Lineage

LINEAGE

William Cheung Lineage

In 1951, at the age of ten, Cheung started his training in Wing Chun Kung Fu under the late Grandmaster Yip Man. From 1954 to 1958 Cheung was a live-in student of Grandmaster Yip Man. It was during this time that he inherited the complete system of Traditional Wing Chun Kung Fu.

Between 1957 and 1958 Cheung won the Kung Fu elimination contests in Hong Kong, defeating opponents with many more years’ experience. In early 1954 Cheung introduced Bruce Lee to Grandmaster Yip Man, and became his personal trainer. Throughout the four and a half years the two men developed a very close friendship, and Cheung passed on to Bruce Lee most of his techniques and helped developed his overall confidence and experience in fights. In later years he was to use these techniques in competitions, and also in his movies.

In 1959, after completing his training under Grandmaster Yip Man, Cheung left Hong Kong to pursue an academic career at the Australian National University in Canberra. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Economics.

After moving to Melbourne to teach Wing Chun professionally in 1973, Cheung began operating a very successful Martial Arts School. In 1976 he was elected the President of the Australian Kung Fu Federation.

Cheung was appointed as Chief Instructor to the U.S. Seventh Fleet based in Yukosuka, Japan, during 1978 to 1980. Throughout this time, he was in charge of the intensive mental and physical development program of close quarter hand to hand combat for the marines.

Many of Cheung’s students have achieved international recognition for their martial arts prowess. In 1982 his students won the heavyweight and middleweight divisions respectively in the World Invitation Kung Fu Championships held in Hong Kong. Furthermore, Cheung himself, in 1983, was inducted into the “Black Belt Hall of Fame” as Kung Fu Artist of the Year and again in 1989, into the “Inside Kung Fu Hall of Fame” as Martial Arts Instructor of the Year.

From 1979 Grandmaster Cheung and many of his juniors conducted special programs for special law enforcing officers and special operation groups in the Armed Services in U.S.A. and other countries, teaching unarmed combat, restraining and disarming assailants and a fire arm retention program.

It was at the Harvard University, Boston, in 1984 that Grandmaster Cheung set the world speed punching record of 8.3 punches per second .

Chu Shong Tin Lineage

Chu Shong Tin was born in Guangdong province in 1933. His childhood occurred during an era of rapid change within both Chinese society and the martial arts. There does not seem to be a lot of information about this period of his life, but we know from Chu’s own statements that he was considered somewhat sickly and at the age of 10 his father arranged for him to study Taijiquan.

Taiji itself was a recent import to the Pearl River Delta, first being popularized in region during the 1920s and 1930s by teachers associated with martial reform movements such as the Jingwu and Central Guoshu associations. It is also interesting to consider that his father was able to arrange for instruction in 1943, during the middle of the Japanese occupation of the region.

In September of 1950 Chu got a job as a secretary at the Restaurant Worker’s Union in Kowloon. This proved to be a fateful development. Ip Man was already living at the Union offices and he conducted Wing Chun classes during the days when Chu showed up for work. Still, Chu did not join his initial class.

For a variety of reasons Chu decided that he preferred the parsimony and conceptual simplicity of Wing Chun, and at the urging of Leung Sheung (a more senior union officer and experienced martial artist), quit Taiji and took up this new style. On January 1st of 1951 Chu Shong Tin presented Ip Man with a red envelope becoming a formal student.

This decision was critical for everyone involved. In all honesty Ip Man’s initial forays into teaching at the Union were not all that successful. While he started out with about 20 students, retention was a serious problem. Chu notes that one after another these students slipped away.

Part of this no doubt stemmed from the transient and economically strained life of most of these individuals. At the same time we know that Ip Man innovated throughout the 1950s to find ways to make his art more attractive to his highly mobile student base. For instance, Chi Sao (sticky hands) came to be emphasized during this decade while long periods of stance training (common in the traditional arts) were scaled back.

