The Heng "Tai Ji Jian" or Tai Chi Sword is a beautiful hand-made weapon with a flexible spring steel blade, ideal for tai chi practice. Many of these swords have gone to advanced tai chi practitioners who can take advantage of the responsiveness that this jian has to their techniques.

To understand the differences between a hand-made sword and a machine cut one, or to understand how these swords are made have a look at our "Tutorial" section on this site.

This is the Jian that UK China Trading uses themselves as their prefered sword for tai chi practice and we have received some very positive feedback from other tai chi instructors too.

The ideal blade for a taichi sword has to have a combination of rigidity and flexibility to enable the energy of the technique to pass down the blade. The end of the spring steel blade should be capable of being bent through 90% and then spring back into its original shape. The rigidity of this blade is supported by the ridge running along the length of each side of the blade.

Any distortion shown in these photographs are actually the fault of the photographer and the lighting used rather than in the blades themselves.

The hilt and scabbard are made from "Ji Chi Mu" otherwise known as chicken wing wood, a type of Chinese rosewood from Hainan island used in fine art. It is called chicken wing wood due to the multiple colours of the grain having some similarity to the colour of the feathers on a roosters wing.

The statistics of these swords may vary slightly from sword to sword as these are hand crafted and every blade is unique.