Uechi Ryu is one of the major systems of Okinawan Karate and was included as part of the formally accepted kata groups in the Tokyo Olympics Karate Kata Competition category. Its founder was Uechi Kanbun (上地完文), who had travelled to Fuzhou City, Fuzhou Province, China in 1898 to learn Kung Fu for about 13 years.
There has been contention about the identity of Uechi Kanbun’s teacher since the 1970s:
The modern main branches generally believe that during a visit to Taiwan or Hong Kong to the 1960s, Chinese Kung Fu hosts told the Karate visitors that Uechi Ryu “looks like something taught by Zhou Zihe (周子和, 1874-1926).”
The last active student of Uechi Kanbun, Toyama Seiko (当山清幸, 1928-2009), said that he heard personally from Kanbun Uechi that his teacher was named “Shuu Shiwa”, which resembles the pronunciation of Zhou Zihe. Toyama Seiko was so adamant regarding his views and oral stories that he declined the opportunity to become the next in line lineage successor to Uechi Ryu’s contemporary-style international organization, and lived a quiet life as a bus driver, farmer, and family man.
In March of 1981, a delegation from the Uechi Ryu Association visited Fuzhou Wushu Association (福州市武术协会) in person and requested to search for “Shuu Shiwa”. The task was given to Professor Sun Chongxiong (孙崇雄) and Wei Qiqi (魏齐祺). After numerous folk interviews among the streets of Fuzhou, Zhou Zihe was tracked to his home village of Zhitian (芝田), and subsequent intensive oral interviews continued. A research committee was formed on June 11, 1981, and the findings were formally reported in March 1984 during the second Karate visitor trip.
The report was mostly a collected folk-story summation about Zhou Zihe and included oral accounts from students of Zhou Zihe’s surviving Kung Fu lineage: Liu Baotang (刘宝堂), Jin Shitian (金世田), and Zhang Tianci (张天赐).
Many stories collected in Fuzhou showed a high-probability match between Zhou Zihe and “Shuu Shiwa”: both preferred to dress in Taoist robes, resided in Taoist temples (in addition, Zhou Zihe’s home also mischievously had a Taoist temple sign), and learned a vast diverse number of different unrelated Kung Fu systems. Okinawan oral accounts also highly match the location of Zhitian village.
Due to this, many subsequent friendship exchanges were organized between Fuzhou Wushu Association and Uechi Ryu, with Kung Fu practitioners visiting Okinawa and the USA, and vice versa.
However, in the late 1980s, all public trips came to a sudden stop without explanation from the Karate side, although sporadic visits were made by Karate people in private over the years until the early 2000s when the Zhou family stopped accepting visitors.
After the official visits stopped, another surviving lineage of Zhou Zihe’s Kung Fu was found, belonging to Master Guo Kongxi (郭孔熙, 1903-2003). But at this time there seemed to be little public interest in Zhou Zihe from Karate practitioners.
With the passage of time, Fuzhou City and Zhitian Village became prosperous, and families of the Guo and Zhou Families (previously living in relative poverty) ascended to middle-upper class, focusing on their careers and families, while their Kung Fu lay forgotten. As these ex-Kung Fu men reached retirement age, once again they looked to their past Kung Fu with nostalgia and reminiscence, and ideas formed to preserve and rescue their fading Kung Fu styles. The Guo and Zhou Families respectively began to promote their Kung Fu again around 2019, but only within China.
By accident, this news reached Uechi Ryu practitioners overseas, and contact was made during the Covid lockdowns. In September 2023 a visit was made by students of Toyama Seiko Sensei’s association. They conducted interviews with the Fuzhou Wushu Association (and the surviving original researcher, Mr. Sun Chongxiong), the Guo Family (son and students of Master Guo Kongxi, who are part of Cangshan Area Wushu Association 仓山区武术协会), and visited Zhitian Village, including Zhou Zihe’s old residence and grave.
In the renewed trip, the visitors hoped to clear up any misunderstandings and clarify any possible reasons for the cut in cross-country communications. The Fujian hosts warmly welcomed the visitors, and patiently answered questions with maximum clarity. The following are the conjectures of the visiting team regarding the general situation:
According to both Zhou and Guo lineages of Zhou Zihe Kung Fu, Zhou Zihe knew a vast variety of kung fu styles, and he would teach different material to different students, depending on the suitability and characteristics of each student. Customized one-on-one teaching of Kung Fu in ancient China was rare but was indeed done by highly skilled sifu. This possibly caused doubts and debate with the early Karate visitors, who hoped to find a style in Fuzhou identical to their Karate with forms matching their own. Possibly subsequent private trips were made with this objective in mind, however there were almost never repeat visits once the visitors realized there was no exact copy of their style left.
As the forms of the Karate and Kung Fu groups were quite unrelated, the only other way to determine similarities was to compare individual techniques and applications. However, commercialization and modernization of Uechi Ryu Karate led to some ambiguities in the usage and performance of the kata, and application was often improvised. Older practitioners of pre-WWII Uechi Ryu were not available to provide their opinions.
The original Fuzhou researcher Professor Sun reiterated that many of the folk stories about Zhou Zihe were obviously fictional “tall tales”, but he had collected and recorded all of them anyways. This may have caused some misunderstanding among the early Karate visitors; they may have confused the tall tales for historical fact which would have raised suspicions regarding the authenticity of the research.
In addition, although the folk stories acknowledged Zhou Zihe having a Japanese student, there was scant information about him; he seemed to have just lived a low-key ordinary life. This was perhaps also a source of disappointment.
The main take-home conclusion from the September 2023 trip was that Zhou Zihe probably evolved and changed his Kung Fu during the maturity of his life. Zhou Zihe indeed taught different students diverse unrelated styles, thus leading credence and explanation to the modern differences between Uechi Ryu and today’s Fuzhou Kung Fu.
Regardless, the Fuzhou hosts hope for more future visitors to come and learn their Kung Fu as-is and experience the uniqueness of Zhou Zihe’s surviving Kung Fu legacy in Fuzhou City in order to keep the flame of tradition alive, and to forge new friendships and renew old ones. Fujian’s Tiger Boxing is possibly one of the oldest Tiger styles in Chinese Kung Fu; it is truly a living treasure and a rare glimpse into the past.
The visiting team belong to the karate association founded by Toyama Seiko known as Zankai (山会), the current head being G. Seizan Breyette. The Zankai has recently published two books called Uechi Ryu Bunburyodo Vols. 1 and 2, detailing information about their Karate, and plans to publish a third volume which will provide more focus on the Fuzhou origins, Zhou Zihe, and detailed accounts of the Fuzhou visit. Undoubtedly much of the information provided by the current visit would be familiar to the earlier Karate visitors, however Zankai was asked by the hosts to publicize the trip and let the international Martial Arts community know more about Zhou Zihe’s legacy, according to their own words and points of view.