By January of 1951 Ip Man had only two remaining students, Leung Sheung and Lok Yiu. This was a critical issue as the old master was totally dependent on his students for economic support. If the teaching experiment had failed it is highly likely that Ip Man would have looked for some other source of income and the modern Wing Chun community (to the extent that one might even exist) would probably be very different. It should be recalled that Ip Man was actually somewhat ambivalent about taking up public teaching in the first place, so this situation may have been more delicate than is generally realized.

Instead Leung Sheung (perhaps the first martial artist in Hong Kong to fully recognize Ip Man’s genius), Lok Yiu and Chu Shong Tin pooled their resources to support their teacher through a period of poor enrollments. Much of the later popularity of the style was subsidized by these sacrifices in the lean years of the early 1950s.

Chu Shong Tin stated that the order in which he learned the Wing Chun system was somewhat different than how most students approach it today. In fact, it seems closer to how the style was taught in the Foshan period. Initially he was introduced to Siu Lim Tao, the style’s first unarmed form, which he practiced for over 1 year. Next he was introduced to the concept of turning prior to the actual introduction of Chum Kiu (which employs both stepping and turning).

Sometime after that (probably during 1952) he seems to have started studying Chum Kiu. The following year he was introduced to the dummy, learning about 20-30 movements at a time. Rather than seeing the entire set at once, individual chapters were introduced throughout the remainder of his unarmed training as new topics or problems came up. In or around 1954 Chu was introduced to Biu Jee, and the following year he began to learn the Six and Half Point Pole.

Chu does not appear to have approached learning as a passive pursuit. One of the things that impressed me as I read about his life and watched various interviews were his keen powers of observation. Chu had been carefully observing Ip Man and his instruction for some time before he ever joined the class.

As such he was able to demonstrate the entire Siu Lim Tao form on his first day as a formal student. This allowed him to spend his time perfecting the nuances of the movements and their applications rather than simply learning them. He is reported to have done the same thing with Chum Kiu.

It was during this early period that Chu first acquired his nickname, the “King of Siu Lim Tao.” Multiple accounts of how this came about have been given, though they all seem to be different aspects of the same event. All of the stories are clear that Ip Man, who enjoyed pronouncing light-hearted nicknames upon his students and friends, was ultimately responsible for this one as well.

Some accounts of the event begin by noting that Wing Chun received a certain amount of coverage in the local press during the 1950s and 1960s. In one of these stories Ip Man mentioned noted Chu’s dedication to the study and practice of Siu Lim Tao, beyond all of the other forms, and named him the “King of Siu Lim Tao.” The name stuck in large part as Chu’s own approach to Wing Chun emphasizes the importance of body structure, relaxation and psychological intent, all things that can be trained in, and explored through the practice of, the first unarmed form.

In a slightly different account of these events given in an interview with Sifu Sergio, Chu instead emphasized the role of his persistent questioning in the origin of the nickname. Following the urging of Leung Sheung, in 1951 he had moved into the Restaurant Worker’s Union to work more closely with his teacher. Ip Man and Chu shared a small room for some time. In addition to learning Wing Chun Chu attempted to help the older master with various household tasks, in effect becoming a live-in student.

The term “Siu Lim Tao” has been translated in a number of different ways. It means something like “the little thought form,” or the “small idea.” This had always bothered Chu as it is quite different from the sorts of names that are given to most other Chinese boxing forms. For him the name itself became a sort of paradox. Every day he would ask Ip Man what it meant, and his teacher would respond simply by telling him to continue practicing the form and to have faith in the process.

Chu did not abandon his quest lightly. Instead he continued to asked Ip Man about the meaning of the name daily. Each time he was told to simply keep practicing. And practice he did, almost constantly. Eventually he began to feel as though he was able to unravel the mystery of the form on his own.

It was at this point that Ip Man, always sensitive to the power of names, began to call his student “Siu Lim Tao.” I don’t think that Chu ever got a straight answer to his question about the origin of the form’s name. Indeed, it is the sort of question that may not have any answer at all. But through his own persistence he acquired a new name for himself.

