Particularly Hong Kong Airlines in which Wing Chun training has become mandatory for its flight attendants. The chance of encountering unruly passengers is slim but best for them to defend themselves. And Wing Chun suits them well as most flight attendants are female and that it is a system that is developed by a woman for women. Osu! [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ocbu83VnWp8"]Wing Chun for Hong Kong Airlines Flight Attendants - YouTube[/ame]
Surely a head butt on the nose with a stern, "now get back in your seat", would do the job just as well. Bit much maybe? :evil:
You're only 3 years late to the party http://www.martialartsplanet.com/forums/showthread.php?t=101169&highlight=cabin
Based on inconsistencies in that legend, it's far more likely Wing Chun was used and developed by a man (or even several different men) based on personal style of 17th century open handed combat, which he/they continued to teach to rebels in Southern China, with the "by a woman for women" story was made up to throw the authorities off his/their trail. 200 years later in the 19th century, the style became more openly practiced and "public", leading to Ip man's lineage and the rest we see today. Keep in mind this theory (which fits historical records AND common sense better) is also maintained by actual Wing Chun enthusiasts who have researched the history better than most Wing Chun sifus, who prefer to deliver the story they received from their instructor (which, while amusing, is clearly legendary and not part of the verifiable anthropology of Shaolin.
I remember reading somewhere that WC was primarily an armed fighting systems focusing on the butterfly knives which then was transformed into an open handed system. The WC punch isn't particularly suited to striking with the fist but would be very effective with a cleaver like knife, chain punch as well. Same goes for the tan sau, blocks would be done with the top of the knife rather than the blade. The bong sau looks very much like a hanging guard used in European sword systems. Even the wrist rotation used in Sil Lim Tao makes more sense if there is a knife in the hand. Also the footwork for the knife form is rather different and more practical than the unarmed forms. The person who posted this was a direct student of Moy Yat and was actually given props over in bullshido for his skills. Not an easy task.
However even this narrative is not historically supported. The first person we can definitively say did Wing Chun and actually existed is Leung Jan, who's family just happened to run an extensive security service and military academy. The women in Wing Chun story cannot really be traced before Ip Man, so it's unlikely that it was some triad cover story (indeed, if you look at certain elements of the myth it's highly unlikely to have existed prior to 1930).
This is true for a lot of TCMA tbh, if you know what to look for you can see the influence of sword and spear fighting on core movements. I think a lot of shorthand material, especially Wing Chun, makes a lot more sense with a blade in play. The two weapons utilised in Wing Chun actually support the idea that it's genesis lies with Cantonese security teams in the mid 19th century.
I won't really argue with this (they're all theories after all), but I also don't think that not being able to trace beyond the 19th century necessarily means there is no Ming/Ching precursor or "ancestor art" as some tales claim.. Just because a certain person is "verifiable" doesn't preclude the prior (unwritten) history. It's nice we can start there..a shame we can't ride a real genealogy backwards in time. I don't believe any women were involved, but that's a personal determination based on what I've read and compared to date. I lean towards the idea that some art related to Chun made its way in that general direction from at least 17th to 19th century, and that by the 20th its became publicly known, but by that time MA in China was already in decline, so it did not truly become a worldwide phenom until it Bruce Lee came to America and shared the Chun "story". In the case of WC specifically, the history appears is more muddled than the other Southern arts. This could either be because the history was purposely altered and retold, or because it was completely made up. Or some hybrid of both, which is often the case in Chinese martial folklore...so yeah, objectively, their lineage from 17th-19th centuries was likely either fabricated (to some degree), or intentionally altered for some reason. Does that mean there are no elements of truth in the story? Not so sure about that, especially given how tightly the actual history and the folk tales are in that part of the world. So, I don't lean in the "completely" made up camp. But I do notice that of all the Southern arts, WC seems to have the hardest time proving it goes as far back as some other arts.
Wing chuns history is murkier than most, who can forget the benny ming museum and the various lineages they have come up with out of thin air (I mean researched) but personally whether the history of an art is made up isn’t that important as whether it actually works in the environment its being deployed into, and does anyone seriously think wing chun is a good art to be used on an airplane to subdue a drink passanger…….actually does anyone think wing chu is a good art to be used …well period
It's REALLY funny you said that because I (unintentionally) linked Benny's site in my earlier post when looking for a source that challenged the Ng Mui myth. Caught it in time, thankfully. Good thing I actually read the rest of that link.... It's set up as a decent looking "legend vs history" page but it's pretty clear how much legend is also part of the "history" bits...good grief, can't trust anything on the internet these days. I shall be more careful. If anyone really wants to see how crazy the Wing Chun backstory is, go start researching and see how many WC people argue with other WC people over the story. Make popcorn first.
