MOVE TO CHINA
- Jun 5
- 5 min read
Leaving London
Finally, the day had come.
The dream that had consumed my childhood was becoming reality.
I still remember standing in my school, telling friends, teachers, and classmates that I was leaving England for China and wouldn’t be coming back for a very long time.
Nobody believed me.
Everyone thought I was joking.
To be fair, I probably sounded crazy. I was a sixteen-year-old kid from North London whose head was already shaved, who sometimes turned up to school wearing orange kung fu trousers because I’d come straight from training. I talked constantly about Shaolin Temple, monks, and China.
Most people assumed it was just another teenage obsession.
It wasn’t.
A few weeks later, I was boarding a plane at Heathrow Airport.
Everything I had dreamed about was suddenly real.
Arrival at Shaolin
The journey itself felt endless.
After flying into Shanghai, I still had to travel across China to reach Henan Province. Over the next two days I squeezed onto overcrowded buses packed with locals, cigarette smoke filling the air as people somehow managed to fit three or four passengers onto seats designed for two.
It was exhausting.
But nothing could prepare me for what came next.
I arrived at the Shaolin Monastery early in the morning.
The temple gates were still closed.
The mountain air was silent except for birdsong echoing through the Songshan mountains.
In the distance I could see the giant statue of Bodhidharma.
Without thinking, I started running.
I ran up the mountain toward the cave where Bodhidharma was said to have meditated.
As I climbed, young Shaolin disciples raced past me on their way down. Some were running. Others were crawling on their hands and knees as part of their training.
It felt like I had stepped inside one of the kung fu films that had inspired my entire childhood.
When I reached the top and looked out across the mountains, I saw my future.
The temple.
The training grounds.
The sounds of training echoing from every direction.
For the first time in my life, I wasn’t imagining it anymore.
I was there.
First Impressions
Later that day, the temple gates opened.
There was a ceremony taking place.
Grey-robed monks carried a large green carpet into an empty hall, and shortly afterwards visitors were invited inside.
The Abbot entered.
Then the performance began.
I sat right on the edge of the carpet as Shaolin monks demonstrated incredible skill and athleticism. Some of them were performers I had previously only seen in videos and stage productions.
Watching them just metres away gave me goosebumps.
Everything felt larger than life.
By that evening I moved into what would become my home.
The room was little more than a concrete shell.
No heating.
No air conditioning.
Bare walls.
A simple bed.
A window covered with mesh.
A door secured by a padlock.
By most standards it was uncomfortable.
To me, it was perfect.
I had finally arrived.
The Routine
That first night I opened a small Nike notebook and created a training register.
Every session would receive a tick.
Morning training.
Afternoon training.
Evening training.
Every day.
No exceptions.
The next morning my new life began.
At 5 a.m. we were already running mountains.
Crawling back down on hands and knees.
Holding headstands on concrete.
Stretching until every muscle burned.
After breakfast came hours of basics.
Kicks.
Stances.
Flexibility.
Jumps.
Acrobatics.
Shadow Boxing.
Weapons.
Then lunch.
A short rest.
More training.
Dinner.
More training.
Day after day.
Week after week.
Year after year.
Before arriving in China, I considered myself good.
Back in London I was often one of the strongest students in the room.
At Shaolin, I was at the bottom.
Children half my age could kick higher, jump further, move faster, and perform techniques I had never even seen before.
It was humbling.
And exactly what I needed.
Learning the Language
The language barrier was brutal at first.
When I didn’t understand instructions, I got corrected the Shaolin way.
Sometimes that meant a bamboo stick across the backs of my legs.
The lesson was simple:
Pay attention.
Learn faster.
Within days I was beginning to understand basic commands.
Line up.
Move left.
Move right.
Faster.
Again.
The language came naturally because it was attached to action.
Every movement had a name.
Every drill had a purpose.
Every day I heard the same words repeated hundreds of times.
Soon I wasn’t translating anymore.
I was simply understanding.
Living Like a Monk
Life was simple.
Eat.
Train.
Sleep.
Repeat.
Meals were basic: rice, vegetables, steamed bread, noodles, and occasionally eggs.
Nobody complained.
Food was fuel.
The real challenge wasn’t eating.
It was everything else.
Fetching water.
Hand-washing clothes.
Cleaning shoes every night.
Maintaining your equipment.
Keeping your room spotless.
At Shaolin, discipline extended far beyond martial arts.
How you folded your clothes mattered.
How clean your shoes were mattered.
Everything mattered.
The standard was high because the expectation was high.
Culture Shock
The biggest surprise was showering.
After weeks of training eight to ten hours a day, I still hadn’t had a proper shower.
Every day I asked when we would wash.
Every day I was ignored.
Then one afternoon the announcement finally came.
“Xizao.”
Shower.
I was ecstatic.
What followed was one of the biggest culture shocks of my life.
We marched nearly an hour to a public bathhouse where hundreds of people showered together.
For a teenager from London, it was completely outside anything I had experienced before.
At first I was embarrassed.
Then fascinated.
Then eventually, like everything else in China, I adapted.
That became a recurring lesson.
The things that seemed strange eventually became normal.
The things that seemed difficult eventually became routine.
The things that seemed impossible eventually became achievable.
Becoming Part of the Wheel
As the months passed, my Chinese improved.
My flexibility improved.
My kung fu improved.
I learned animal styles, traditional boxing, weapons, acrobatics, conditioning, and discipline.
But the greatest lesson wasn’t martial arts.
It was understanding what it meant to be part of something bigger than yourself.
Everything was done together.
Training.
Cleaning.
Eating.
Laundry.
Work.
No one stood alone.
No one succeeded alone.
The individual mattered.
But the group mattered more.
For a sixteen-year-old kid from London, it was a completely different way of life.
And I loved it.
What began as a childhood dream was now reality.
The Shaolin Temple wasn’t the fantasy I had imagined from films and television.
It was harder.
Colder.
More uncomfortable.
More demanding.
And far more beautiful.
This wasn’t a holiday.
This wasn’t an adventure.
This was the beginning of my transformation.
I love reading these updates. It looks like you've already started filming a biopic?