Hu Yuen-chou

Hu Yuen-chou (胡云綽, 1906–1997) holds a position in the archive that no other figure occupies: four systems met in one life. A Choy Li Fut grandmaster trained in both great branches of the art, a closed-door student of Yang Chengfu, the founder of a sword school, and a practicing physician for six decades, he is the point where the archive’s traditions converge. The Golden Eagle line descends from his teaching through his first disciple, Doc-Fai Wong.

Fut San beginnings: Chan Sheng and the Hung Sing line

Hu was born in Foshan — Fut San in Cantonese — of Nanhai ancestry, in a city whose martial arts culture stood alongside Cangzhou in the south. At about age nine he entered the school of Chan Sheng (陳盛), known by his nickname Ngau-Sing (牛盛, “Ox Sheng”), head of the Fut San Hung Sing line that Jeong Yim had founded. His first Choy Li Fut, in other words, came from the combat branch of the system.

The letter of introduction

When Hu left Foshan for Guangzhou around age sixteen, Chan Sheng wrote him a letter of introduction to Chan Yiu-chi, grandson of the founder and head of the King Mui family teaching in the city. On the strength of that letter Chan Yiu-chi accepted him. The detail matters: Hu’s Choy Li Fut thus runs through both great branches of the system — Hung Sing first, then King Mui — and the bridge between the two branches was a piece of paper carried by a sixteen-year-old.

The Four Kings of Heaven

Hu spent more than twenty years under Chan Yiu-chi and finished first among the four most advanced pupils of the Guangzhou school, a group nicknamed the Four Kings of Heaven (四大天王): Hu Yuen-chou, Xia Bik-chi (夏碧池), Guo Tianyang (郭天揚), and Jian Yingjie (簡英傑). English-language lineage accounts add studies of Northern Shaolin, Hung Kuen, Hop Gar, and other systems alongside the family art.

A physician of two medicines

Hu graduated from the Guangzhou Red Cross Western Medicine Academy — the first Western medical school in Lingnan, of its first entering class — and practiced Chinese trauma medicine (dit da 跌打) all his life. In Hong Kong he led the Tung Wah Hospital’s Chinese medicine trauma clinic for decades. Martial artists of his era who were also physicians were rare; one trained in both Western and Chinese medicine was rarer still. His fellow schools called him Mr. Gam Chou (甘草先生, “Mr. Licorice”) because licorice harmonizes a hundred herbs: he was the man the Guangzhou martial world asked to mediate its disputes.

Yang Tai Chi, from Chen Wei-Ming to the closed door

In 1929 the Tai Chi master Chen Wei-Ming (陳微明) came to Canton to teach on behalf of his own teacher, Yang Chengfu. Hu studied with him for nearly three years, then was accepted as a closed-door student of Yang Chengfu (楊澄甫) himself from 1932 to 1934. The biographical record of Yang Chengfu is preserved in this archive at its original address; Hu’s connection means the Yang style in the Golden Eagle line runs through Yang Chengfu’s own close instruction.

Wudang sword, and a school of his own

In 1927, through martial-arts friends, Hu met General Li Jinglin (李景林), the era’s foremost Wudang swordsman, and became — by the inside record of the Lingnan Wudang sword lineage — the most important of Li’s southern students. After Hu moved to Hong Kong in 1949 he met Guo Qifeng (郭岐鳳), Li Jinglin’s sword brother, who had also arrived. In the 1950s Hu, Li Ying-ang (李英昂), and Wang Dongcai (王棟材) studied under Guo together and were nicknamed the Three Swordsmen of Hong Kong (香江三劍俠). Fusing the sword work of both of his teachers with thirty years of his own practice, Hu founded a distinct school, Lingnan Wudang sword (嶺南武當劍), known for precision and for his early advocacy of free sword sparring. Through Doc-Fai Wong’s federation the school has spread to more than thirty-seven countries.

1932: instructor to the Nineteenth Route Army

During the Songhu resistance of 1932, Hu served as one of four southern martial arts instructors to the Nineteenth Route Army (十九路軍), alongside Huang Xiaoxia (黃嘯俠), Lu Weichang (盧煒昌) of the Chin Woo Athletic Association, and Lin Yintang (林蔭堂), teaching saber method and close combat to soldiers headed for the Shanghai front.

The challenge match of 1945–1946

A visiting White Russian boxer — Alen-ko (阿靈哥, also written 阿倫哥) — set up a ring challenge in Fut San. Local fighters had lost to him; the city’s martial reputation was at stake. Hu accepted on behalf of the entire martial arts community of the city and won by technical knockout in the second round. The match made his name across Foshan and Guangzhou. The archive dates it 1945–1946: encyclopedic accounts give 1945, while the official Foshan martial history places it during the 1946 revival of the Hung Sing association, and both readings are kept.

Rebuilding the Hung Sing association

That revival was its own work. In the spring of 1946 former members of the Hung Sing Kwoon, led by Liu Deng (劉登), moved to re-establish the Hung Sing Athletic Association, and Hu — by then a director of the Guangzhou Guoshu Association — came to Foshan and offered to handle the arrangements. He sat on the eleven-member preparatory committee and presided over the association’s founding meeting in November 1946, and presided again over its tournament the next year. His first teacher’s school, nearly lost in the war, was reopened in part by his hand. When the Foshan Hung Sing Memorial Hall opened in 2001, his materials were given a dedicated display.

Hong Kong: physician first, teacher always

Hu moved to Hong Kong in 1949 and spent the rest of his working life there — the trauma clinic at Tung Wah Hospital, the South China Athletic Association where he served as team physician to the football section and taught Choy Li Fut and Tai Chi classes, and the Chinese Martial Arts Association of Hong Kong, for which he led Tai Chi instructor training in the 1980s. He was a founding member of the Chan Heung Memorial Association (蔡李佛始祖陳享公紀念總會) and its first president from 1972 to 1977. In 1989 he began the first of three American teaching tours; by the mid-1990s his students’ schools counted members on six continents.

Taipei, 1997

Before the Hong Kong handover Hu settled in Taiwan. He died in Taipei on 26 August 1997 at age 91 — his obituary in the island’s newspapers has not yet been located, and the archive marks the search as unfinished. That same year, in Alabama, Golden Eagle Martial Arts Centers was founded under the lineage he had given Doc-Fai Wong. The bridge between the traditions crossed the Pacific in the year his life ended.

Cautions

• The challenge match is dated 1945 by encyclopedic sources and 1946 by the official Foshan martial history; the archive keeps both readings.
• The boxer’s name appears as Alen-ko (阿靈哥) and A-lun-ko (阿倫哥); they are the same person, and the rendering varies.
• “The only southern disciple of Li Jinglin” is the Lingnan Wudang sword lineage’s own claim; the archive states it as the lineage’s record, not an independent fact.
• The honorary doctorate he received while teaching in America (1995) rests on federation records alone.
• The names of the other Three Swordsmen and of the second, third, and fourth Kings of Heaven vary slightly between accounts; the encyclopedic renderings are used here.

The record continues

His Choy Li Fut line — Hung Sing beginnings, King Mui completion — is told on the Chan Yiu-chi and Chan Koon-pak pages; his Yang Tai Chi on the Yang Chengfu page preserved at its original address; and his teaching’s American future on the Doc-Fai Wong page. This page records the man in whom those lines met.