The Daoyin Tu (Daoyin Chart) — The World's Earliest Exercise Atlas

According to legend, as early as the era of the sage rulers Yao and Shun in remote antiquity, people had already begun to use dance-like movements to treat disorders involving impaired joint mobility. By the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, through practice and exploration, people gradually developed preventive and therapeutic methods such as “daoyin exercises” (health-preserving gymnastics) and “tuna exercises” (respiratory gymnastics).

The Daoyin Tu (Daoyin Chart), unearthed in 1974 from the Mawangdui Han Tomb No. 3 in Changsha, Hunan Province, is the earliest extant scroll of meticulously executed color paintings of health-preserving exercises — a work dating from the late 3rd century BCE. The chart depicts, in color, more than 40 gymnastic postures performed by men and women of various ages, accompanied by brief explanatory texts alongside the images, with males and females represented in roughly equal numbers. The Daoyin Tu is not only extremely early in date but also extraordinarily rich in content. It provides the earliest graphic material for many types of daoyin and fitness exercises whose textual records in ancient literature had been scattered and incomplete, offering invaluable clues for research into the development and evolution of daoyin. From it, we can discern several aspects of daoyin practice:

I. Breathing Exercises
The breathing exercises depicted in the Mawangdui Daoyin Tu are not entirely identical to the “placental method” (dantian breathing method) of traditional classical training. Two places in the textual annotations directly refer to breathing, such as “yang hu” (tilting back and calling out) and “yuan hu” (ape's cry). In ancient usage, “yang hu” meant tilting the body upward and emitting a cry, while “yuan hu” referred to the howling call of the ape. The corresponding postures in the chart show the chest expanding and both hands raised backward — movements designed to strengthen the training of the heart and lung functions.

II. Limb Exercises
In the Daoyin Tu, with the exception of a very few squatting and kneeling (or sitting) postures, all the remaining movements are standing exercises. The eight basic movements in China's current fifth set of broadcast calisthenics essentially encapsulate the essential elements of the Daoyin Tu. For example, there are upper-limb exercises such as “dragon ascent” (long deng); punching exercises such as “ma zhan”; chest-expanding exercises such as “yang cui”; lateral body exercises such as “tang lang” (praying mantis); abdominal and back exercises such as “man zheng”; jumping exercises such as “stretching the neck” (yin jing) and “seated guidance to the eight directions” (zuo yin ba wei); as well as leg-kicking exercises and trunk-turning exercises for which the images remain but the accompanying text is missing.

Furthermore, figures resembling the bird, bear, and monkey of the Wuqinxi (Five Animal Frolics) also appear with similar illustrations, suggesting that Hua Tuo's Wuqinxi shares a definite historical relationship of origin with the Mawangdui Daoyin Tu.

III. Apparatus-Assisted Exercises
Apart from bare-handed exercises, the Daoyin Tu also reveals the use of staff or stick-assisted movements, including a posture of bending the body and rotating the trunk while holding a staff in both hands. The accompanying textual explanation reads: “Use the staff to communicate yin and yang.” There is also a waist-bending trunk-rotation movement performed with a ball-like object beneath the feet — another form of apparatus-assisted exercise.

IV. The Relationship Between Daoyin and Disease Treatment
The textual annotations of the Daoyin Tu directly mention disease treatment in twelve places, including such items as “vexation” (fan), “pain and vision” (tong ming), “guiding deafness” (yin long), and “guiding warm disease” (yin wen bing). This demonstrates that daoyin exercises were closely connected not only with knee pain in the limbs, digestive disorders in the abdomen, and conditions of the ears and eyes among the five sense organs, but even with the treatment of certain infectious diseases.

These four aspects of daoyin practice reflected in the Mawangdui Daoyin Tu amply demonstrate that China was one of the earliest countries in the world to apply therapeutic exercise. The European scholar Martineau acknowledged that the West, through the introduction of Amiot, had copied China's medical gymnastics from the Far East. The British scientist Dr. Joseph Needham also held that modern Western therapeutic gymnastics actually evolved from early Chinese gymnastics transmitted into Europe. Thus, Western scholars have called China “the motherland of medical gymnastics.”