Oral Histories

Yip Man Wing Chun

The oral history of the Yip Man branch of Wing Chun dates its creation to the reign of the Emperor Kangxi (1662-1722). After escaping the destruction of the Henan Shaolin Monastery by Qing forces, the Abbess Ng Mui fled to the distant Daliang mountains on the border between Yunnan and Sichuan.

One day, she came upon a fight between a snake and a crane. She took the lessons she learned from observing the fight between the two animals and combined them with her own knowledge of Shaolin kung fu to create a new style.

Ng Mui often bought her bean curd at the tofu shop of Yim Yee. Yim Yee had a daughter named Yim Wing-Chun whom a local bandit was trying to force into marriage. Ng Mui taught her new fighting style to Wing-Chun, which the girl used to fend off the bandit once and for all.

Wing-Chun eventually married a man she loved, Leung Bok-Chao, to whom she taught the fighting techniques that Ng Mui had passed on to her. Husband and wife in turn passed the new style on to others.

Yiu Kai Wing Chun

The oral history of the Yiu Kai lineage dates the creation of Wing Chun roughly a century later, to the early 19th century, and names Wing-Chun's father as Yim Sei, a disciple at the Fujian Shaolin Temple who avoids persecution by fleeing with his daughter to Guangxi.

Wing-Chun learned the Fujian Shaolin arts from her father and, from their raw material, created a new style after being inspired by a fight between a snake and a crane.

She eventually married Leung Bok-Chao - a Shaolin disciple just like Wing-Chun's father - and taught her fighting style to her new husband. The young couple began teaching Wing Chun's fighting style to others after moving to Guangdong Province in 1815, settling in the city of Zhaoqing.