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Robert Amacker has spent over half a century in pursuit of the deepest secrets of Taijiquan.

Robert was born in Texas in 1944. He began practicing martial arts with self-study of Judo at the age of eleven. For ten years, he studied Karate and Aikido with some of its foremost exponents (Bobby Lowe, Peter Urban, Yoshimitsu Yamada). Robert studied Zen meditation with Hakuun Yasutani Roshi and Katsuki Sekida.

At the age of twenty-one, he took up the study of Taijiquan in New York City with Zheng Manqing (Cheng, Man-ch’ing), a student of Yang Chengfu, and later with two of his students, William Chen and Ben Lo.

Zheng Manqing. Photo © Ken Van Sickle

Chu Chufang and Robert Amacker, 1972

Chu Chufang, doing Yang Style Solo Form

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Robert Amacker has taught Taijiquan since the spring of 1968, without a single break, and with over two decades in both the San Francisco Bay Area, and in Moscow, Russia. What he teaches is the most historically classical style of the Yang Family, the result of lifelong research on his part and this authenticity has been verified numerous times by teachers on the Chinese mainland.

Robert Amacker is co-author of today’s most widely acclaimed and utilized translation of the Classics of T’ai Chi Ch’uan. He is the author of a widely acclaimed book, The Theoretical Basis of T’ai Chi Ch’uan.

Olesya Amacker began her study of Taijiquan in 2001 at the White Crow School of T’ai Chi Ch’uan in Moscow, Russia, where, under the guidance of Master Robert Amacker, she learned the complete Taijiquan curriculum: Solo Form, Tuishou, Three-step and Circular Tuishou, Da Lu, and Sanshou, and began the study of Taijijen (Taiji Sword). She continued her pursuit of the sword with Master Ken Van Sickle, who was one of Zheng Manqing’s famous “Second Seven” students of note, and who has devoted his life to the study of Taiji form and fencing, receiving from him in 2015 a certificate authorizing her as a teacher.