Martial Arts Gathering 2007.

[Eric Ling]

Hi everybody,

So you guys are talking about “Phok Kek”, a contemporary system?

Are they still active anywhere in W Malaysia?

Firehawk4, I would be calling on Sifu Cheong in Penang to invite him to MAG2007; that’s the plan.

Cannot commit anything now but I will give it a shot. I know someone here acquainted with him and he’s helping in this matter.

Looks like you guys are very familiar with the W Malaysia scene; perhaps you could help me out here.

I am trying to locate some of these folks:-

• Dong Zhiang White Crane or East River White Crane. If I remember correctly this was headed by a Master Quek in the Selangor area.
• Tai Sheng Mun. Almost like Hong Kong’s except without the “Pek Kwa”.
• Nam Kwon Do or Nan Quan Dao.
• Lohan White Crane – possibly another W Malaysian hybrid.
• Anyone connected to Master Lau Chew Ho – an Ngo Chor Master who also taught Fukien White Crane.

If you are based in W Malaysia and would like to meet up, let me know. I should be in KL first week of February.

Received some mails asking for more impressions of Fuzhou Whooping Crane; here’s some footages taken some 10+ years ago in Singapore.

Snippets from old Whooping Crane forms, some not commonly seen anymore.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4dfraMhTHA

Warmest Regards.

Eric

[CannonFist]

Bagus!

I'm curious if you ever meet any sifu in Perak. I met someone from there and he says that it has the oldest ties to CMA because of the Tin industry. He mentioned a style or type of CMA called Poe-Ket (sp?) It is supposed to be a pure fighting style but I didn't get much else.

Kasih.

Yes, I have heard of a type of CMA in Perak that tends to be referred to as Pok Kik. This style does not bother much with forms. Their fighting strategy is like that of Choy Lee Fut and Tibetan Pak Hok. Their favourite combination revolves around the Kup (overhand strike), Pao (upper cut), Seh (shoot, straight punch with regular or leopard punch). Back in the 60s, I heard that this style was well known to challenge other styles in Perak with very good success rates. Back in those days practitioners of this style tend to wear bamboo rods on their forearms when going into fights involving machetes to block the machetes as well as deliver a harder blow with forearms using their swinging arm techniques.

[shinmyouken]

you're right cannonball :-) one of my seniors used the charp chui in tournament and came in first. there was also an incident involving a TKD "ambassador" from Korea which resulted in him being recalled after being decked by the sau chui. the police was called in and my teacher hauled up for questioning. but that was a long time ago. there is also a derivative of pok khek called chik khek in which the founded added in karate techniques :-) i remember seeing a tournament where the top 3 fighters were from the pok khek and chik khek schools - this would be in the early 80s.

[Eric Ling]

Hi everybody,

Got a bit of time before I head out to the suburbs to shoot Chu Gar’s Master Liew, so I swing by “Chinese Martial Arts Association” training site last evening…

Had my camera with me so I took some of the boys in action; lighting not too good though.

The boys were training both their traditional and competition routines.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cesp-trvPMc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nndBLD5kayM

Like I said before, these boys are really hardworking doing their forms repeatedly.

I really got to shoot them again with proper light and all ……

Warmest Regards.

Eric

[kismet]

Hi Eric,

This gathering / meeting sounds fantastic. Kudos to you for all your effort and hardwork. I can only imagine you are loving it - training, kungfu and carlsbergs - what more can one ask for in life? I would love to visit in and watch this...I may try to as I believe a mutual aquaintence of ours is definately visiting.

Can I ask who is representing or performing the Chow Gar Tong Long? Have you tried to contact Sifu Lee Teen Loi as I believe this is something he would be very interested in.

Thanks for all the clips, great stuff.

[hasayfu]

Thanks everyone for the info on Pok Kek. It matches what I have heard and filled in some of the gaps.

[Eric Ling]

Hi everybody,

Kismet, I will talk to you off-line regarding the Master you mentioned.

And you are 120% right, we must meet and touch hands…

Spent the day with Master Liew Joo Mew, the Chu Gar Internal Jin Praying Mantis teacher who lives some 20 miles from my place.

