Quanzhen introduced monasticism to Taoism, and almost everything else about it follows from that fact.
Before it, organised Taoism was priestly and hereditary: ritual specialists who married, lived among the people they served, and passed their office and their texts to their sons. Wang Chongyang, working in the Shandong peninsula around 1170, established something quite different, celibate monks and nuns living in monasteries under a rule, doing full-time what had previously been done part-time and in the world. The Buddhist model is visible and was not concealed. Quanzhen taught the unity of the three doctrines, drew openly on Buddhist and Confucian material, and its monasteries look considerably more like Chan monasteries than like anything in earlier Taoism.
Its practice is neidan, internal alchemy. The older external alchemy had tried to compound an elixir of immortality from minerals, sometimes fatally. Internal alchemy relocates the entire operation inside the body: the practitioner refines jing, essence, into qi, vital energy, and qi into shen, spirit, and shen into emptiness, through meditation, breath control, stillness and moral discipline. The alchemical vocabulary is retained as a map of an interior process.
Wang's seven principal disciples, the Seven Perfected, founded lineages of their own. The surviving dominant branch is Longmen, the Dragon Gate, founded by Qiu Chuji, who secured the patronage of Genghis Khan and established the White Cloud Temple at Beijing.