Please don't take this as a "trigger" for a knee-jerk defensive response! That is not my intent! I hesitated to start this thread, but decided to do it in the spirit of trying to be "fair and reasonable" as I mentioned on the prior thread. On that prior thread I posted something that Rene Ritchie said back in 2003:
If WCK was really an art trained by a large number of people in the secret societies (as opposed to a small fringe group on the Red Junks), then it likely would still have spread prior to and beyond the Red Junks within the Societies and today be found in Taiwan and overseas much as Hung fist and other Society arts are.
Look at one of the most popular WCK origin myths - that it was created to defeat the more common arts leaked to the Manchu so that soldiers could be trained better/faster and overthrow the Qing.
Yet they don't spread it, they don't train the militias, and they don't overthrow the Qing? Either that wasn't what WCK was created for, or the implementation was ineffective to the point of, well, not being the work of the brightest minds out there.
We know the Red Junk had WCK aboard in the 1850s. We've thus far not found WCK stemming from anywhere else, any earlier. It may have, maybe it even did, but there's nothing to indicate it yet, much less support it. We have a reasonably good idea what WCK looked like back to that point, what shapes it used and how it generated power (which are often considered the mapping points of an MA), and we know what other arts were around at that point in that area.
I followed it with this statement:
And here we are over 10 years later and NO ONE else has emerged teaching HFY or having any knowledge of HFY other than Garrett Gee and his students.
But in all fairness, this jogged my memory and I went back looking in some of the stuff I have archived. A few years back a fellow named Lee Chiang Po was a member of this forum. At one point he posted this:
The lineage of which my own wing chun comes from is called Hung Fa, and is said to be descended from Hung Gun. My dad always just called it Hung Fa Wing Chun. I had no idea that there were so many different lineages of Wing Chun in the world until I found this forum while looking at the Kung Fu magazine site some time back. I thought that mine was of the only lineage.
If I remember correctly, My dad was born in 1880. He was old when I came along. In 1965 he died from diabetes at 85 years old. He was a Boxer in 1900 and barely missed the headsman. Later he fled the Canton area and went to Hong Kong in 49 to escape the Communists. From there he came to the states. He told me that he learned Hung Fa from ex-soldiers. They were working members of a tong gang. The stuff I related might or might not have been true, but it does make sense to me at least. These things he told me. Now I am old. Or getting old.
Now, what I have been trying to do is keep from making statements of fact. I don't have the facts. Too much myth to really know. What I have said is that what it was called by my dad was Hung Fa. He also called it Hung fa wing chun. He never really called it Hung Fa Yi. I have heard it called by other names as well. I know that he was born in 1880. Some time after 1890 he started learning what he called Hung Fa wing chun. He learned it from ex military men. Soldiers of the Imperial Army. Later in his life he learned from other men when he joined with a secret society. A tong gang is you will. He did not come to the states until 1950. He was an old man. He never did tell me anything concerning lineage or so forth. So I have no idea. Now, I know that what he was teaching me was at least that old. I am guessing that it goes way back more than that. When we see family trees with the last person being enhereter I have to wonder. I was not told this in so many words, but it was indicated that there were hundreds if not thousands of people running around China that were Wing chun boxers.
When I said that it looks the same to me it is because it looks the same to me. Wing chun is built on concepts and basic principals. You can watch 5 people that are trained by different sifu and you will see differences in their style. However, in most all cases you are going to see that they do adhere to these principals even if it looks a bit different. When you abandon these principals you are not doing wing chun in my opinion. Also, if you are the last living person of a single lineage then you can enheret. But you can not enheret the entire system as such.
I have watched Bill Cheung do wing chun and must say that I do my wing chun pretty much like he does. I am sure by Victors written article that I felt familiar with every concept of what he wrote. If my wing chun was different I would have immediately noticed differences. As for the HFY of Garret Gee, I have no idea as I have never seen him do much except on a few short video clips. It looked exactly like what Bill Cheung does.
I do not believe the story of Ng Mui or Yimm Wing Chun. It would make the lineage far too narrow to have had hundreds if not thousands of followers in China. Look at the number of lineages today. It could not account for only a half dozen generations.
I don't think I have ever made a posting on the 101 forum spoken of earlier. I am not a member and would not be able to. I have only been there a couple of times and gave up trying to navigate that forum. That was something posted on this forum.
I can speak of only my own, which I do call Lee Chiang Po Wing Chun Kung Fu. There are only 12 true Sao's in this system. Anything else is going to be variations of these, which do not bare naming. All these are purely defensive, and yet each and every one can have an entire fighting system built up around it. It is the Conceptual part of Wing Chun.
When we practice our Sil Lim, we practice each and every one of these concepts, but we only occasionally apply a palm strike or whatever, but you can add and take from that as you see fit in order to develop these to your best ability to perform. Thus the " Use a little imagination" thing. That is all you have to do. Keeping Sil Lim as traditional from one student to the next is nothing more than an attempt at that very thing. Sil Lim, Chum Kil, and of course, Bil Gee, are all designed to be altered at your own descresion to meet your own needs.
If you keep it simple, you can learn the system very quickly. However, you will not learn it in most modern day kwoons or gyms that teach Wing Chun. You need to be started from absolute scratch from day one and taught properly. Most will start you in an intermediate class and you start learning somewhere in the middle. You usually give up from frustration. They will have you sparring day one before you even know how to punch or defend.
I am wondering if anyone from the HFY school ever looked up Lee Chiang Po to compare his system to HFY?
The historical problem for HFY is the fact that over the decade since it became public knowledge no one that teaches it or knows anything about it has emerged other than Garrett Gee and his students. As Rene Ritchie asked way back in 2003, if this was truly the fighting method used by the Hung societies for training revolutionary militias....and was taught to hundreds of people, why do we not see more surviving lineages today? Other styles associated with the secret societies can be found. The number of people trained on the Red Boats would have been very small compared to the number training as part of revolutionary militias. We can find multiple lineages tracing back to the Red Boats but none claiming connection to the Hung societies other than Garrett Gee. This is a real historical problem for HFY. Again....please no knee-jerk reaction attacks! This is a simple statement of fact. No agenda here. No political motivation here. Just an interest in WCK history!
But......if what Lee Chiang Po has written is true, this could very well be something that would buttress and support HFY history. If his "Hung Fa WCK" is more similar to HFY than it is to the Red Boat lineage systems, then what Garrett Gee has taught about HFY's background would get some validation and go a long ways towards making people like me eat my words!!!!Prove me wrong! Please! I would love to see some validation of the HFY history! It would make the world of WCK even more interesting!
So. Does anyone know Lee Chiang Po? Has anyone paid him a visit?
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Originally Posted by zuti car