Master Liew, a Chinese physician, is nice enough to take time off his busy patients schedule to entertain me.

He gave me a very good narrative of the history and principles of his style.

Like many other Masters I spoke to before, he talked about returning to his hometown in mainland China just to be told that they don’t do traditional kung fu there anymore.

This is exactly the same picture that my White Crane family encountered when they went back to Fuzhou some years back.

According to Master Liew, many overseas Chinese were called to go back to the mainland to replant various traditional Kung Fu there. He showed me documents from the mainland to substantiate this.

Later he told me something that really got me all keyed up; in his younger days, he studied another style of Kung Fu called “Shao Lien Quan”.

Shao = little or young.
Lien = Lotus.
Quan = Fists.

This is an inconspicuous style that came out of Fukien Shaolin and regarded to be the “brother” style of Hungga that became popular in Canton and heavily caught up in fighting the Manchurian invaders.

Shao Lien, on the hand, stayed very low profile and left the mainland with immigrating Chinese settling in SE Asia. During one of his trips to China, Shaolin folks over there seek him out because of his knowledge of this style….

Master Liew did the beginner’s form from this style for me. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAgBRBOzze0

He also did forms from his Chu Gar – a beginner’s form, the trident and the iron ruler.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6g1N_T3GbBc

Later he took me through his fighting methodology which consists of nerves and chi-gates striking.

This man’s knowledge in chi-gates striking is really something, many times all he did was plant his fingers into my chi points and I was unable to respond.

I gotta to say that the more I meet these Masters here; I am increasingly feeling that I know very little about Kung Fu.

I left Master Liew with the concurrence of meeting again to do more filming of both his Chu Gar and Shao Lien Quan. Also got his confirmation to appear in MAG2007.

Next I got a date tomorrow to film a lion “eyes-dotting” ceremony at a local temple in the morning and then it’s off to meeting another Master in the afternoon.

Warmest Regards.

Eric

[Eric Ling]

Oooookay, it rained like crazy cats and dogs today so I gave the “eyes doting” ceremony a miss.

Did spent the day with a group of CKF veterans in a coffee shop talking about CKF then and now and where it’s headed.

One of them, Master Chang spoke about his involvement in an event in Penang last year and that he’s a personal friend of many Masters there including GM Dato P’ng Chye Khim from Sao Lim (Fukien Shaolin pronounced in Fukinese)…

Master Chang agreed to lend a hand in inviting them for this coming September meet in Kuching and later gave me a bunch of video footages from Penang.

I remember someone asking to see Sao Lim Lohan , the form featured in the “Shaolin Lohan” book, in another thread, so here you go :- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nHCqwFuWdc

Also you’ll see the “White Crane Spreading Wing” exercise that they do over there which totally reminds me of Fuzhou Crane relaxed manner of execution.

I said this before; Ven Sek taught different forms to different disciples in Indonesia, Penang and Singapore.

Going through the footages reinforces my belief.

The “flavor” is alike but the forms aren’t.

Even GM P’ng’s Lohan is dissimilar to the ones I’ve learned.

Well, I will be in that part of West Malaysia soon and hopefully meet GM P’ng.

Warmest Regards.

Eric

Ps. Will try to extract more forms to post… got to go see my old frend Mr. Carlsberg.

[Eric Ling]

Hi everybody,

More of the Sao Lim’s “flavor” that I spoke about.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLggPGwYyAI

In the clip, you’ll see 1) Willow Leaves Palm 2) Jin Kang or “Diamond” Fists 3) Lohan 18 Palms.

The last form, done by the Swiss lady is very interesting…

Got “1 Blossom” or “Yi Ki Buay” written all over it.

Yi Ki Buay was the first form taught to me when I was training in Shiong Lim Temple Singapore in the early 70s.

Warmest Regards.

Eric

And Milan, I read your message before your deletion; which email are you talking about?

Errrrhhhh, let's not forget we had some underwater cables problem recently that affected conectivity in my part of the world..

