Jeong Yim

Jeong Yim — more precisely Cheung Yim, childhood name Cheung Ah-yim, later given the name Cheung Hung-sing (張炎, 張鴻勝; 1824–1893) — founded the Fut San Hung Sing Kwoon in 1851 and gave Choy Li Fut its largest and most widely traveled branch. Chinese sources routinely call him one of the founders of the system (蔡李佛拳創始人之一); the Chan family school at King Mui counts Chan Heung alone. This archive keeps both statements, labeled.

A boy from Dongling village

Cheung Yim was born in 1824 in Dongling village, Shuangshui township, Xinhui (雙水鄉東凌村， 舊稱下村)， and lost his parents young. Relatives raised him. The municipal biographies now record this birthplace; an early article by the kwoon’s own historian Chen Yilin gave “Shizui” (石嘴)， and older Western summaries repeat it. The newer record is followed here, with the older one noted.

The Li Gar school

As a small child he was placed with the Li family fist teacher Li Yau San (李友山)， one of the three teachers whose arts the new system would unite. There he received the foundation of the Li method — the second character of Choy Li Fut. Li Yau San was about sixty when, some years later, he accepted Chan Heung; the boy Cheung entered the same school a generation’s turn earlier in his own life.

The handyman at Chencun

At twelve (1836) his uncle Cheung Kwan (張昆) took him to Chan Heung’s school at Chencun in Shunde. The local custom was explicit: 武技不傳外姓 — the skill was not taught to boys of outside surnames. Chan Heung could not enroll him, so the boy stayed on as a servant, boiling tea, sweeping the hall, and watching every drill. He practiced what he had memorized in private. When Chan Heung discovered how much the handyman had absorbed, he was persuaded: he taught the boy alone at night, took him back to Xinhui when his own teaching returned there, enrolled him formally, and instructed him for about five years. The “student who learned by watching” is one of the most retold stories in the school; the archive records it as lineage tradition.

Three teachers — and a shared founding

Cheung Yim’s formation ran through all three strands of the future system. First Li Yau San and the Li family fist. Then Chan Heung, for roughly five years from age twelve. Then — from age seventeen — the Green Grass Monk (青草和尚) on Pak Pai Mountain in Guangxi, for about eight years of the monk’s inner-and-outer Baqua method (內外八卦拳)， dit-da medicine, and the politics of the anti-Qing movement.

When that training ended, Cheung Yim returned to Xinhui and visited his second teacher — and, by the Hung Sing accounts, transmitted the Buddhist family boxing to Chan Heung. The two men then organized the Choy, Li, and Fut materials together, and the synthesis that had been Chan Heung’s became, in this telling, their shared work. Hence the Chinese sources that name Cheung Yim 蔡李佛拳創始人之一， a co-founder of the system. The King Mui tradition, centered on the founder’s own village, names Chan Heung alone. The two branches’ accounts are stated here side by side, per the editorial method: neither is erased.

The Green Grass Monk and a gift of characters

The Hung Sing lineage records identify the Green Grass Monk as a junior fellow-disciple of Zhishan (至善禪師)， head of the Fujian Shaolin line — the same teacher from whom Li Yau San had learned at Puming Temple — and connect him to the “Five Classics monks” of the Shaolin legend cycle. Secular historians dispute whether such a monk existed; the school itself never doubted it, and kept his shrine in its halls down to the twentieth century. The archive labels this material as lineage tradition.

Two things, however, are documentary: the name and the verse. Before parting, the monk gave his student the characters 鴻勝. The sound 鴻 (hung4) is the sound of 洪， the character of 洪武 — the reign title of the Ming founder — and the name therefore carried the hope of an anti-Qing restoration in plain hearing of the Qing state. The school’s ritual-stance verse embeds the slogan 反清復明 one character at a time, as the fifth character of each line:

大鵬展翼反天手，魁星踢斗清名留。 拱拜五湖復四海，日月拱照明世流。

The names of two of its core sets, the level fist (平拳) and the long fist (長拳)， were read the same way — 太平 and 長安， peace and enduring order.

