Tung's heart-qi-spirit needling

The needle sage of his age · Tung Ching-chang

Tung Ching-chang's family came from Pingdu county in Shandong. He was born on 23 May 1916 and died on 7 November 1975, aged sixty. In his youth, amid social upheaval, his mother sent her only son to a Daoist temple on Mount Lao near Qingdao for safety — which is how he came to encounter Daoist practice.

From 1939 he began treating people with needles in his home region of Shandong, often serving neighbours without regard to fees. He came to Taiwan in 1949 during the civil war and, after leaving military service in 1953, opened a clinic in Taipei where he treated countless patients. Across more than forty years of practice he treated over four hundred thousand people, was repeatedly honoured as a model citizen, and was widely admired for the integrity of a great physician.

In 1971 President Lon Nol of Cambodia was left hemiplegic after a stroke and had spent months seeking treatment in the United States without result. Tung was invited to Cambodia to treat him. On the second day of needling, the president could feel his left leg for the first time in eight months; within three weeks he could stand and walk with a cane. Tung travelled to Cambodia five times in all and fully resolved the hemiplegia. He received a letter of thanks, an honorary doctorate of medicine and a national defence decoration from President Lon Nol, along with the highest honour from President Chiang Kai-shek — the first person in Chinese medicine to be so recognised.