A Warning About Fraudulent Wudang Stores

I saved for six years to train in the Wudang Mountains. When I finally got there in 2012, I'd spent everything just to make that year happen. My account was at zero. And here's the problem with being a foreigner in China - you can only stay for one year maximum before you have to leave. You can come back later, but first you have to get out.

So there I was. Broke in China with a ticking clock and no money for a flight home.
I grabbed my camera and started photographing every Wudang product I could find. Made a basic website on Jimdo - free and really simple because I was terrible at web design back then. Put photos up with price tags underneath. That was it.
I got orders in the first week.
The markup was 60-100% over what I paid. I told myself people were paying for the presentation, for me showing them these things existed. Nobody else was doing this. From there it grew. I sat for hours every day writing product descriptions, calculating prices, working out SEO keywords, creating titles. Every single product needed all of this work.
By the end of that year, I'd made about 8000 euros across five different shops. Not much, but since my stay was already paid for, it was enough to get home.
She was my first true love. Those first three months were intense and real. I was planning to go to Wudang alone, but when I told her, she said yes - she wanted to come too. So she did. She stayed with me there for a year.
But something shifted after those first months. We rarely saw each other even though we were technically together. The connection just faded. She saw what I was building with these shops though. In Ukraine, where she spent most of her time after leaving Wudang, the income from these stores meant something. She worked her way in to get a share of the sales.
I kept the relationship going because it gave me stability to focus on my teaching in Vienna. But the love from those first three months? Long gone. I knew it. She probably did too.
Eight years. That's how long this went on. Then when I was finally ready to end it, I found out she was pregnant. Not with my child. With the child of the man she'd been cheating on me with. I saw him on VKontakte, that Russian social media site. The timeline told me everything. She'd been sleeping with him for who knows how long and never said a word.

The Welfare Fraud

Here's another part I'm not proud of. She and her mother were collecting AMS benefits - that's Austria's unemployment and welfare service, the Arbeitsmarktservice. They were getting this money while she spent most of her time in Ukraine and was making money from the online stores.

I helped them keep that money flowing. The Austrian Finance Ministry showed up at my door once - one of the few days she actually had to be in Austria. She had to explain herself to them directly.
I reported the fraud to Austrian officials afterward. But they're not interested. She's out of the country, out of their jurisdiction. Not worth pursuing.
I'm guilty here too. Here's the thing about my Asperger's - I'm helpful to a fault. Someone needs something, I help. No moral calculation, no weighing consequences. Just help. It doesn't matter if it's right or wrong. That pattern has gotten me into trouble more than once.

What She Stole

Let me be clear about one thing. I built those shops. I wrote the design. I wrote the code. Across all five stores, I wrote around 1600 product descriptions. Every single one by hand. This was before ChatGPT existed. Just me and a keyboard and too much coffee.

She helped create the stores, maybe 20% of the actual work if I'm being generous. The backend, the product research, the descriptions, the design - that was me.
I had two legitimate stores: wudang-store.com and internalwudangstore.com. When I came back to Austria and wanted to legalize my business properly, I decided to shut them down. I was done with that chapter.
She had other plans.
She hired a hacker to copy the old store and uploaded it to internalwudangstore.net. Just cloned my work like that. With wudang-store.com, she locked me out completely. It was on Shopify's cloud platform and I never got back in. She changed everything and kept running it.
She didn't even have the balls to rewrite anything. The blog posts, the marketing texts, the promotional content - all of it was written by me. Every single word. She just kept using it all.

These are the stolen stores still running with my work: https://www.wudang-store.com/ and https://internalwudangstore.net/
They probably do ship products, but they're dropshipping from AliExpress at marked-up prices while pretending to be authentic Wudang sources.
If you check the impressum at https://internalwudangstore.net/impressum/, you'll see it's registered to someone in Vienna. But this is what's called a Postkastenfirma - a shell company with just a mailbox address. You pay around 1000 euros a year for this kind of setup. The impressum claims products are "handmade directly in Wudang Mountains by local Daoist handicrafts" and "directly exported from Wudang to your address." That's not true. It's AliExpress dropshipping.
They still list this old address where I used to be reachable:
Wudangshan Huilong Guang Daojia Gong Fu Guan, 442714 Shiyan, Hubei Province, China
This address is not reachable anymore. But she kept using it because it looks legitimate.

