I suppose I don't have to intruduce Donn Draeger but always wondered about Master Wang, because both Donn Draeger and Jon Bluming were speaking of Master Wang in high respect.
Some further information on Master Wang (and Donn Draeger)
There was a famous xingyiquan and baguazhang teacher in Japan in those days, named Wang Shujin. He had a son-in-law living in Japan, running a Chinese restaurant. He was associated with the son of the infamous Toyama Mitsuru (founder of the Genyosha), Toyama Ryusuke, and stayed in his home. Toyama, father and son, had always been Shimizu Takaji’s sponsors, and through this connection, I believe, Donn met Wang. On the other hand, Robert Smith was already connected to Wang in Taiwan, and Robert and Donn were good friends, so the initial meeting could have come through Smith’s auspices. Illustration – WangShujin Bagua
Donn (and a number of other of his associates) began training with Wang on the grounds of the Meiji Shrine, in any and all weather. During winter, Phil Relnick told me, they would get so cold they would uncontrollably tremble, and Wang would offer a huge hand and they would grasp it with their two hands, and find that it was not just warm but hot, warming them at the touch. Wang was massively powerful – about five feet six inches and I’m guessing about 260 or more pounds. He was so round that his students nicknamed him “The Chubby Chucker.” When I later travelled in Taiwan, every prominent teacher I visited claimed to have defeated Wang Shujin one way or another—and from what I knew of the Chinese martial arts culture, this revealed that Wang probably was the dragon that they all believed they had to beat, but couldn’t.
Wang was famous for his ability to take any blow below the neck—using soft power, not rigid muscular strength (like Donn with Muhammad Ali). He could allow you to punch him in the belly, and if he didn’t like you, ‘punch’ you back with his belly, sending the arm rocketing out of his flesh behind your ear, at such speed that it nearly dislocated. I personally saw him hug a Kyokushinkai karate champion, dropping him wheezing to the ground, ‘punched’ by Wang’s massive paunch, and this, only several months before his death from cancer. He could barely walk, but he could still make any part of his body a ‘fist,’ and drive through the man with a connected body augmented with an impeccable usage of ground and gravity. Illustration Robert Smith and Wang Shujin
Wang took to Donn—as did, I believe, any truly martial human being. Donn gave people respect, when they merited it, but he never displayed a trace of arrogance. When in Japan, Wang mostly taught his adaptation of Chen Pan Ling’s synthetic t’ai chi form, but if you found favor with him, he would select either xingyiquan or baguazhang as your personal art. For Donn, he chose baguazhang, and thought well enough of him that he actually had him do the traditional tree circling for two years – no form – he simply had to circle round the tree for several hours every morning, until he’d dug a trench with his feet (or, in the most traditional mythos, this was done until the roots weakened and the tree would begin to topple). Donn said Wang would walk up, look at the track scuffed in the soil around the tree, and say “not deep enough” and then pursue Donn around the tree in a game of tag, panther pursued by Leviathan, the former always caught.
Wang visited Donn at his small home, and in the conversation, said to him, “Your trouble is you have insufficient control of your body,” reached over and picked up a meteorite, the size of a shot-put that Donn used for a paperweight. He took a pose on one leg, extended his arm straight out and held the meteorite, palm DOWN, for ten minutes, immobile, then shifted to his mirror image and did it again for another ten.
Perhaps the greatest mark of Wang’s reported power was this. Some of you may know the immense torii at Meiji shrine. Donn stated that Wang went up to it, and shook it so it swayed. (I wish I could have seen that myself—it seems an impossible feat—but so was the gymnasium building that I personally saw Chen Xiao Wang shake with a foot stomp, creating the same vibration as an earthquake…I didn’t believe it when I saw it, assuming this was either due to a sprung floor, or something similar, so I waited until everyone left, got up on the six foot stage, and jumped down straight legged. The floor, much less the building, was unaffected. Chen, on the other hand, catapulted his leg downwards, using his connective tissue, this augmenting the utterly relaxed stomp downwards, as if firing his leg like an arrow, his body being the bow). Given what I’ve seen, I can believe that Donn was possibly reporting things accurately.
In sum, then, Donn had some experience and expertise in Chinese martial arts.
Source:
"Donn Draeger & Robert Smith: Their Intersection Concerning Chinese Martial Arts" by ELLIS AMDUR