Weng Chun (Eternal Spring)
永春A southern Chinese art often confused with wing chun; the names sound almost identical in Cantonese, the systems differ.
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ChinaCharacter & Origin
Training
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.
About Weng Chun (Eternal Spring)
Weng chun, literally eternal spring, is a southern Chinese martial art that is easily confused with wing chun. The confusion has a linguistic cause: in Cantonese the two names sound almost the same and differ only in tone, and both schools trace their legendary origin to the same monk, Chi Sim, of the southern Shaolin temple. They are nonetheless two different systems, and masters of both traditions have agreed on that; technically weng chun is closer to hung gar than to wing chun. Its documented history begins only in the twentieth century. The key figure is Chu Chung-man, a fifth-generation practitioner born in Foshan, a friend of Yip Man, who moved to Hong Kong after 1953; there he met other masters, among them Tang Yik and Wai Yan, and their shared training place became the Dai Tak Lan poultry wholesaler. The older part of the family tree, the monk and the Shaolin temple, is not documented and this page presents it as tradition. The system rests on the principle of not opposing force but using it to break the opponent's structure. Seven basic principles, among them tai, lan, dim, kit, got, wun and lau, come out of work with the long pole; eighteen advanced principles of the bridging hands, arranged in nine pairs, follow on from them. The training tools include the wooden dummy, the long pole and the pole dummy.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.