Wing Chun
A Close-Range Self Defense Kung Fu System
Wing Chun is a close-quarters martial art that focuses on directness and efficiency of motion. It’s a system of self-defense that is ideal for use in an urban environment and confined spaces of limited mobility such as an airplane, bus, or elevator.
Wing Chun became well known under the late Grandmaster Ip Man since it was the main system that his great and famous student Bruce Lee studied and was the base of Sifu Lee’s martial art.
The Legend of Wing Chun
Legend has it that at the time after the destruction of the southern Shaolin Temple by the Qing Dynasty, a Buddhist Nun, named Ng Mui as one of Five Elders of the Shaolin Temple that managed to escape. With her high level of Shaolin martial arts, she created a form of self-defense which could transcend size, weight and gender. She drew her inspiration from the movement of animals, primarily the crane and snake. When applied to the human form, these delicate but natural movements required little force to block and strike effectively and efficiently.
Ng Mui’s first student of the yet unnamed art was a beautiful young girl named Yim Wing Chun (means 'forever springtime’) who was being pressured by a bandit warlord into marriage. After mastering the art, young Yim Wing-Chun publicly rebuffed the local warlord marriage proposal and issued a challenge for a one on one duel. She stated that she would reconsider if he defeated her, but if she won she would gain her freedom and he would forever leave her and her family alone.
This then-still nameless style enabled Yim Wing Chun to decisively defeat the warlord. Yim Wing-Chun thereafter married the gentleman that she loved Leung Bac-Chou and taught him the style, which was later named after her. This is how the lineage of Wing Chun began according to popular legend.
