History

The history of Wing Chun has historically been passed verbally from teacher to student making it difficult to clarify the different accounts. This is one version.

The style of Wing Chun is said to have been invented anything up to 300 years ago from the Siu Lam temple (during the Qing dynasty).

The Siu Lam temple was not only used for its religious purposes but also for hiding anti Qing revolutionaries (criminals) from the military.

Because of this and also due to a fear of the monks fighting skills, the Manchurians decided to burn down the temple and kill all inside.

It was said that the five elders of the temple escaped (and are often written about in Chinese history as ‘the venerable five’). One of these was the Buddhist nun Ng Mui, a siu lam boxer.

Whilst on the border of Sichuan and Yunnan province she witnessed a fight between a snake and a crane and decided to bring this together with her own previous studies to eventually create a new, unnamed art.

Ng Mui eventually took onboard a student, a young girl by the name of Yim Wing Chun (Wing Chun meaning, beautiful springtime).

There is also a story that after training for some time the beautiful Yim Wing Chun was harassed by a local thug who wanted to marry her and would not leave her alone.

To put an end to this she challenged him to a fight and in no time at all after seeing him off, she had created her reputation as a fighter.

Later Yim Wing Chun married Leung Bok Chao and after learning his wife’s skills he decided to name the style ‘Wing Chun Keun’ (Wing Chun fist) in her honour.

This was passed down from selected disciple to selected disciple until it reached Yip Man in Foshan China. Yip Man decided to break tradition by teaching openly (but only to the Chinese), one of this students was a young man named Jun Fan (Bruce Lee).

Bruce Lee over later years brought Wing Chun into the eyes of the western world but for a long time it was not taught outside of the Chinese community. Yip Mans eldest son Yip Chun decided to break tradition even further by teaching westerners.

At the present time there are only 13 people in the world qualified to represent his teachings and only 3 of those are western.