likely able to quickly master a great deal from Chen, gaining further depth and insight. From this training Wu began to develop his own style, which he shared with members of his extended family. He and his family were wealthy gentry, some of them government officials but none in military careers at that time, and had no need to teach martial arts for professional or financial purposes. They seem to have pursued t'ai chi primarily as a means of self-cultivation, and possibly for self-defense and leadership in a time of widespread civil breakdown and unrest including banditry, anti-landlord uprisings, and the Nian and Taiping rebellions. The T'ai Chi Ch'üan Classics In the early 1850s Wu's eldest brother Chengqing (, also known as Wu Qiuying, , 1800-1884) was serving as a government official in Henan, when he obtained a manual on the principles of internal martial arts. In the writings of the next generation, this was tersely reported as having been received at "a salt shop", with the assumption that any reader would understand the context of that statement. Salt merchants were wealthy and of equal social status with an official like Wu Chengqing. At least one scholar speculates that the owner of that shop may have been a fellow book collector who had learned of the Wu family's interest in the topic, and was seeking to curry favor with Chengqing who among other things was in charge of tax collection. Authorship of the manuscript was attributed to a Wang Zongyue () of Shanxi, about whom no information is available in verifiable historical records. (Some have suggested Wang Zongyue could be a pseudonym of Wu Yuxiang or another Wu family member, but the writing style is different and the mundane salt shop story — as opposed to, say, claiming an immortal sage found it in an enchanted cave — lends believability as well.) Wu Chengqing passed the manual on to Wu Yuxiang, who discussed it with his friend and teacher Yang Luchan. Yang agreed it was important. Over the following years, Wu and his family applied the lessons of this text to the development of their art and created a body of written work around it, which together became known as the first version of the T'ai Chi Ch'üan Classics. Wu's nephew and top disciple Li Yiyu (, 1832–1892) contributed several texts to the final collection. Wu's older brothers Chengqing and