history of wing chun

As is typical with  most martial arts the history of Wing Chun Kung Fu was been passed down from teacher to student by word of mouth and no one can confirm the true origin of Wing Chun as there are no written historical records available. 

Most however believe that Wing Chun dates back over Three Hundred years to the reign of the Chinese Emperor Kangxi ( 1662 - 1722 ). the story goes that Ng Mui, a Buddhist nun, escaped the destruction of a Shaolin Monastery by Qing forces and fled to the Daliang mountains between Sichuan and Yunnan.

There she saw a fight between a crane and a snake and she took the lessons that she learned from observing how they fought one another and combined them with her own knowledge of Shaolin Kung Fu to create a unique fighting style of her own.

Present day Wing Chun was shown to the world mainly through the students of Yip Man. Although Yip Man did not teach anyone other than Chinese his students have gone on to share their knowledge of Wing Chun Kung Fu with the rest of the world.

Yip Man was born October 14th 1893 in the town of Fut Shan in the Kwong Tung province of china. He studied Wing Chun Kung Fu under Chan Wah Shun along with other students including Ng Chung Sao. Several years later before Chan Wah Shun died he asked Ng Chung Sao to continue teaching the young Yip Man the Wing Chun system od Kung Fu.

Yip Man fought against the Japanese invasion for Eight years and eventually ended up in Hong Kong where he was forced to teach Wing Chun in order to survive as he was quite poor. It is here in Hong Kong in his 60's that he instructed Bruce Lee who went on to become a famous movie star and marital artist and who used the ideas of Wing Chun to develop his own fighting style called Jeet Kune Do (way of the intercepting fist).