During 1955 Chu Shong Tin began to study the Six and a Half Point pole form. This was a period of sweeping transition within Ip Man’s growing clan. Sometime during the same year Ip Man’s relationship with a widow and fellow refugee from Shanghai (known within his school only as the “Shanghai Po” or the “Shanghai Woman”) became visible. This relationship, outside of the bounds of his initial marriage, while never publicly defined, became a crisis for a number of his students. It was a violation of their understanding of “martial virtue,” or perhaps the Confucian glamor that Ip Man often exuded to his younger students.

A number of Ip Man followers left him. This proved to be both a professional and personal setback for the now aging master. Ip Chun relates that he had been receiving remittances from his father’s teaching fees that were sent regularly to his family members still living in Guangdong. Due to his increased financial hardship these payments ceased after 1955.

At the same time a number of Ip Man’s senior students left to start their own schools. These helped to establish a strong base of Wing Chun instruction in Hong Kong, but they also competed directly with the master’s own efforts.

After living with his teacher for almost five years Chu Shong Tin also left during this same period. Having found work as a secretary with another labor group (the Association of Taxi Drivers in Hong Kong) he moved to Wan Chi in Central. However he continued to study with Ip Man and made the trip back to Kowloon as his work schedule permitted.

During 1957 and 1958 Chu, like others, took advantage of the growing popularity of Wing Chun and began to teach. At first this took the form of private lessons at the homes of individual students. Later a new job (this one with the Association of Textile Workers of Hong Kong) allowed him to move back to Kowloon. Much like Ip Man in 1951, he taught classes on the rooftop of the association headquarters until he found a more permanent location for a school.

Ip Man’s sons, along with a number of other individuals who had been trapped in Guangdong when the border was unexpectedly closed in 1949, were able to return to Hong Kong in 1962. This period seems to correspond with something of a renaissance in Ip Man’s career and he once again took a more active interest in his teaching. In 1963 Chu Shong Tin began his study of the Bart Jarm Dao (“Eight Cutting Blades” or Butterfly Swords). Indeed, he was one of the few individuals to learn the complete form from Ip Man. His study of the subject took more than a year, and he was introduced to the final section of the form in 1965.

In 1964 Chu established his first school in a permanent space at the Four Five Six Building of Nathan Road in Kowloon. Three years later (in 1967) he moved about a block away to Cheung Sha Wan Road where he both lived and conducted classes for many years.

Chu was deeply affected by the death of his teacher from throat cancer in 1972. By this point the future of Wing Chun seemed secure. Ip Man had personally trained a generation of instructors who were running schools across Hong Kong (and eventually in a number of other cities) while his student Bruce Lee went on to ensure the lasting fame of the art throughout the global system.  This was also the start of a new era for Chu whose son Horace was born in 1974.

Chu remained busy teaching Wing Chun at his own school and with the VTAA throughout the following decade. Later he began to commit the fruits of his deep research into the principals of Siu Lim Tao to paper. In 1993 he published The Book of Wing Chun (in three volumes). This Chinese language project examined the unarmed forms, the wooden dummy and both the pole and knife sets. The text was accompanied by line drawings. The author of the 2013 edition’s preface states that while Chu was happy with the content of these volumes, he felt that they failed to achieve their full potential as they never received sufficient promotion.

He also took other steps to document his understanding of the Wing Chun system in other ways. In 2002 he released a DVD titled “Chu Shong Tin Wing Chun.”

The next decade of Chu’s life was not without incident. He was involved with a number of projects as Ip Man’s growing stature in popular culture increased the profile of Wing Chun. At the same time a 2011 article in the South China Morning Post revealed that Chu had been diagnosed with late stage cancer earlier in the decade and had been told to make his final preparations.

Luckily he managed to beat the odds and went on to enjoy another decade of teaching and exploration of his beloved art. His family attributed his long and relatively healthy art to his dedication to Wing Chun.