Siu Nim Tau

Quick Facts

About the kata

Siu Nim Tau is the first of Wing Chun's three empty-hand forms and, per the English Wikipedia, the most important: practised for life, with all other forms and techniques resting on it. The practitioner holds the yee jee kim yeung ma stance; the legs and torso never move, only the arms work. The form teaches balance, body structure, and holding the centreline. Kwokwingchun.com and West Coast Wing Chun both split the form, in the Yip Man lineage, into three parts totalling 108 movements. The first is practised slowly; repeating tan sau, fook sau, and wu sau builds strength by alternating tension and release, and West Coast Wing Chun singles out its Sam Pai Fut section, the threefold bow to Buddha. The second teaches switching strength on and off, half soft and half hard. The third watches the correct position of the basic techniques — pak sau, gan sau, huen sau, bong sau — and ends with the chain punches lin wan kuen. Yip Ching, per kwokwingchun.com, compared Siu Nim Tau to the alphabet's 26 letters: whoever cannot pronounce each one will never speak English well.

The kata in different styles

Meaning of the name

The characters 小念頭 (Jyutping siu2 nim6 tau4) are rendered by the English Wikipedia as "small idea at the beginning". Per kwokwingchun.com, Yip Man explained the name by saying that in practice, thoughts of money, work, hatred, or love should fall to a minimum, or vanish entirely. West Coast Wing Chun adds a second reading: the form carries the basic ideas of the whole art. Per Wikipedia, Chu Shong-tin asked Yip Man the name's meaning and got only the advice to keep practising; once he had practised long enough to find new understanding in it, Yip Man began calling him Siu Nim Tau Wong, the king of Siu Nim Tau.

Creator and history

According to the English Wikipedia, where Wing Chun comes from is not known for certain: the art was passed down orally and its development was accompanied by secrecy. Wikipedia distinguishes at least eight lineages, each with its own origin story. The most widespread system of forms has three empty-hand forms, Siu Nim Tau, Chum Kiu, and Biu Jee, a form on the wooden dummy, and two weapon forms, the long pole and a pair of knives. West Coast Wing Chun attributes the forms to the founder Ng Mui; Wikipedia places the story of Ng Mui and Yim Wing-chun among the legends. Kwokwingchun.com states that Siu Nim Tau draws on movements of the crane and snake styles, and that in the Yip Man lineage it was rearranged by him and his predecessors in Foshan and later in Hong Kong. According to Wikipedia, Yuen Kay-shan arranged the open sets he had learned from Fok Bo-chuen into three forms: Siu Lien Tau, Chum Kiu, and Biu Jee. In 1972, a few weeks before his death, Yip Man performed the form on camera.

Differences between styles

Per the English Wikipedia, Siu Nim Tau differs markedly between branches, though many movements are similar. In the Yip Man lineage, the first part is practised by tensing and releasing the arms to build strength for hand techniques; in the Moy Yat lineage, without muscular tension, slowly and meditatively. Some branches take the form's symmetrical stance as a basic fighting stance, others only as training. The Nanyang branch Ban Chung Cho Ga has a single long form, Siu Lim Tao, and Snake Wing Chun a single empty-hand form, Siu Lin Tao, which Wikipedia explicitly distinguishes from Siu Nim Tau. Per kwokwingchun.com, the snake element shows more in Yuen Kay-shan's Wing Chun than in the Yip Man lineage.

Bunkai – applications

Wikibooks reads the form not as a fight against an imagined opponent, but as a manual of concepts and basic movements. For some sections it still gives uses: a double gum sau to the sides, then a backward strike behind the waist, can free a grip around the waist from behind; tan sau covers frontal strikes from mid-ribs to the crown; bong sau relieves pressure from too strong an attack — the practitioner turns, and the arm shifts into tan sau, deflecting the strike away from the body. The doubled moves are, per the same source, a stylisation; in a fight one hand covers, the other attacks.

Techniques in the kata