Very interested to hear from all White Crane players.
Got a friend who does the Wing Chun system with only 1 form (All 3 Wing Chun forms rolled into 1) and he believes Wing Chun is the Canton version of Eng Choon White Crane.
Both Wing Chun & Eng Choon means "Always Spring". Seen his form and appears very White Crane.
Wing Chun or Ving Tsun is spoken in the Cantonese dialect. Eng Choon is spoken in the Fukien dialect. They are similar in the written form. There is a place call Eng Choon near FooChow.
Wing Chun is the kung fu style is what Leung Ting's and company are doing. Eng Choon White Crane is another style popular in SE Asia.
Are these 2 connected in any way ? That is what I am interested to find out. There is a website www.fujianbaihe.com with a form call 8 hands. This is a Eng Choon White Crane form. To me it looks very Wing Chun.
Yong Chun is a county in Fu Jian ( a province). Yong Chun in also the name of the capital of the county ( a town about the size of Salisbury ).
This is exactly the same pronunciation as all the westernised Wing Chun systems. In Yong Chun they practice white crane. ( I think almose exclusively ). I will be going back to Yong Chun later this year so if you have any specific questions you want me to look in to please send me an email ( martin@allmydates.com ) - www.fujianbaihe.com is my web site.
I would be most interested who your teachers are and where you club is, then I can see the crane you are doing. Even better I would be interested to see an avi of one of your forms and then I would know more about what you are doing. If you are with YMMA or kungfu-taichi whilst they are both crane they are not crane from Yong Chun - I have yet to find anyone teaching Crane from Yong Chun county or town else I get in contact and visit them.
The crane I have seen from all over Fu Jian is quite different. However, I have often heard that crane is indirect and evasive, This is not the impression that I have from Yong Chun crane, but then nearly all the work there is limb conditioning and forms.
The connection between crane and Wing Chun will not be direct. Like the connection between Okinawan Karate and Fu Jian crane which is also a complex issue which many people have tried to solve. It would appear to me that Wing Chun is a rarefied form of crane with some of the crane principles taken to fuller extension and others discarded. e.g. foot positioning and weight distribution.
Then in order to look for true connections between the systems you have to know both systems very well. Tell me the man who even just knows crane very well - and if he is in Europe I would love to go and study with him her!!!
The Yong Chun White Crane seems to sit quite in the middle of many systems in terms of style and does not seem to specialise in a particular discipline ( e.g. touch sensitivity as in Wing Chun, or energy generation as in other cranes ) which would indicate to me that it is a good parent source for other systems. However I may well be wrong on this. - I will be back in China next week and will try to get a fuller understanding of the extent of the system. Also I will working with a few of the local schools to get a more broad representation of the system. Hopefully I will get a load of footage of different interpretations from the town and would be happy to post them if you get in contact and let me have your addresses.
Another similarity between Crane and Wing Chun is that it is all in the principles. i.e. the forms may reveal and help you extract and practice the principles, but at the end it is the principles you are trying to master, not the forms. That is why you can study Crane, get some of the principles and then go and develop an okinawan karate style. Of course the question of what your level of understanding is at the time at which you go and develop your system is vital, but then if you take a system like Euichi Ryu you can be sure that Kanie ( founder ) had a better understanding of crane when died than when he put the system together even though he may not have studied with any more crane teachers.
One thing you can be sure about with Crane is that over the next 10 years ( and this has already started ) it will become a much larger system in the West as organisations begin to cash in on the interest this area generates as it sits accross many of the systems, but works with some concepts which are in some ways simpler and in some ways more complex than other styles. Five ancestors will also suffer the same effect. That is why at the end Crane players are really talking about San Jan and how they do it rather than much else. It is partly because this system is filled with much contradiction , historical intrigue and influence that it is such an interesting system to study - most of the questions like the one on this thread are tantalisingly unknowable - but well worth asking!!!
- My feeling , and that of some other crane players I know in asia, is that Wing Chun is yong Chun White Crane developed in a special direction.
DuDunna, what style of white crane? Fukien is much more like Japanese karate than Tibetan which is very graceful, indirect and evasive. Also, you said your instructor teaches Southern Shaolin, what style of shaolin? To my knowledge there is no such thing as just plain southern shaolin. It is very possible wing chung and fukien white crane are derivied from the same style. Crane was developed by a nun in the Fukien Shaolin Temple and Wing Chung was created by a nun fleeing from the temple after its destruction. Neither of these styles were simply thought up, they are both modifications of a preexisting style that did not fully suit the needs of the nuns (or a girl named Wing Chung if you go by the legends) and so they created their own style. Since they both come directly or inderectly from the Fukien Temple, they could very well share an ancestor, or one may have even been created from the other. My suggestion is to read as many sources on both styles as you can, then you will be totally cunfused as to the origins of any style and get so fed up, you wont mind not knowing the answer.
• In my part of the world, S E Asia, there is this general White Crane family tree chart that we use. In this chart, you will find Ng Mui Shi Tai (a nun) listed as a 4th generation descendant of Fang Chi Niang – the founder of White Crane. Yim Wing Chun is recorded as a student of Ng Mui Shi Tai. Yim subsequently brought her kung Fu to Fushan and there it proliferated among the Cantonese. Her Kung Fu was renamed “Wing Chun” in her honor. • If you are associating Fukien White Crane and Yip Man’s stream of Wing Chun, I can understand your difficulties in spotting likeness. However, if you were to examine the other streams of Wing Chun – Pan Nam’s Wing Chun for instance, the resemblance is more obvious. Take a look at Pang Nam Wing Chun’s Bil Jee. • In Fukien White Crane, there is a form called “Ba Fen Chun Fa” or roughly translated to mean “8-parts Inch Method”. This form is intended to train one into achieving short range (inch) power – a quality that is also aspired in Wing Chun’s training. You can find a write-up of this form in “Martial World 2002 Aug #8 issue”. This is a magazine published in mainland China. It this common “inch power” aspiration a mere coincidence? • If you look into Southern Kung Fu systems, only Wing chun and White Crane share the vertical punching method albeit in White Crane, the vertical punch is done with the phoenix eye. • Like I described when I started this thread, there is another stream of Wing Chun that is found primarily in SE Asia wherein there is only one long form instead of 3. This form appears to be all the 3 forms done in one go. I am a White Crane teacher and I got to tell you that this particular form reminds me of White Crane.
FooChow Crane - you sound like a most knowledgable man in these matters.
This from the Leung Ting website about Mg Mui:
'.... and also an expert of the “Weng Chun Bak Hok Pai” style of kungfu, or the “White Crane” kungfu style of the Weng Chun Precinct in Fujian Province. Due to political problems, Ng Mui, together with a few other Shaolin members, were hunted down by the ' etc etc.
So she was an expert in White Crane from Yong Chun and she then made a system which was passed on to a girl who became called Yong Chun (although the first character of the name does have an additional yan added to it). How much of a connection do you want!!
If you wonder for Stylistic variance, there is plenty of that in-side fujian Crane itself. In fact - if you wonder for stylistic varience, just take in a few different Wing Chun clubs in london where in my experience, even something as syalistically identifying as stance has many interpretations.
Personally I find it harder to believe that either systems were founded by women than that one is the father of the other.
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