I came across an interview with Sifu Robert Chu today. He said something I liked and that has some bearing on recent threads here in the forum:

You gotta have some brains in order to do Wing Chun. That is the beauty of it, what is it an advanced marital art? It is thinking man’s art. Think about it, Wing Chun was passed down by the opera troops. They have to be very innovative, be comical, understand situations to entertain people. They have to be able to take the best of martial arts and simplify it for application. Yet they still have to be able to use martial arts for show and entertainment.

They passed it down to the merchant class. Doctors and merchants are usually very smart people. They have to use their brain, they have to do problem solving. Then we have the age of the educated individuals, like in Hong Kong.

You didn’t have your basic farmers learning Wing Chun, you had people with more substance (learning it at that time). We should conduct the art in that matter, because it’s progressing in that matter. I think there is a great improvement of Wing Chun, because it passes onto intelligent people. Not just thugs, gangsters, or stupid people.