[Ozzy Dave]

Hi Eric,

Thanks again for these clips and info.

In particular I appreciate the Sao Lim clip. I practice a little Sao Lim and it’s great to see other forms, especially from someone like GM Dato P’ng. It’s also great to hear there are Sao Lim people coming to MAG2007.

I learned a form in Singapore similar to the one in the clip above, it was called "Jing Gang" Lohan. First third or so was nearly exactly the same.

Give my regards to Mr Carlsberg

Dave

[Asmo]

Hey Eric,

I love your clips, but I am honoustly wondering about the music each time (and turning it off). I think it would be great if it is possible to leave the original sound on!!! You had some training clips as well, where I could see people making sounds during the playing of forms etc. it would be great if that is kept intact.

Other then this, good stuff

[Eric Ling]

Arrrrrggggghhhhh …. You don’t like my music

I gotta warn you, original sounds could be anything from dogs barking to children bawling.

Tell you what, let’s meet half the way; I will use softer music or keep volume low so that if there is breathing or verbal explanation of techniques, those would come out audible.

Ozzy Dave, what’s your email address? Please drop me a note at white88crane@yahoo.com thanks.

Okay, now on to the next style and Sifu.

When I first came to Kuching, I wanted to meet 2 groups of White Crane folks.

The first is the late GM Huang Xin Xien’s line essentially because the late GM Huang is related to my late White Crane teacher.

The other is descendants of the late GM Huang Yi Ing – the other distinguished MingHe teacher in Sarawak.

After some asking around, I was introduced to Sifu Robert Siew; one of the few who is still actively teaching.

Robert is really passionate about his Kung Fu. His daytime job in the insurance industry is already hectic enough and still you find him teaching in the evenings; more to keep the art alive than anything else.

Over the last couple of years, I spent quite a bit of quality time with this gentleman discussing the various characteristics of our individual White Crane and I always come away gaining new insights into the world of White Crane boxing.

Met Robert again today and videoed him doing the 4 major forms from his MingHe. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNCAcfi1_Lg

After the video session, we talked about his contribution in this September gathering and possibly working together in some video publishing projects.

2 Fuzhou Whooping Cranes side by side …. What more could I ask for …..

Warmest Regards.

Eric

[Eric Ling]

Hi Milan,

My sincere apology if I offended you in any way.

Fact is, my internet connection zonked out for a couple of days; had to put everything in a thumb-drive and use a friend's system to upload.

WuLinIJia is taking the back seat for a short while.

Right now all our materials go to Russ Smith's server in the US.

We foresee that we will be running out of capacity in no time.

I shoot an average of 50Gb of videos a month and my books/magazines collection run into the thousands and add this to what Evert & Russ have got in their collection....

My recent trip to Kuala Lumpur was to talk to some IT companies there about working with us in term of storage capacity , bandwidth and maintenance of WuLinIJia.

I will be in KL again for a second round meeting with these guys.

Simply put, we want to launch right and not postpone projected issues.

Again, my friend, if I was out-of-line, forgive me.

I will write to you on working together for both WuLinIJia and MAG2007.

Warmest Regards.

Eric

[Eric Ling]

Now for some White Crane that I really looove .....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR9m6hNhmac

Warmest Regards.

Eric

[Eric Ling]

Hi everybody,

Another view of Sifu Robert Siew dong the front portion of the original “Babulien” or “8 linking steps” passed down by the by the late GM Huang.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y11jdtNEFo

Personally I got a special interest in this particular form because we do the same form in our Whooping Crane albeit in a different manner.

Really like the way his whole body is “energized” like a loaded spring and the method he releases the energy at the end of the technique – crispy. This is his style of manifesting the “whipping” that is associated with almost all Fukien/Fuzhou cranes.

With Robert, the 2 of us take the “agree to disagree” attitude seeing how we express the same art in 2 divergent manners.

Over the many discussions we had, it became obvious that the differences are only skin-deep.

Warmest Regards.

Eric

Milan, sometime in the next couple of days, I will send you a mail regarding MAG2007.
Thanks.