All things Chinese were considered pretty ‘Gucci’ by the Okinawan’s, particularly with regards to the martial arts. You can see this from the ‘1936 meeting of the masters’ where everybody appears to get quite excited about the fact that Bushi Matsumura was trained by a Chinese teacher. Anything Chinese was embraced and considered cool by the Okinawans.
The ideas and theories that Miyagi Sensei must have come across as a result of his travels in China would have no doubt had a profound influence upon his understanding of the art he was actively developing up to the time of his death. I truly believe that in order to understand Tensho better we need to look toward the various Chinese arts and research their theories of power generation, body alignment, energy circulation (qigong), intention, and even more obscure areas such as folklore, superstition, geology, numerology etc. The Chinese were, and still are to a certain extent, a very superstitious folk, and any opportunity to invite good luck into their lives would have been actively encouraged, hence the names and configurations of certain templates.
I agree that to have any understanding of what Miyagi was trying to achieve we need to take a good hard look at what he was basing his system on.
It’s impossible to be sure exactly what his thoughts were, there seems to be a lot of confusion, or at least disagreement between his proteges.