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Hung Gar, Hung Kuen, or Hung Gar Kuen is a southern Chinese martial art associated with the Chinese folk hero Wong Fei Hung, who was a master of Hung Gar.

History

According to legend, Hung Gar was named after Hung Hei-Gun, who learned martial arts from Jee Sin, a Chan (Zen) master at the Southern Shaolin Temple. Jee Sin was also the master of four other students, namely Choy Gau Lee, Mok Da Si, Lau Sam-Ngan and Li Yao San. These five martial artists later became the founders of the five major family styles of Southern Chinese martial arts: Hung Gar, Choy Gar, Mok Gar, and Li Gar.

The temple where they trained had become a refuge for opponents of the Qing Dynasty, who used it as a base for their activities, and was soon destroyed by Qing forces. Hung, a tea merchant by trade, eventually left his home in Fujian for Guangdong, bringing the art with him.

Because the history of the Chinese martial arts was historically transmitted orally rather than by text, much of the early history of Hung Gar will probably never be either clarified or corroborated by written documentation.

The character "hung" was used in the reign name of the Emperor Hong Wu who overthrew the Mongol Yuan Dynasty to establish the Han Chinese Ming Dynasty. Opponents of the Manchu Qing Dynasty made frequent use of the character in their imagery.

Hung Hei-Gun is itself an assumed name intended to honor that first Ming Emperor. Anti-Qing rebels named the most far reaching of the secret societies they formed the "Hung Mun".

The Hung Mun claimed to be founded by survivors of the destruction of the Shaolin Temple, and the martial arts its members practiced came to be called "Hung Gar" and "Hung Kuen."

Techniques

The hallmarks of Hung Gar are deep low stances, notably its "sei ping ma" horse stance, and strong hand techniques, notably the bridge hand and the versatile tiger claw.

The student traditionally spent anywhere from some months to three years in stance training, which would often consist of sitting in horse stance for between half an hour to several hours at one time, before learning any forms. Each form then might take a year or so to learn, with weapons learned last. However, in modernity, this mode of instruction has been deemed economically unfeasible and impractical for students, who have other concerns beyond practicing kung fu.

Hung Gar is sometimes mis-characterized as solely external (that is, reliant on brute physical force rather than the cultivation of qi) even though the student advances progressively towards an internal focus.

Forms

Wong Fei Hung is visibly the most famous Hung Ga practitioner of modern times. As such his branch/lineage has received the most attention and as such recorded in various documents.

The Original Hung Ga curriculum that Wong Fei-Hung learned from his father comprised the sets :

- Single Bow Fist

- Double Bow Fist

- Tiger Taming Fist

- Tiger Fist

- Black Tiger Fist

- Mother & Son Butterfly Swords

- Fifth Brother Eight Trigram Pole

Wong distilled his father's empty-hand material along with the material he learned from other masters into the "pillars" of Hung Ga, four empty-hand routines that constitute the core of the Wong Fei-Hung lineage:

- Taming the Tigre

- Tiger Crane Form

- Five Animal Fist

- Iron wire fist

References

_{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hung_Gar}

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