Chan Heung

Chan Heung (1806–1875) was a Chinese martial artist from King Mui village, Guangdong, who founded Choy Li Fut in 1836. The system’s name is a memorial to its sources: Choy Ah Fook of the Northern Shaolin line, Li Yau San of the Li Gar method, and Fut — the Buddha Family boxing of his uncle, the monk Chan Yuan Wu. Chan Heung combined the three into one system, and the combination became one of the most widely transmitted southern Chinese martial arts in the world.[1]

Teachers

The founder’s biography is a record of three schools. His uncle Chan Yuan Wu gave him the Fut Gar foundation. Choy Ah Fook, a monk of the Northern Shaolin tradition, taught him the northern method during years of training away from home. Li Yau San added the Li Gar system. When Chan Heung set up his school in King Mui, he declined to name the art after himself; the name Choy Li Fut credits the teachers, and that naming convention is itself documentary evidence of how the system understood its own authority.[1][2]

The system

The art Chan Heung assembled is defined by long-range, whipping power generated from the waist, full arsenal of classical weapons, and a curriculum that grew to include the ten animal forms, Chin Na joint locking, Shuai Jiao wrestling, and San Shou. The historical materials of the Golden Eagle schools — which taught the art in Alabama from 1997 — advertised formal training in 36 weapons, and the archive’s Nine Dragon Trident study documents one of the system’s specialty weapons.

Lineage to the archive

The Golden Eagle schools taught Choy Li Fut within the Plum Blossom International Federation under Grandmaster Doc-Fai Wong, a successor in the King Mui branch that descends from the founder’s direct line. The federation’s records are the connective tissue between Chan Heung’s 1836 school and the archive’s founding in 1997.[2]

[1] Chan Heung, English Wikipedia — biography and the three-teacher derivation.

[2] Plum Blossom International Federation, organizational history of the King Mui lineage.