I think that depends on a modern understanding of style. I don't believe that Leung Jan created Wing Chun from nothing or from unrelated systems, but I don't think he learned an ancestor art either. I think it's more of a case that he came from a Foshan martial tradition which for whatever reason favoured shorthand expression (this same martial culture would also spawn Bak Mei and Lung Ying). Prior to this point style was less formalised and more personal, often a collection of techniques and principles rather than what we'd now call systems (more akin to the waza collections of traditional Japanese martial arts than the structured syllabus with solo Kata of Karate). I suspect that rather than learning a secret system from an itinerant opera performer (although he may well have learned some techniques from such people) Leung's primary teachers were the martial arts instructors at his family's security organisation. This was after all one of the best ways to study martial arts in a city prior to the emergence of professional public schools. It's interesting to note that key figures in the histories of some non-Ip Man lines are constables or military officials, the kind of people who may have learned their chops at the Leung's security group or military academy. These people likely taught a set of skills within a framework of what was deemed professionally desirable, and brought their influences to bear on that material. People joining the organisation may also have been experienced martial artists in their own right, if they'd learned in their village militia before moving to Foshan to find work for example. Leung Jan's Kung Fu was likely a product of this environment. If you look at the Wing Chun myth 5 elders escape destruction of Shaolin temple: myth, and a fairly modern one Ng Mui: fictional character Yim Wing Chun: almost certainly ripped off wholesale from the Yongchun crane creation myth Taught to southerners by a famous character from the north: A common trope in Chinese culture, there is an established snobbery which says that anything from the north is superior. All of these points suggest that the Wing Chun myth is a complete fabrication, and probably no older than 1930.
What better way to fabricate a creation myth than by using bits of actual history and other CMA themes? You end up not with an unbelievable tall tale, but one that actually appears to "fit" right in with the otherwise historically accurate conflicts of the Ming/Ching era. With so many martial arts developing during and emerging from that period, anybody could have created their own art and assigned it all the usual trappings (Shaolin lineage, Ming insurgents) and it sort of blends in with all the other arts. If your theory is correct then this would have been what happened...if you created your own style circa late 19th/early 20th century, it had BETTER have Shaolin or Daoist associations, or else it might not even be taken seriously! And by that time...there are no Ching Assassins looking for Ming rebels...they're long gone by then. So chances are this is a situation not unlike today...if you want students, tell them you have the "real Shaolin" and it is superior to all other known styles. Make it so that your style represents an "advanced" level of Shaolin training available to very few, compared to the "old hat" animals etc. Which to me seems silly, because the Shaolin animals are such a simple, easy concept to grasp adding Wing Chun on top seems to overly complicate it into the "classical mess" Bruce Lee used to talk about. Fast forward a hundred year or so we now have generations of Wing Chun people claiming all of these things, with no proof of any of it. But right alongside the rest of CMA...monkey see, monkey do? There are no "village" Wing Chun styles to the best of my knowledge, which makes WC a sort of oddity compared to older styles like Ba gua or Tai Chi or Hung ga. For each those and the other family arts, you've got generations and generations, whether inside the "canonical" lineages like the Wong family's, or outside it. But WC has this ONE focal point in the early 20th century...so weird.
Most definitely, the Chinese propensity to elevate things that are old, things that are northern and things that are renowned all led to a creation myth essentially for promotional purposes. The legend serves to differentiate it from styles such as CLF (which had a huge commercial presence in Foshan at the time) and gives it a mythos equivalent to Hung Gar. It also helps to distance the art from the very working class CLF, allowing it to be marketed to the emerging middle class (like Ip Man). I suspect this may well be the root of much of the "refined movements" and "beat a larger, stronger opponent" hyperbole. Bagua isn't older than Wing Chun. It was created in the mid 19th Century. I'd suggest that the profusion of non-mainstream Bagua stems from the large numbers of Bagua training manuals printed in the early republican period. There are only really a couple of "village" Taiji styles that aren't clearly Yang offshoots, and they have strong historical connections to Chen Village. I would be cautious of taking village Hung styles as evidence of Hung's historicity. It may simply be evidence of the success of WFH's Hung Gar as a brand. There's evidence that many small local styles re-branded themselves in the late imperial and early republican period to align themselves with well known martial brands. Some writers also state that in the Qing dynasty the terms Sil Lum, Fut Gar and Hung Kuen were interchangeable, and essentially were just the Cantonese term for indigenous Kung Fu. It wasn't until Lam Sai Wing's books that Hung Gar came to have specific meaning, and established it as the leading brand (along with the WFH Wuxia novels). It's possible that after the rise of the WFH line the Cantonese schools that hadn't already forged an identity just said they were Hung Kuen (a similar effect can be seen in the north with Mei Hua Quan). After all, if you look at village Hung styles, they typically look like the product of their environments. The Foshan styles look like they're from Foshan, the Jiangmen styles look like they're from Jiangmen (and interestingly are perhaps closest to what we'd recognise as Hung) and while the only style I've seen from Maoming is Ha Say Fu, it's stylistically VERY distinct from WFH Hung Gar.
Great post, thanks. Right on; the signs on WFH's Po Chi Lam clinic would not have said "Hung ga kuen" (which depending on the version honors either the Han emperor OR an anti-Ching folk rebel). It more likely would have said "Siu Lum Kuen" or something similar....generic.
