5 Great Kung Fu Masters From Chinese History

5 Great Kung Fu Masters From Chinese History

Precision technique, incredible acrobatics, and deadly consequences. China has a long history of martial arts masters practicing a rich variety of styles that have brought honor to the Chinese people and justice to society. My fist hungers for justice.

In this article, I want to go through five great kung fu masters from Chinese history. And no, in case you're wondering, Bruce Lee is not one of them.

Although Lee was instrumental in popularizing kung fu in the West and possessed great abilities, his martial arts were a mixture of Wing Chun that he learned from his teacher Yip Man or Ye Wen in Mandarin, plus influences from Western boxing, jujitsu, and even fencing. It's not that we don't want to show Bruce Lee the respect he deserves, but in this discussion, we want to go deeper into masters of traditional Chinese arts that have a long history and established lineage. This is five great kung fu masters from Chinese history.

1. Wang Lang: The Creator of Praying Mantis Style

First up, we have Wang Lang. He was believed to be born in either the Song Dynasty or the late Ming Dynasty.

And yeah, I know those two periods are several hundred years apart. But this is a Chinese legend, all right? Stay with us. The Song Dynasty legend about Wang Lang is that he was one of 18 masters invited to improve the arts of Shaolin, and all of this knowledge was recorded in a kung fu manual called Mi Shou or Secret Hands.

This book was then lost until the Qianlong era of the Qing Dynasty hundreds of years later. There's always a secret kung fu manual in these stories. In the Ming Dynasty, the legend about Wang Lang is that he lost a kung fu match to another master and was resting under a tree when he saw a mantis fighting a cicada.

He then took several praying mantises—or is it mantai? Praying mantai? Is that the plural? Since owning a Lexus, it's amazing the number of Lexai you see around. Because that's the plural. Whatever.

He took these praying mantai back to the Shaolin Temple and observed their movements and created a whole style based on the moves and tactics of the mantis. From the basic hand position to the way it hooks, draws in, and traps its prey. The mantis style has gone on to be one of the most iconic styles of Chinese kung fu portrayed in various media.

After Wang Lang created the mantis style, he went on to win many fights using the style, and a legend was born.

2. Dong Haichuan: The Enigmatic Founder of Baguazhang


5 Great Kung Fu Masters From Chinese History

Let's move on to our second great kung fu master from Chinese history, and that is Dong Haichuan. Dong Haichuan is credited as the creator of Baguazhang, or the Eight Trigrams Palm, one of the three main Taoist internal martial arts.

He lived in the 1800s, and the crazy thing about Dong Haichuan is that no one really knows where he learned his kung fu. He just turned up in Beijing one day with this amazing style that no one had ever seen before. He told some of his students that he learned it from a Taoist in the mountains.

And he may not have taught everything he knew either. His students were all accomplished martial artists already, and they came to Dong to learn his advanced style. What he taught each student was slightly different depending on what the student had learned before.

So it seems that Dong's knowledge was pretty extensive, even tailoring the techniques to each student's body type and previous knowledge. Baguazhang is a kung fu style that primarily uses palm techniques and utilizes circle walking as its main training method. Since it moves in a circle, the practitioner of Baguazhang is constantly changing direction and can easily get behind their opponent.

Power generated from the art moves in a coiling motion in its attack and defense. Let's now move on to a true Chinese folk hero.

3. Huo Yuanjia: A Symbol of Chinese Strength

Huo Yuanjia is the main character in the Jet Li movie Fearless and a real Chinese folk hero for his supposed fights against Caucasian strongmen.

He was born near Tianjin in 1868. He was the middle of three brothers and unfortunately had a weak body and suffered from some childhood illnesses, including jaundice. His father was a farmer and a part-time bodyguard who made some extra cash, escorting merchants to Manchuria and back.

But due to Yuanjia's weak body, he was not taught the family style of Kung Fu, which was called Mi Zong Yi or Lost Track Art. Instead, his father arranged a tutor to teach him academic subjects and morality, and as payment, he taught the tutor Kung Fu. Well, you may have already guessed what happened.

5 Great Kung Fu Masters From Chinese History

Huo Yuanjia learned his family system of Kung Fu secretly from the tutor instead. Then one day in 1890, a martial artist from out of town came and challenged Huo's family. His older brother fought the man and actually lost, so Huo Yuanjia stepped up to the challenge.

To the surprise of his father, he won. This proved he could excel at Kung Fu despite his weak body, and his father took him as a student. It seems he joined his father in the bodyguarding trade and started making a name for himself defeating bandits.

In 1902, after moving to Tianjin, he supposedly accepted a challenge that a Russian wrestler had put out to anyone willing to fight him, calling the Chinese men sick men of Asia or Dongya Bingfu. Huo Yuanjia won the fight and the hearts and minds of his fellow countrymen. I'm telling you, we Chinese are not sick men of Asia or Dongya Bingfu! This insult is often portrayed as the ultimate disrespect towards the Chinese in many Kung Fu stories coming from many enemies like arrogant Westerners or the evil Japanese.

However, whether he actually fought the Russian is not confirmed. Some accounts say that upon hearing it was Huo Yuanjia that answered the challenge, because of Huo's reputation, the Russian actually backed out and issued an apology in the newspaper. His most famous fight, which also may never have happened, was against a boxer named Hercules O'Brien.

