Lau Gar
劉家拳A southern Chinese family style, one of the five traditional southern lines. Its documented history starts in Britain in 1961, where it is now the most practised kung fu.
Quick Facts
ChinaCharacter & Origin
Training
Who It Suits
Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
Catalogs & Databases for Lau Gar
About Lau Gar
Lau Gar kuen, "Lau family fist", is counted among the five southern Chinese family styles that tradition names as the roots of southern kung fu: Lau, Hung, Choy, Li and Mok. So much for the tradition. It is not documented — the story of a monk from Shaolin who at the Kuei Ling temple in Guangxi taught a tiger hunter named Lau Sam Ngan, nicknamed "Three Eyes" after a deep scar in the middle of his forehead, is transmitted orally, and no written source survives from the period in which it is supposed to have happened. Neither a founder nor a year of origin is therefore recorded here. The documented part of the style's history is British and begins in 1961, when Jeremy Yau, grandson of Yau Luk Sau, arrived in the United Kingdom. He did not teach publicly until 1973, and then regardless of a student's background — until that point southern kung fu in Britain had passed almost entirely within the Chinese community. The British Kung Fu Association was founded the same year, with him as chief instructor. That step shaped the style as it stands today more than its Chinese roots did. Lau Gar became the most widely practised kung fu in Britain, and its centre of gravity shifted into competition under semi-contact and light-contact rules. Technically it is a southern style with firm low stances, work at short and medium range, and an emphasis on hand techniques whose power comes from the hips and legs. Weapons belong to the syllabus, but the weight of the practice stays on unarmed fighting.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.