Mo PaiArchive

City · Hebei, China

Tangshan

The sanatorium where the word "qigong" was put to work.

A street view in Tangshan, Hebei.
Tangshan, in Hebei. The sanatorium where Liu Guizhen taught in the early 1950s is not marked, and the city was levelled by an earthquake in 1976 — but this is where the word qigong went to work. Mark Hammond from London, England · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

An industrial city in Hebei, and the site of the sanatorium where Liu Guizhen taught the therapeutic breathing programme of the early 1950s that carried the name qigong into general use.

The relabelling mattered more than the clinic: it separated technique from cosmology and let practices with religious ancestry continue as state-approved health care. Almost everything the world now calls qigong reaches it through that decision.

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