---
title: "Yin Fu (尹福, 1840–1909) — the senior disciple, \"Thin Yin\""
---

**Yin Fu** (**尹福 / Yǐn Fú**, 1840–1909), courtesy name **德安 (De'an)**, was **Dong Haichuan's** earliest and most senior disciple, and the founder of **Yin-style Baguazhang** (尹派八卦掌). Lean and spare in build — the martial world called him **"Thin Yin" (瘦尹)** — he brought a **Luohan / long-fist** background to Dong's circle-walking art and kept its harder, more percussive flavor. Where [Cheng Tinghua's](https://wulin.openmindspace.org/cheng-tinghua) branch opened the frame, Yin's stayed tight, vertical, and weapon-like. He is also the branch with the closest ties to the **Qing court**.

## Life

Born in **漁子山, 冀縣 Ji County, Hebei**, Yin came to Beijing as a young man and, by tradition, earned his living as a small tradesman in the capital. He was already trained in **羅漢拳 (Luohan boxing)** and northern long-fist — including **彈腿 **[**tan tui**](https://wulin.openmindspace.org/tan-tui) — when he became the disciple of [**Dong Haichuan**](https://wulin.openmindspace.org/dong-haichuan). He is generally counted as Dong's **first and longest-serving** student, and attended the master closely in his old age.

Yin's reputation reached the **imperial palace**: he is recorded as having served the Qing court as a martial instructor and guard, and lineage tradition connects him to the protection of the court during the upheavals of **1900**. His standing made the Yin branch the most "official" of the Bagua lines in late-Qing Beijing.

He died in **Beijing in 1909**.

## What he gave the art — Yin-style Bagua

Yin's branch is the **tight, hard, percussive** stream of Bagua:

- **The "ox-tongue palm" (牛舌掌)** — fingers held together and flat, thumb tucked, the hand shaped like an ox's tongue — in deliberate contrast to the open dragon-claw of the Cheng line.
- **A tighter, more vertical frame** with shorter, sharper issuing of power; the **Luohan** hardness Yin brought from his first art is preserved rather than dissolved.
- **A dense weapon and striking vocabulary** — the Yin line is often described as the most "外家-flavored" of the Bagua branches, retaining a long-fist crispness inside the circle-walking method.

## The branches that descend from him

- **宮寶田 (Gong Baotian)** — Yin's disciple, who served as an imperial bodyguard and carried the Yin-line Bagua into the 20th century; through Gong, the Yin transmission later reached [**Liu Yunqiao**](https://wulin.openmindspace.org/liu-yunqiao) in the Baji world.
- **馬貴 (Ma Gui, "Wooden Ma" 木馬)** — a famously rigorous Yin-style holder in Beijing.
- **門寶珍 (Men Baozhen), 楊俊峰 (Yang Junfeng), 居慶元 (Ju Qingyuan)**, and Yin's son **尹成章 (Yin Chengzhang)** — who seeded the continuing Yin-style schools.

The Yin-line published record includes **孫錫堃 *****八卦拳真傳*** (1934, 2 vols), one of the early printed Bagua treatises, held in the codex.

## See also

<PageRef space="notes" slug="dong-haichuan" text="Dong Haichuan (董海川) — Yin's teacher, the founder of Bagua" />

<PageRef space="notes" slug="bagua" text="Bagua Palm (八卦掌) — the full style overview" />

<PageRef space="notes" slug="cheng-tinghua" text="Cheng Tinghua (程廷華) — Dong's other great disciple; the contrasting Cheng branch" />

<PageRef space="notes" slug="liu-yunqiao" text="Liu Yunqiao (劉雲樵) — inheritor of the Yin-line Bagua via Gong Baotian" />

<PageRef space="notes" slug="history" text="A Short History of Chinese Martial Arts" />

## Sources

**[1]** *Yin Fu*, Wikipedia ([en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin\_Fu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_Fu)) and the Chinese Wikipedia counterpart — biography, the Luohan background, the court connection, the Yin-style lineage.

**[2]** 孫錫堃 *八卦拳真傳* (1934, 2 vols) — a Yin-line printed Bagua treatise, held in the codex's `Sources/internal-arts-manuals/`.

**[3]** *董海川* lineage inscriptions, Wan'an Cemetery, Beijing — naming Yin Fu as the senior disciple.