Was Wing Chun meant to be a complete system?

[Lee Chiang Po]

Just thought I would ask this question..

Reading the history of Wing Chun, it was designed to be learned in a very short amount of time and was designed to help a person beat another specific person.

The "founder" was trained in a southern style of kung fu and then distilled it to be learned in that one year time of hard training. Looking at other southern styles you see many of the same concepts there as well, although not as much time is spent on them in some cases.

So do you think that Wing Chun, was a sort of "kung fu combatives" that was meat and potatoes of it's parent system of the easy to learn apply techniques, or do you think that it was designed to be a whole comprehensive system.

Back in it's day it was indeed considered to be a complete system. These guys usually had to make it work a lot. Today maybe not so complete. In the hundreds of years that Wing Chun has been kept alive it might have lost a little of it's completeness, and of course there have evolved lots of other things that were not around at the time. Guns for one thing. And of course the legal end of it since there is law and order supposedly. We have sport fighting now, which tends to be specialized in several ways. Not wide ranging systems at all because they have rules of engagement. MMA, Judo, BJJ, and probably many other sport fighting systems exist today that did not exist back then. Each one has it's own set of rules to work by. It stands to reason that some of this would be difficult to fight against today even though it might have been a complete system at one time.