The Hung Sing Kwoon, 1851

Cheung Hung-sing opened his school in Fut San in 1851, the first year of the Taiping rising. Its purpose, in the Hung Sing accounts, was to train fighters, and its curriculum reflected that purpose: fighting combinations and combat drilling ahead of form collection. He joined the Taiping cause and taught in its armies, and in that service created the saber method called 攔門寨， “blocking the gate” — a work with a second life thirty years after his death, noted below.

Exile, and the reopening of 1867

On the fifteenth day of the sixth lunar month of 1864, Nanjing fell, and Zeng Guofan’s forces hunted the Taiping’s surviving teachers. Cheung Hung-sing left by night boat for Jingmei, the Chan village, where he found Chan Heung — the exile recorded on the founder’s own page. The two went to Hong Kong together. Chan Heung later sailed on to San Francisco; Cheung stayed in Hong Kong and taught there. In 1867 he returned to Fut San and reopened the school under the altered spelling 鴻勝舘， the character change that let the school exist in the open and that names the branch ever since.

“Three things not taught”

Cheung Hung-sing’s admission rule — the 三不教， three things not taught — fixed the school’s social character for a century:

1. Officials were not taught (官吏不教).
2. Local tyrants and bullies were not taught (土豪惡霸不教).
3. Gangsters and hooligans were not taught (流氓地痞不教).

The school taught instead the working people of the Pearl River delta — craftsmen, dock workers, farmers, small traders. This is the root of the Hung Sing branch’s later reputation as the “red school” (紅色武館) and of the saying that Choy Li Fut was a “red martial art”: a body of teachers bound to the laboring classes, and therefore, repeatedly, to revolution.

The method: 1,080 points

The core of the Hung Sing curriculum was the inner-and-outer Baqua method (內外八卦拳) inherited from the Green Grass Monk — by the school’s own count, some 1,080 distinct points, where an ordinary boxing set runs to little more than a hundred. It contains the ten animal forms (dragon, snake, tiger, leopard, crane, lion, elephant, horse, monkey, and the biao 彪) — the curriculum study preserved at Ten Animal Forms — and eleven families of hand method: 包、抄、偷、繞、截、升、沉、潛、伏、進、退. The design purpose, the school records, was 力長氣長 — strength and breath that last — for men who might have to charge in battle.

His successor Chan Sheng later condensed this inheritance into three great sets for ordinary teaching: the long fist (長拳) of more than 360 points, the level fist (平拳) of more than 280, and the striking-and-seizing set (扣打) of more than 180. The parent system’s shared curriculum is described at Choy Li Fut.

Medicine first: “Before gong fu, dit da”

From the Green Grass Monk, Cheung Hung-sing had learned not only boxing but bone-setting and trauma medicine, and he made medicine a condition of the school’s training: 未學功夫，先學跌打 — before learning gong fu, learn dit-da. The tradition is still administratively alive: in 2013 the Foshan municipal government listed the school’s therapeutic massage lineage (蔡李佛鴻勝功夫推拿) on its intangible cultural heritage register.

The red school in modern China

The admission rule put the school on the side of the century’s upheavals, and its members show up, named, in every one of them:

• Taiping era — Cheung Hung-sing himself, teaching in the armies.
• 1911 — disciples Li Su (李蘇) and Qian Weifang (錢維方) joined the Tongmenghui and raised the militia that recovered Foshan for the revolution.
• The Great Revolution — Liang Guihua (梁桂華) and Qian Weifang were among the first four members of the Communist Party in Foshan; two of the city’s first four communists came from this school. Wu Qin (吳勤) organized the Nanpu peasant corps.
• 1937 — Chen Yilin (陳藝林)， a third-generation disciple and the kwoon’s guoshu director, demonstrated the school’s saber work at the Chinese Guoshu Association’s conference in Shanghai. The gathered schools selected eight of its methods for national promotion as the 抗日大刀法， the anti-Japanese saber method — derived from the 攔門寨 saber work Cheung Hung-sing had created in the Taiping armies.
• The war years — Wu Qin led more than two hundred Hung Sing disciples in a volunteer resistance corps.

The peak, and the diaspora

Around 1921, under Chan Sheng, the school reached its peak: thirteen branch kwoons in Foshan (some counts say twenty), more than 3,000 registered pupils, and over 10,000 members across the system — by the municipal historians’ judgment, the largest martial arts school in China at the time.