Some say he was Irish, some say English, some say American. Sounds Irish, right? O'Brien. But anyway, he was another arrogant brutish Westerner.

That's all you need to know. In the Jet Li movie, Huo is portrayed as an honourable man competing under unfair circumstances. They don't even give him a fair translation.

O'Brien proves to be a formidable opponent, but Huo wins and actually saves O'Brien's life, causing him to accept Huo's win with honour, at least in the movie. Like the Russian wrestler, it is not known if this fight actually happened or not, and some sources say that O'Brien fled the country before the big day. But Huo Yuanjia has gone down in Chinese folklore as one of the most formidable martial artists in Chinese history.

4. Yang Luchan: The Invincible Spreader of Tai Chi


5 Great Kung Fu Masters From Chinese History

Up next, we have Yang Luchan. Yang Luchan is the creator of the Yang style Tai Chi or Tai Chi Quan, which is the most popular style of Tai Chi in the world today. Oh, what was that? You thought Tai Chi was just something practiced by old ladies to improve health? It's a ferocious martial art, and although practiced in slow motion to develop technique and power, it does actually have a solid martial application and produced many martial arts masters over the centuries.

Yang Luchan was born in 1799 to a farming family in Hebei province. When he was young, he learned long fist styles of Kung Fu, and he used to do odd jobs at a Chinese pharmacy owned by a man with the surname Chen. One day he saw this man use a Kung Fu style that he'd never seen before to defeat some thieves.

He wanted to learn it, but at this time the Chen family did not teach their Tai Chi to outsiders. So the owner of the family referred Yang to the Chen village or Chen Jiao Gou. There are a few different versions of this story, but when he got to the Chen village, it seems that Yang wanted to learn from the sixth-generation Chen style master Chen Changxin.

At first, Chen either wouldn't accept him as a student or did teach him some things, but he was not part of the inner circle. Then Yang discovered Chen teaching students secretly at night. He would peer through a crack in the wall to watch and learn the secrets.

Later on, Yang was ordered to spar with Chen's other students, and none of them could defeat him. Upon seeing this, Chen accepted him as a formal disciple and taught him everything. Yang was supposedly in the village for somewhere up to 30 years, at which point he had mastered the art that Chen Changxin was teaching.

There is some controversy about whether what Yang learned from Chen Changxin was the same as the Chen style Tai Chi that was being commonly taught in the village, since the styles look quite different, and there are a variety of different theories on this. We won't get into it here. But anyway, after becoming a master, Yang left the village and returned home, where he was challenged by multiple people and won every duel.

Thus, he became known as Yang Wudi, or Yang the Invincible. He later ended up in Beijing, where he taught Yang style Tai Chi and became the first person to spread Tai Chi outside of the Chen village. He ended up teaching Tai Chi in the imperial household to Prince Duan and his guards.

Although he was often challenged by other masters, Yang remained humble and polite. One day, one of Prince Duan's guards challenged Yang to a contest. They were to sit on two chairs and fight with their fists.

Once the contest started, Duan's guard suddenly started sweating all over and his chair started creaking as if it was going to collapse. Yang, however, remained serene and composed. When Yang finally got up, he modestly said that this boxing master's skill was great, it's just that his chair was not as stable as Yang's.

5. Huang Feihong: The Legendary Master of Hung Ga


5 Great Kung Fu Masters From Chinese History

Let's now move on to our final great Kung Fu master in this discussion, and that is… Huang Feihong.

Huang Feihong is more commonly known in the West by the Cantonese pronunciation of his name, Wong Fei-hung. He was born in 1847 in Guangdong province in southern China. He learned Hongjiaquan, which in Cantonese is pronounced Hung Ga, which is a tiger-crane combination style from his father, who was part of a group of masters known as the Ten Tigers of Canton.

It sounds like something out of Kung Fu Panda, doesn't it? But no, this was real. The two would travel around selling medicine and performing martial arts in the streets. Feihong would often get challenged by other martial artists and became famous for never losing a fight.

One of his signature techniques was the no-shadow kick, or Wu Ying Jiao. Huang Feihong has been featured in over 100 films, with one actor, Kwan Tak-hing, playing him in 77 movies in the 1950s and 60s, all the way up through the late 70s. But the most famous portrayal of Huang Feihong, or Wong Fei-hung, has to be Jet Li in the Once Upon a Time in China series of movies in the 90s, directed by Tsui Hark, with the iconic opening sequence and theme tune.

This song was an old Chinese folk song called On the General's Orders, Jiang Jun Ling. It was featured in the earliest Huang Feihong movies, all the way up to the most recent films. The title was changed to Nan Er Dang Zi Qiang, or A Man Should Better Himself, by the time of the Jet Li movies in the 90s.

The song was again featured in the movie Rise of a Legend in 2014, with Eddie Peng playing Huang Feihong. Now although Huang Feihong has amassed a cult following, not that much is actually known about the man. Even what was for some time considered the only photo of him in existence was later found to be a photo of one of his sons.

In 2005, another alleged photo emerged that was supposedly taken by one of his students. It shows Huang in his senior years, and this one is thought to actually be him.

That concludes our exploration of five great Kung Fu masters from Chinese history.

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