Wing Chun History: Separating Fact from Speculation
Terence Niehoff, February 4th, 2008
How do we separate fact from speculation or story? How do we know what is really true? By looking for independently verifiable evidence of lineage. That’s the only way.
By lineage I mean showing that person A actually existed, knew Wing Chun Kuen, and taught person B, who actually existed, who in turn learned Wing Chun Kue, taught person C who really eixsted, etc. We do that in reverse — starting with the here and now and working our way backward. And you need to be able to do that with independently verifiable info.
If we do that, we can show in some cases, though not all, a proven lineage of Wing Chun Kue practitioners going back to the Leung Jan era.
We can’t prove Wing Chun Kue was on the Red Boats. We can’t prove the people in the stories of Wing Chun Kue on the Red Boats even existed. Those are only stories, legends. There is no genuine evidence that they are in fact true.
And, we certainly can’t prove anything before that point in time.
That various Wing Chun Kue lineages have similar (or dissimilar) origin stories doesn’t prove they are true. Legends are adopted and passed down without being true.
Also, without first proving lineage, it isn’t sound to use any “branch’s” technical or oral traditions for trying to deduce the history/development of Wing Chun Kue. What you are doing in that case is circular reasoning — you are ASSUMING that those traditions existed to prove they existed. In other words, if you can’t prove Branch Y existed prior to the current generation Sifu Z with independently verifiable evidence of lineage, but nevertheless assume it existed at the Red Boat era and use those assumptions to prove some divergence of technical repertoire must have occured at that time (since Branch Y has X and others don’t - another debatable point), your reasoning is unsound.
With Yip Man Wing Chun Kuen, it is clear with abundant evidence that his lineage extends back to Leung Jan (a real person, someone who has a grave, a shop, etc.). So Yip Man oral traditions and technical repetoire can be used to compare to other lineages that also have proved to have existed at the Leung Jan era (like Yuen Kay-San’s, for example). If Branch Y hasn’t yet been shown to have eixsted prior to Sifu Z — then it’s oral traditions and technical repertoire can’t seriously be considered in determining Wing Chun Kue history. (Because there is no proof of when, how, etc. it really came into existence.)
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