It was also the first Chinese martial arts organization to establish itself abroad at scale. Branch kwoons stood in Hong Kong from the late Qing (under Chan Sheng, Yuen Hai, and Lei Can). After the revolution of 1927 failed, members carried the school through Southeast Asia and the Pacific. In the early 1930s Liu Bin (劉彬), a disciple of Yuen Hai (阮懈), founded a Hung Sing Kwoon in San Francisco — the oldest Hung Sing kwoon in North America. Foshan’s official accounts date the founding to 1931; other records say 1939. By the 1960s and 1970s the branch stood in Canada, Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Indonesia, South Africa, and Vietnam. Foshan’s official estimate today counts heirs in more than fifty countries, with over ten million people trained in Hung Sing lines.

Four branches, one system

The system’s four great branches all trace to the founding generation:

• 洪聖 (Hong Sheng) — the King Mui line of Chan Heung, the founder’s own school, later also known by the names 雄勝 and 永勝.
• 鴻勝 (Hung Sheng) — Cheung Hung-sing’s Fut San line: the largest, most widespread, and most internationally established branch, and the one this page documents.
• 北勝 (Buk Sing) — the Guangzhou line of Tam Sam (譚三)， a third-generation Hung Sing line through Lei Can (雷燦)， recognized on the national heritage register in 2020.
• 雄勝 (Hung Sheng, Jiangmen) — the Jiangmen line of Chen Changmao (陳長毛).

The Hung Sing branch’s preponderance follows from what its founder built: a mass base among working people, and a diaspora network planted a century before martial arts went global.

Death on the river road

In 1893, the nineteenth year of Guangxu, Cheung Hung-sing attended a wedding banquet at Chencun and took the river journey home. He fell asleep at the bow, caught a chill, and worsened; his disciple Chan Sheng (陳盛) escorted him back to his home district, where he died, aged sixty-nine. He was buried on Jiangjun Hill (將軍山) in Shuangshui — the general’s hill, in the village where he had been born.

At the sites today

Two sites in Foshan carry the branch’s physical record. The Ancestral Kwoon (鴻勝祖館) at Yipang Street 15, set up by Chan Sheng in the Guangxu era, is the oldest surviving private martial arts school building in the city, protected as a municipal heritage site since October 2006. The Foshan Hung Sing Memorial Hall (佛山鴻勝紀念館) occupies the Taishang Temple (太上廟) at Xiang’an Street 15 — a temple first built in 1663, used as a branch kwoon in the late Qing and early Republic, renovated and opened as a museum in 2001; its roughly 360 square meters hold photographs, weapons including an anti-Japanese saber, and statues of the school’s ancestors. In 2014, for the 190th anniversary of Cheung Yim’s birth, the city unveiled his statue and held a world gathering of the branch.

Cautions

• The Green Grass Monk is a lineage-record figure: the school kept his shrine and its own history records him, but secular historians dispute his existence. The archive labels him as 師門傳承， the school’s tradition, not established secular history.
• Co-founder status is a two-traditions question: Hung Sing sources name Cheung Yim a co-founder of Choy Li Fut; King Mui sources name Chan Heung alone. Both statements are kept, labeled by branch.
• The founding date of the Fut San school is 1851 (first year of Xianfeng) in all official records; an 1839 claim circulates online and is not supported.
• The birthplace is now officially Dongling village, Shuangshui, Xinhui; the earlier “Shizui” (石嘴) from Chen Yilin’s article is superseded but noted.
• The death year is 1893 (Guangxu 19) by multiple sources; an 1899 variant exists. The legend of a death at thirty-three belongs to tradition and is inconsistent with documented teaching in the 1880s.
• The roster of his leading nine disciples varies slightly between sources — Li En (李恩) and Li Su (李蘇) appear in different lists; both names are kept.

The record continues

The Hung Sing branch’s institutional record — its museum, its protected ancestral hall, its heritage listings — is the densest documentation of any single lineage in this archive. The parent system is described at Choy Li Fut, and the story of how these schools entered the archive’s own record at the history of the archive.