THE WING CHUN CONNECTION : How Yip Man’s art adds impact to kung fu cinema.

This year’s Mandarin Films summer dinner saw the company announced its latest martial arts epic, ‘Yip Man’. The film tells the story of a legendary master of the Wing Chun style. This unique form of close range combat has played a remarkably large role in the history of kung fu cinema. Present at the dinner were Donnie Yen, who plays Yip Man in the new film, and veteran martial arts movie helmer Sammo Hung, who is choreographing the action. I was also delighted to encounter another old friend, Wing Chun maestro Yip Chun, son of the legendary fighter. I’ve known Master Yip (pictured above) for almost 20 years, and was happy to see him in fairly good health, at a gathering to celebrate his late father’s great legacy.

Though it found its greatest fame in Hong Kong, the Wing Chun style hails from the southern Chinese city of Fatshan, the same place that gave the world Hung Kuen legend Wong Fei-hung. In researching his ‘Yip Man’ role, Donnie Yen visited the Wing Chun Museum in Fatshan. (He also dropped by the Wong Fei Hung one. ‘I was thinking about you!’, he told me later.) According to legend, the Wing Chun style was developed by Ng Mui, a Buddhist nun who escaped the fabled burning of the Shaolin Temple. She taught her art to a young girl, Yim Wing Chun (Beautiful Springtime) who had been coerced into fighting a duel with a prospective suitor. Using Ng Mui’s close range fighting style, Wing Chun won the day, and her name has graced the art ever since. Though there’s (as yet) no major movie depicting the events above, the eponymous ‘Wing Chun’ starred Michelle Yeoh as a slightly older version of the heroine, and Cheng Pei Pei as her teacher Ng Mui.

The ‘Wong Fei-hung’ of Wing Chun is the great master Leung Jaan, who brought the art the fame it came to enjoy in Fatshan. An equally skilled fighter and teacher, Leung’s story inspired the aforementioned Sammo Hung to make two of his greatest martial arts movies. Prodigal Son stars Hung’s protégé, Yuen Biao, and depicts the young Leung Jaan’s transition from ‘bai gaa jai’ (a rich wastrel) to a bona fide kung fu master. Sammo’s Warriors Two starred Golden Harvest stalwart Leung Gar-yan as an older version of the character, and depicts the events leading to his untimely demise. (Hung actually shot the latter film first, but, viewed in this order, the two movies show the ‘birth’ and death of Leung Jaan.)

Leung also provided the inspiration for a lesser kung fu flick, Descendant of Wing Chun. This film was to have starred real-life Wing Chun master William Cheung as Leung Jaan, but Cheung was replaced by actor Melvin Wong after only a week of shooting. The film is today perhaps most memorable because clips from it turn up in the Chow Yun-fat vehicle Bulletproof Monk!

Wong Wah-shun, the character played in Warriors Two by the wonderfully named Casanova Wong, was in real life the teacher of the young Yip Man. Yip was just a boy, and ‘Moneychanger’ Wah (as he was known) was 70. Regardless, Wong Wah-shun passed on Leung Jaan’s art to his last (and most influential) disciple. As an adult, Yip Man led a very eventful life in Fatshan, some of the events of which will be depicted, albeit in a dramatized fashion, in the new film. He was already in late middle age when he relocated to Hong Kong, took on students and established the name of Wing Chun far and wide. In the then Crown Colony, the most famous of Yip’s followers was the late Wong Shun-leung, who demonstrated Wing Chun’s effectiveness in countless challenge matches. However, the disciple who would put the system on the world martial arts map was a little guy called Bruce Lee…

Lee was already well-known as a child actor in black-and-white Cantonese melodramas when he became a follower of Yip Man. Though he would later renounce all organized systems of combat in favour of his own non-style, Jeet Kune Do, Bruce Lee received his basic training in Wing Chun, and it was his fame that would help popularize the art internationally.

A number of earlier Yip Man films have been mooted. Donnie Yen and Stephen Chiau were both attached to a project in which (if I remember correctly) Yen would play Bruce Lee and a heavily made up Chiau his teacher. In order to start shooting at an auspicious hour, the production actually shot for a day, but was later abandoned.

In recent years, avant garde Hong Kong film-maker Wong Kar-wai has been developing his own Yip Man project, with Sammo Hung’s former Wing Chun adviser, Guy Lai, as consultant. It would be fascinating to see what kind of take this master film-maker has on the character, to be played by Wong regular Tony Leung Chiu-wai.

With these projects yet to materialize, Wing Chun was, until recently, confined to the small screen, with Yuen Biao reprising his Leung Jaan role in two separate TV series, Real Kung Fu (for TVB) and Wing Chun (for Universe). With ‘Yip Man’, the art makes a welcome return to the big screen.