Chan Heung

Chan Heung (1806–1875), courtesy name Ziying (字典英) and style name Da Ting (號達亭), was a Chinese martial artist from King Mui village, Guangdong, who founded Choy Li Fut in 1836. The system’s name is a memorial to its three sources: Choy Fook of the Northern Shaolin line, Li Yau San of the Li Gar method, and Fut — the Buddha Family boxing of Chan Yuen Wu (陳遠護), a senior clansman of the village. In his own preface to the Choy Li Fut Art of Fighting (《蔡李佛技擊學》), Chan Heung recorded the derivation himself: “Choy is Master Choy Fook; Li is Master Li Yau San; Fut is Chan Yuen Wu — all of the Buddha school, blended with Chan practice.” The combination became one of the most widely transmitted southern Chinese martial arts in the world.[1][2]

Three teachers, in order

The founder’s biography is a record of three schools, entered in sequence. At about seven he began the Fut Gar foundation under Chan Yuen Wu — a lay Shaolin disciple of the Fut Gar tradition whose line ran through Dinghu Mountain’s Qingyun temple, and a clansman of senior generation rather than a near uncle. At seventeen, on Chan Yuen Wu’s recommendation, he entered the school of Li Yau San and studied the Li family method for four years. Li Yau San then directed him onward to the monk Choy Fook on Mount Luofu, under whom he trained for close to ten years — the Shaolin boxing of the Fujian line together with the bone-setting and herbal medicine that Choy Fook carried out of that tradition.[1][3]

When Chan Heung set up his school in King Mui, he declined to name the art after himself; the name Choy Li Fut credits the teachers, and that naming convention is itself documentary evidence of how the system understood its own authority.[1]

The system

The art Chan Heung assembled is defined by long-range, whipping power generated from the waist, a full arsenal of classical weapons, and a curriculum that grew to include the ten animal forms, Chin Na joint locking, Shuai Jiao wrestling, and San Shou. The catalog recognized by the national heritage listing counts 193 sets in all: 39 barehand sets, 54 two-person sets, 64 weapon sets (14 of them staff), 18 dummy-method sets, 9 lion-dance sets, and 9 internal-power sets — alongside named classifications of 30 hand methods, 28 palm methods, 29 bridge methods, 35 fist methods, 14 body methods, 16 leg methods, and 18 stances.[4]

The weapons he devised in combat number more than ten; the most famous is the Nine Dragon Trident (九龍叉), a steel reworking of Qi Jiguang’s bamboo wolf-brush, devised around 1838–1839 for the water war against firearms — hooking muskets, breaking blades, fighting in formation on a crowded deck. He also established distinguishing marks of the school: five vocal sounds — 噫, 哈, 嘻, 呵, 呼 — by which members of the system recognized one another by ear, and a gate rule recorded in the family line: “Before learning the art, learn courtesy; before practicing the fist, cultivate virtue.” The medical practice he learned from Choy Fook became the Yong Sheng dispensary in Xinhui and the “Sheng”-branded dispensaries his disciples carried across the province; that dispensary tradition is today listed as municipal intangible heritage.[1][3]

The spread: 44 schools and the historical record

Between 1842 and 1845 he dispatched more than a hundred disciples to open 44 Hung Sheng (洪聖) schools across Guangdong and Guangxi — among them Chen Da-ji in Canton, Chan Tin-huan in Nanhai and Foshan, Chan Tin-bang in Dongguan, Lung Chi-choi in Xunzhou, Guangxi — with 26 more village branches in Xinhui itself. That network, and the “Sheng” pharmacies attached to it, is the structural reason Choy Li Fut became the largest boxing school of Lingnan.[2][3]

The biography is tied to the large events of the century. In 1839 he trained the water militia at Lin Zexu’s viceroy office during the opium suppression. From 1856 he served the Taiping commander Shi Dakai as advisor and instructor; after the movement fell he was wanted by the Qing state and traveled through Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, and the Americas. Overseas accounts record two famous challenges: in San Francisco he answered the bully Kilisi on behalf of the Chinese community — felling him twice under a signed life-and-death agreement, then treating his injuries — and in Hong Kong, about 1872, he met a Russian strongman under Western boxing rules, ending the match with a ribs-targeting strike. The archive records both accounts as the county gazetteer preserves them, in the two-source convention described in Editorial Method.[2][3]