What These Stores Actually Are

They're dropshipping operations running off AliExpress. She's not in Wudang. She's not sourcing authentic items. She has no connection to any Wudang tradition or teachers. She just places orders from cheap suppliers and marks up the prices.

I know exactly how it works because I built the original system. The difference is I was actually in Wudang. I had real connections. I was trying to build something legitimate. What she's running now uses my stolen work - fake address, my designs, my 1600 hand-written descriptions - while pretending to offer authentic Wudang products.
She took years of my work and turned it into a deceptive operation.
I could pursue this legally, but it doesn't make sense. The legal costs would outweigh any result, especially with the shell company setup and her being out of the country. Besides, I don't think these stores are making much money anymore. They'll probably go offline on their own soon enough.
For anyone shopping online: Don't blindly trust ecommerce stores, especially ones selling "authentic" martial arts or cultural items. Check the sources yourself. Go to AliExpress, Alibaba, similar sites. For quick verification, take the product photo and do a reverse image search. If you find the same photo on AliExpress for a fraction of the price, you know you're dealing with a dropshipper marking up cheap products and pretending they're special.

Where to Actually Buy Wudang Items

I'm not just writing this to call out my ex. If you actually want Wudang items, there's a legitimate option.

A Chinese woman operates from Hubei Province at https://www.shoppingkungfu.com/. She's in the region and handles custom orders. Nobody's skimming off the top. Nobody's running dropshipping schemes. You're dealing with someone actually connected to the place and the tradition.

Looking back, those eight years taught me how first love can turn into something unrecognizable. Those first three months were real. She came with me to Wudang, we shared that experience. But after that year in China, after we stopped really seeing each other, it became something else. We kept it going out of habit, convenience, maybe some hope that what we had would come back.
It never did.
I maintained that relationship so I could focus on teaching in Vienna. But the cost was higher than I realized. You can't build a life on the ghost of what once was. In the process, I let my tendency to help override my judgment - helping with the AMS fraud, turning a blind eye to things I knew were wrong.
My Asperger's makes me helpful without calculation. I see someone needs something, I help. Period. It's taken me years to understand this trait, which seems positive, can enable situations that shouldn't be enabled.
I feel sorry about this whole situation. When I look at it honestly, I created the imbalance. By helping with things I shouldn't have helped with, by maintaining a dead relationship for years, by building something successful and letting someone position themselves to exploit it - I set the stage. She made her choices, but I created the environment where those choices became possible.
The shop situation is just one piece of a bigger story. I learned to recognize when something looks legitimate on the surface but is hollow underneath. Those fake stores with stolen designs and fake addresses are a perfect metaphor for what the relationship became.
If you see wudang-store.com or internalwudangstore.net, or that old Wudang address, you know what you're dealing with now. Don't fall for it. And if you want actual Wudang items, go to someone who's really there, not someone running an ecommerce scam from Ukraine while pretending to be in China.

My feelings after all this:

Here's a short paragraph to explain my feelings. This is my personal view and maybe it doesn't fully reflect reality, but I want to express how I feel. I feel hurt by this situation. I put a lot of work into building everything from the ground up, and it's difficult for me to see that work continue without me. She joined in when most of it was already established. Yes, she helped with shipping and post office tasks - but that was mainly because I struggle with spelling on complicated forms due to my Asperger's. She often expressed frustration when she had to help with these things. In a company, the person who creates and builds something has a different role than someone who helps with logistics. I wanted the option to close this chapter myself so I could make a fresh start, and not having that choice has been hard for me. Throughout my life I've created many things, and I've also let go of projects when I felt they weren't working. I believe it's important that people build on their own efforts rather than simply taking over what others have created, and this situation doesn't align with that value.