Th3 HiStOrY oF wInG cHuN

The history of Wing Chun, has historically been passed from teacher to student verbally rather than through documentation, making it difficult to confirm or clarify the differing accounts of Wing Chun's creation. Some have sought to apply the methods of higher criticism to the oral histories of Wing Chun and other Chinese martial arts.Others have attempted to discern the origins of Wing Chun by determining the specific purpose of its techniques.

Wing Chun starts to appear in independent third-party documentation during the era of the Wing Chun master Leung Jan, making the subsequent history of Wing Chun and its divergence into branches more amenable to documentary verification.

The oral history of the Yip Man branch of Wing Chun dates its creation to the reign of the Emperor Kangxi (1662–1722). After escaping the destruction of the Fujian Shaolin Monastery by Qing forces, the Abbess Ng Mui fled to the distant Daliang mountains (大涼山) on the border between Yunnan and Sichuan. One day, she came upon a fight between a snake and a crane (or other animal). She took the lessons she learned from observing the fight between the two animals and combined them with her own knowledge of Shaolin kung fu to create a new style. Ng Mui often bought her bean curd at the tofu shop of Yim Yee (嚴二). Yim Yee had a daughter named Yim Wing-Chun (嚴詠春) whom a local warlord was trying to force into marriage. Ng Mui taught her new fighting style to Wing-Chun, who used it to fend off the warlord once and for all. Wing-Chun eventually married a man she loved, Leung Bok-Chao (梁博儔), to whom she taught the fighting techniques that Ng Mui had passed on to her. Her husband then name the style as Wing Chun.. Then, both of them passed the new style on to others.