The Xiangongdan rite and the 220th anniversary

The founder’s birthday — the tenth day of the seventh lunar month — is kept as an annual observance, the Xiangongdan (享公誕). It is arranged by the Chan family and their descendants, with the town and village authorities as co-organizers, and it runs as a fixed sequence of rites: the welcome offering (迎祭禮), the procession (行祭禮), the full obeisance (拜祭禮), the literary rite (文祭禮), the collective rite (眾祭禮), and the martial rite (武祭禮).[6]

The 220th anniversary was held on 22 August 2026 at King Mui. Some 1,300 practitioners came from more than 60 schools and associations at home and abroad. The day opened with lions and gongs in the village, the assembled disciple orders entered the founder’s dwelling (陳享故居) and the Hung Sheng ancestral hall (洪聖始祖館) to perform the obeisance, and delegations then walked the Chushenhua lane (出神入化巷) and the Choy Li Fut International Inheritance Centre. What they showed on stage was the full range the school claims: empty-hand and weapon sets, dragon and lion dances, and the tall-pole acrobatic traditions of caiqing (采青) and panqing (盤青).[6]

Two family injunctions are recorded with it. The school’s stated purpose is “to nurture character through virtue and strengthen the body through martial practice” (以德養性，以武強身), and the family motto he left the generations is “before learning the art, learn the manners; before practising martial skill, first cultivate virtue” (未曾學藝先學禮，未曾習武先修德).[6] On his deathbed Chan Heung is said to have left his descendants the charge to carry the family learning on without break, to spread the martial tradition, and never to spare effort in promoting Choy Li Fut.[6]

The line that keeps the records is Chen Yongjian (陳永建), a fifth-generation direct descendant in the male line, described as the bearer of the Xiangongdan observance. He returned to the village in 2022 after decades abroad, and has since opened the family’s holdings to study — hand-copies of the boxing and weapon manuals, the practice songs and formulas, and the family’s bone-setting and herbal prescriptions — together with video records of the forms.[6]

The archive grades this material as reported rather than independently documented. It comes from a single municipal media release, and the events it describes are current commemorations; the founding facts it repeats are separately sourced above.[1][2][6]

Lineage to the archive

The founder’s six senior second-generation disciples carried the system outward: his sons Chan On-pak and Chan Koon-pak, first student Lung Chi-choi, Cheung Hung-sing — known as Jeong Yim — whose Fut San school became the Hung Sing branch, Chan Tin-huan in Foshan, and Chan Shun of the opera world. The King Mui main line runs from Chan Heung through his sons to Chan Yiu-chi and on to Doc-Fai Wong, whose Plum Blossom International Federation is the connective tissue between the 1836 school and the archive’s founding in 1997. In 2008 the art entered China’s national intangible heritage register (number Ⅵ-36), and in 2024 the annual 享公誕 commemoration of the founder’s birth entered the Xinhui district heritage list in turn.[4][5]

Cautions

Two famous stories circulate at legend grade and are kept out of the record above. The tale of Chan Heung killing a jaguar in the Americas is contested by his own family tradition, which locates a tiger episode in Guodou Mountain near Xinhui; Xinhui literary-materials scholarship (Xie Weijian, Xinhui Wenshi Ziliao no. 63) treats the native version as the better-supported one. Claims that the Taiping organizer Feng Yunshan was his student lack support in official history. The archive records both as legend, per Editorial Method.

[1] Chan Heung, preface to Choy Li Fut Art of Fighting (《蔡李佛技擊學》自序), Xinhui Choy Li Fut Starter Association edition — founder’s own account of the three teachers and the naming.

[2] Xinhui County Gazetteer, persons section (《新會縣志》人物篇) — dates, official service, and the overseas accounts; Xinhui Library D/K29/D4.

[3] Jingmei Chan Clan Genealogy, notable persons register (《京梅陳氏宗譜》歷代名人志) — Chan Yuen Wu’s seniority, the school network, and family records; Xinhui Library K820.9/C477.3-30.

[4] State Council second national intangible cultural heritage list, 7 June 2008, item Ⅵ-36; national-heritage curricula figures for the 193-set system.

[5] Chan Heung, English Wikipedia — biography and the three-teacher derivation (secondary; see sameAs).

[6] Jiangmen Overseas Chinese Media Center, 24 August 2026 — the 220th anniversary of 22 August 2026, the six-stage Xiangongdan sequence, the village sites visited, Chen Yongjian’s holdings, and the family motto. A municipal media release: reported, not independently documented.