Fu Jow Pai (Tiger Claw)
虎爪派A southern Chinese style built on seizing and tearing with the hand held as a tiger's claw. In 1957 it became one of the first Chinese arts publicly taught in the United States.
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About Fu Jow Pai (Tiger Claw)
Fu Jow Pai, the tiger claw style, is a southern Chinese art built on a single image: the tiger that sinks into its prey and tears. The hand holds the shape of a claw with the fingers tensed and is used to seize, jerk and rip — not to punch, as is usual elsewhere. The targets are the soft places: neck, wrist, elbow, muscle attachments and face. The style is deliberately aggressive and does not reckon on waiting; whoever trains it presses forward and takes the opponent's distance. The stances are lower than in northern Chinese styles and the arms are led closer to the body. Tradition traces the line to the monk Wong Fook Do of the Hoy Hong temple and links it to the so-called black tiger school; the documented line begins in the twentieth century. Its spread outside China has a specific date — Wong Bil Hong opened the first public school in New York's Chinatown in 1957, at a time when Chinese arts were not commonly taught to outsiders. Fu Jow Pai is therefore among the first Chinese styles publicly taught in the United States, and it remains stronger there than in China. Training includes conditioning of the fingers and grip — squeezing jars, clawing sand and work with weights — because without finger strength the claw remains only a shape of the hand.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.