Wong Cheung

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Sifu Wong Cheung aka Kut Shuin, was born in Pun Yu county, Kwangtung province. He was learning his family's Sam Chin "Iron Wire" form at the age of 8. At age 10, he developed small pox. He was moved 50 miles away by his family to the village of a doctor, Leung Shu Cha, who cured his small pox and also taught him the "108 plum-blossom dummy" and the "nine-armed grinder dummy". At the age of 14, Sigung Wong went to Canton with his uncle to work in an orchard. While there, he learned Dragon Pa Kwa from Fu Man, the brother of Fu Cheng Sung of Iron Palm fame. In 1920, at the age of 19, Sigung Wong went to Hong Kong where he worked as a gardener for a European family. His co-worker was Fung Ping-Wai, a former monk who had returned to worldly life. Fung was a grandstudent of the founder of the Siu Lam Black Tiger style and agreed to teach Wong Cheung. This association lasted 3 years. Subsequently, Grandmaster Wong studied Chi Kung under Cheung Loy and Lee Kow. He learned the 18 classical weapons, among others, under Pun Fei San. In 1928, he set up his own martial arts school, the Wong Cheung Gymnasium, in Hong Kong. After the war, he moved across the harbor to Kowloon peninsula.

Wong Cheung was a small man with extremely well-conditioned hands who emphasized stealth and deception over raw power. He was extremely skilled with the staff, and he and an acquaintaince once fought off a large number of dockworkers with this weapon.^{[citation needed]} He left his own unique imprint on his system, integrating hard and soft schools and techniques while maintaining the flavor of the originals. The system is so diverse that no single individual was ever able to learn the entire system, although a great number of forms and training methods are still practiced by a few students and grandstudents. Wong Cheung, as was typical of the time, did not award rank or belts. Rather, the traditional junior/senior method was used in which seniority is determined by the date a student began studying the style.

[edit] Source

Most of what is written in this article also appeared in the magazine Real Kung Fu, July 1976, Volume 1 Number 11 (Comray Publications and Enterprises Company, LTD. - Hong Kong) in an article entitled Black Tiger Style & Its Unique Nine-Armed Grinder Dummy Techniques.