Wuzuquan (Five Ancestors Boxing)
五祖拳A southern Chinese style from Fujian composed of five sources. Its Sanzhan form is the same as Okinawan Sanchin — the same characters, the same principle.
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About Wuzuquan (Five Ancestors Boxing)
Wuzuquan, the fist of the five ancestors, is a southern Chinese style from Quanzhou in Fujian province. It was assembled in the nineteenth century by Cai Yuming, known in Hokkien pronunciation as Chua Giok Beng. The name does not point to five people in one lineage but to five sources from which the style is composed, and therein lies its peculiarity: it is a deliberate composition, not the gradual growth of one school. From Bodhidharma, in Chinese Damo, it took the frame of the body and the stretching; from Luohan boxing the work of the hands; from the Taizu style, associated with the founder of the Song dynasty, the firm stance; from monkey boxing the mobility and footwork; and from White Crane the breathing and the way power is released. Fighting is done at short range. The stance is low and seated, the arms work close to the body, the strikes are short and delivered with both open and closed hand. Training includes conditioning of the trunk and arms, which is called iron body. The central form is Sanzhan, three battles, an exercise of tension and controlled breathing that appears in Okinawan karate under the Japanese reading Sanchin — the same characters and the same principle, which is one of the clearest surviving traces of karate's Chinese origin. Wuzuquan is still strong in Fujian, in Taiwan and above all in the Chinese communities of Southeast Asia, that is in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines, where emigrants from Fujian carried it.
Similar styles
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