Everyone who practises taiji sword knows the public Yang style jian form. Almost nobody knows there was a second one: Yang Lu Chan's original jian form.

The Yangjia Michuan Taiji Jian (楊家秘傳太極劍), the Yang Family Secret Transmission Taiji Sword, is the older and lesser-known of the two Yang family jian systems. Unlike the public form, it was kept within the family for generations and never taught openly. The first person outside the Yang family known to have received it passed it along a line that eventually reached Master Wang Yen-nien, and Scott M. Rodell learned it directly from Wang Yen-nien.

It doesn't even have posture names. The movements are referenced only by a short classical poem that describes each section, which tells you what this form was and wasn't meant to be: it was never meant to be performed for an audience or taught to a crowd. What it has instead is a complete, coherent logic of swordsmanship: eight basic cuts and a back-weighted strategy that differs markedly from the later public form.

Why you can't learn this anywhere else

For most of its history you simply weren't allowed to. Even now, teachers of the Michuan jian are vanishingly rare, and the form actively resists being copied from video: with no posture names and its logic carried in strategy rather than shapes, imitating the outside of the movements gives you choreography and misses the sword art entirely.

This course was built to solve exactly that. The form is taught as a practical manual, with the duifang, the opponent, present in the mind throughout, so every sequence is learned as what it encodes: technique, strategy and timing against a real blade.