Jeong Yim

Jeong Yim — more precisely Cheung Yim, later Cheung Hung-sing (張炎, 張鴻勝; 1824–1893) — was the most famous disciple of Chan Heung and the founder of the Fut San Hung Sing branch of Choy Li Fut. The four main branches of the system today all descend either from the Chan family school at King Mui or from Cheung Hung-sing’s Hung Sing Kwoon in Fut San (Foshan).

An orphan in the Li Gar school

Hung Sing histories agree that Cheung Yim lost his parents young. An uncle placed him, at about seven or eight, with the Li Gar teacher Li Yau San. When the uncle could no longer care for him, Li Yau San’s senior student Chan Heung — who had recently returned from completing his own training — took the boy in as a handyman at King Mui.

The famous account states that Cheung Yim memorized Chan Heung’s lessons while working and practiced them secretly at night. When Chan Heung discovered him, the boy’s skill persuaded the teacher to continue instructing him privately. This story is part of oral tradition; the archive records it as such.

Fut Gar under the Green Grass Monk

In 1841 a fight with fellow students forced Cheung Yim out of King Mui. Chan Heung sent him to find the monk Ching Cho (青草和尚), a fugitive living near Pak Pai Mountain in Guangxi. The monk recognized authentic Shaolin-derived movement in the boy’s demonstration and trained him for roughly eight years in the Fut Gar (Buddhist family) system, Chinese medicine, and — the monk being an adherent of the Hung Mun movement — the politics of the coming anti-Qing rising.

In 1849 the training ended. The monk gave his student the name Hung-sing (鴻勝/洪勝, “Hung Victory”), and directed him to Fut San.

The Hung Sing Kwoon in Fut San

Cheung Hung-sing opened his school in Fut San in 1851. Its purpose, in the Hung Sing accounts, was to train fighters for the Taiping-era revolutionary movement, and its curriculum reflected that purpose: fighting combinations, combat drilling, and a smaller formal repertoire than the King Mui branch.

The school closed under Qing pressure after 1864. Cheung Hung-sing spent roughly three years in Hong Kong — the period in which, according to both branch histories, he and Chan Heung exchanged material and the Fut Gar additions entered the parent system. In 1867 he reopened in Fut San under the modified spelling 鴻勝舘, which persists as the branch’s name.

Death and the documentary record

Two rival death accounts circulate: a legend in which he dies of wounds at thirty-three, and the Fut San elders’ record that he died of illness in 1893 at about sixty-nine. The second account is the one consistent with documented teaching in the 1880s, and the archive treats it as the better supported. The larger lesson of his biography is documentary: because his school was a revolutionary organization, written records were dangerous, and its history survived orally until the mid-twentieth century.