Wing Chun History

According to the late Grandmaster Ip Man, Wing Chun comes from a lady in the 1700’s whose name was Yim Wing Chun,meaning “Beautiful Springtime” or “Springtime Song.”

The legend is that there was a Buddhist nun famous for her invention of various Kung Fu styles including “White Crane”,”Dragon”, “Wing Chun”, “her own style, etc. Her skill was in her leg work and in her ability to fight on top of well placed wooden poles called the plum blossom poles.

Yim Wing Chun, a beautiful tall lady from the North, used to sell delicious Chinese steamed buns of various sorts to the locals. Often people from the monastery would come down from the mountain to buy her goods.

One day a local martial arts bully who happened to be travelling through the town, noticed Yim Wing Chun’s beauty and so decided that she will be his wife. However she resisted all of his advances which annoyed him to no end. Finally he issued an ultimatum that said “marry me or I will destroy your family.” Yim Wing Chun didn’t know what to do so she confided in the Buddhist nun Ng Mui (Sometimes written Wu Mei) and told her the story.

In her wisdom Ng Mui developed a plan. She told Yim Wing Chun to tell the bully that she will marry him one year later on the condition that he could defeat her in a public fight on top of a stage for all the town folks to see. In the mean time the Buddhist nun Ng Mui promised to train Yim Wing Chun day and night over the next year to prepare her for this event.

The bully being overly confident and chauvinistic had never seen a woman that could defeat any male martial artist so he without hesitation accepted the challenge. He thought “what a fun way to gain a wife.” He knew that if he did lose then he would lose face and no woman would marry him after that. But he was willing to risk that because it was unheard of that a woman could be better than her husband in martial art.

Day in and day out Ng Mui trained Yim Wing Chun. She taught Yim Wing Chun the elements of Snake style and Crane style fighting which she said was more suitable for a lady and that both systems were designed in their own ways to deal with massive strength. Both systems were fluid, flexible and very fast. The quick movements of the Crane and Snake wold be combined with very agile footwork to produce an elusive fighter that could not be hit yet could accurately strike with blinding speed at will.

A year late a stage was built in the center of the town for of town for the famous match to be held. This method was common in those days for challenge matches between practitioners of various Kung Fu arts. Little is known about the actual fight but the results of the fight became known far and wide. Later through Yim Wig Chun and her future husband’s, the style of his wife became famous and many variations of the art spread to Southern China.

There are many versions of this story. These days various independent researchers cannot really find evidence of this story nor can they find any alternate story which more credibility. In various periods of history, each dynasty would make up their own historical stories to make their dynasty look good and the other dynasties look bad.

Master Wang Kiu himself went to China many times to research the origins of Wing Chun. He concluded that there was no real traceable history of Wing Chun that could extend back to the Shaolin days. He said that a Man by the name of Lee Man and Ip Man developed the Yim Wing Chun story for marketing purposes to connect the art to a famous legendary figure from Chinese novels called Ng Mui.

This story and it’s variants still float around, not because it is really true, that’s why it is called a legend, but because it immediately give a Wing Chun practitioner and the teacher an idea about what Wing Chun must be like.

Since a female usually cannot compete against male strength (modern Olympic women being an exception to this) then it could guide teachers and students of the art on what would be the criteria of correct Wing Chun. If a Wing Chun student’s Wing Chun uses a force against force and massive muscles for it to work, then this is not Wing Chun.  In the end, Wing Chun is a close range art based on economy of motion and the attributes of good positioning, sensitivity, timing, speed and short range power to deal with the opponent’s superior size and strength.

One Wing Chun teacher by the name of Robert Chu has done his own research into the history of Wing Chun. His approach was to talk to the various living Masters of Wing Chun in mainland China and then just record what they said. The result of this was his book on the history of Wing Chun. Still even today, nobody really knows the origin of Wing Chun. There does seem to be some evidence that Wing Chun does relate to “White Crane Kung Fu” since in one of the White Crane forms, many of he actions contained in the Wing Chun forms are also contained in this White Crane form.