I was watching a Bruce Lee movie recently when suddenly a question popped out of my head; who taught Bruce Lee martial arts? Bruce Lee is a legend, his teacher must be someone worth blowing our mind for. So I began to do my own little fun research at home through the internet and found IP MAN.
Ip Man was the man who taught Bruce Lee a type of Chinese martial arts called Wing Chun. The name Wing Chun sounded like a female name to me, so I read further. As my reading suggested, it really was a female name!
Wing Chun was a woman who lived in a chaotic era in China during that time. The Emperor of China wanted to expand his power throughout the enormous mainland, so he destroyed all Shaolin temples ran by the monks who taughts various kinds of kungfu and wushu to the public. These monks of Shaolin temples were indeed influential, but the Emperor was powerful. The clash of power between the temples and the Emperor had caused tremendous bloodshed and many people died.
It was during this time when a warlord of a little village saw Wing Chun - the pretty lady and wanted to marry her. Wing Chun turned down the proposal and the man was angry. He challenged Wing Chun to beat him in a combat and if she won, he wouldn't pursue his intention to marry Wing Chun anymore.
Wing Chun was not a weak lady. She went to a monk-in-hid and asked her to teach him martial arts so that she could beat the warlord. At that time, that form of martial art was yet to have a name. Even with a lose grasp of the martial arts, Wing Chun managed to beat the warlord and married another man. Wing Chun then taught the martial art to her husband, who named it after her and made it popular. Throughout the decades, the martial art was then taught to Ip Man, and Ip Man taught it to Bruce Lee, whom we saw in many classical Hong Kong movies.
This story however, was not recorded as truth. Nobody can really tell the origin of Wing Chun, because no one ever took the trouble to document anything. But, in every story of Wing Chun's origin, there is a woman named 'Wing Chun', so most probably it is true that Wing Chun was created by a woman. I also caught a scene in the movie 'Ip Man' where a gangster said to Ip Man, 'I really want to see how a man can fight like a woman'.
Today, Wing Chun was one of the most popular martial art form in United States of America and in many parts of the world. In the hands of Ip Man and Bruce Lee, the form of martial art was flourished and taught to many people of different ethnicities. Ip Man and Bruce Lee may have died, but the Wing Chun legacy was continued by Sammo Hung, who is also in show business, making Chinese martial arts to be even more well-known.
What amazed me is that, Bruce Lee becomes a legend by literally fighting like a woman. Now who said women are weak. That's what I would call 'woman's power'.
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