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Praying Mantis Kung Fu -
Tanglang Quan; For this style even more than the other styles we
recommend you also look at the Shaolin >
Kung Fu > Styles > Tanglang Quan section...
 Northern
Praying Mantis (Chinese: 螳螂拳;
pinyin: tánglángquán; literally "praying mantis fist") is
a style of Chinese martial arts, sometimes called Shandong Praying
Mantis after its province of origin. It was created by Wang
Lang and was named after the praying mantis, an insect, the
aggressiveness of which inspired the style. Shaolin records document
that Wang Lang was one of the 18 masters gathered by the Shaolin Abbot
Fu Yu (福裕)
(1203-1275), which dates him and Northern Praying Mantis to the Song
Dynasty (960-1279).
The mantis is a long and narrow
predatory insect. While heavily armoured, it is not built to withstand
forces from perpendicular directions. Consequently, its fighting style
involves the use of whip-like/circular motions to deflect direct
attacks, which it follows up with precise attacks to the opponent's
vital spots. These traits have been subsumed into the Northern Praying
Mantis style, under the rubric of "removing something" (blocking
to create a gap) and "adding something" (rapid attack).
One of the most distinctive
features of Northern Praying Mantis is the "praying mantis hook"
(螳螂勾;
pinyin: tángláng gōu): a hook made of one to three fingers
directing force in a whip-like manner. The hook may be used to divert
force (blocking) or to attack critical spots (eyes, face, accupuncture
points). These are particularly useful in combination, for example
using the force imparted from a block to power an attack. So if the
enemy punches with the right hand, a Northern Praying Mantis
practitioner might hook outwards with the left hand (shifting the body
to the left) and use the turning force to attack the enemy's neck with
a right hook. Alternately, she might divert downwards with the left
hook and rebound with the left wrist stump to jaw/nose/throat.
Northern Praying Mantis is
especially famous for its speed and continuous attacks. Another
prominent feature of the style is its complex footwork, borrowed from
Monkey Kung Fu.
(Much more about the northern
Tanglang Quan you will find in the Shaolin > Kung Fu > Styles
> Tanglang Quan section...)
Despite its name, the Southern
Praying Mantis style of Chinese martial arts is unrelated to the
Northern Praying Mantis style. Southern Praying Mantis is instead
related most closely to fellow Hakka styles such as Dragon and more
distantly to the Fujian family of styles that includes Fujian White
Crane, Five Ancestors, and Wing Chun.
Southern Praying Mantis is a
close range fighting system that places much emphasis on short power
techniques and has aspects of both the soft and internal as well as
the hard and external.
As in other southern styles,
the arms are the main weapon, with kicks usually limited to the hip
and under. Emphasis is placed on strengthening and lengthening the
arms.
When an extended arm has
strength, it allows the practitioner to move about faster since his
arms don't need to recoil or move back for more strength, like in
boxing or many other fighting systems.
Like Wing Chun and Xingyiquan
other styles created as pure fighting arts—Southern Praying Mantis
has relatively no aesthetic value, unlike its northern counterpart and
many other styles.
Southern Praying Mantis is
informed by traditional Chinese medicine, in particular the concept of
meridians, which it uses for dim mak and tui na.
The four main branches of
Southern Praying Mantis are:
- Chow Gar (周家;
Chow family)
- Chu Gar (朱家;
Chu family)
- Kwong Sai Jook Lum (江西竹林;
Jiangxi Bamboo Forest)
- Iron Ox (鐵牛)
Chow
Gar 周家
The Chow family branch traces
its art to c. 1800 to Chow Ah-Nam (周亞南),
a Hakka who as a boy left his home in Guangdong Province for medical
treatment at the Southern Shaolin Monastery in Fujian Province where,
in addition to being treated for his stomach ailment, he was trained
in the martial arts and eventually created Southern Praying Mantis.
Chu
Gar 朱家
The Chu family branch
attributes its art to Chu Fook-To, who created Southern Praying Mantis
as a fighting style for opponents of the Manchu Qing Dynasty (1644-1912)
that overthrew the Han Chinese Ming royal family (1368-1644) of which
he was a member. According to the Chu family branch, because Chu took
refuge there, the Qing destroyed the original Shaolin Monastery in
Henan, forcing Chu to flee to the Southern Shaolin Monastery in Fujian.
Kwong
Sai Jook Lum 江西竹林
The Kwong Sai Jook Lum style
traces its origins to the temple Jook Lum Gee on Mt. Longhu (龍虎山)
in Kwong Sai, where it was created in the early 19th century by one of
the monks, Som Dot. In the mid-19th century, Som Dot passed the art on
to fellow monk Lee Siem, who would visit Guangdong to the south and
teach the art to lay practitioners there. One of Lee's students from
Guangdong, Chung Yu-Chang, would return with him to Kwong Sai to
complete his training at Jook Lum Gee. C. 1900, Chung opened his first
martial arts school and traditional Chinese medicine clinic in Bao'an
County in Píngshān (坪山)
Town, which his eventual successors Wong Yook-Kong and Lum Wing-Fay
were natives of. Wong would be responsible for the preservation of
Kwong Sai Jook Lum Praying Mantis within China and Lum (also referred
to as "Lum Sang" 林生,
literally "Mister Lum," out of respect by his successors)
responsible for its dissemination without.
Iron
Ox 鐵牛
The Iron Ox branch is named
after its founder, Iron Ox Choi (Choi Dit-Ngau; 蔡鐵牛),
who fought in the Boxer Rebellion (1900).
"Hakka
Kuen"
Though the origins of Southern
Praying Mantis may be contested, what is indisputable is its
association with the Hakka people of inland eastern Guangdong. The
region that is home to Southern Praying Mantis begins in the very
heart of Hakka territory at Xingning, where Chow Gar founder Chow
Ah-Nam came from. From Xingning, the Dongjiang flows west out of the
prefecture of Meizhou through Heyuan, where Iron Ox founder Choi
Dit-Ngau came from. In the prefecture of Huizhou, the Dongjiang forms
the northern border of Huěyáng (惠陽)
County, where Kwong Sai Jook Lum master Chung Yu-Chang and Chow/Chu
Gar master Lau Shui came from. From there, the Dongjiang flows into
the Pearl River Delta at Bao'an County (present-day Shenzhen), where
Kwong Sai Jook Lum masters Wong Yook-Gong and Lum Wing-Fay came from.
These masters all belonged to the Hakka people, who kept Southern
Praying Mantis to themselves until the generation of Lau Shui and Lum
Wing-Fay.
In fact, Kwong Sai Jook Lum
tradition records that it was once nicknamed "Hakka Kuen" (literally
"Hakka fist") by the general public of the Pearl River
Delta. When Lum Wing-Fay first began teaching Southern Praying Mantis
in the United States, he did so at Hakka fraternal organizations such
the Hip Sing Tong. Lum would eventually accept students that were not
Hakka, but they still had to be Chinese (with the rumored exception of
a Caucasian taxi driver whose extraordinary kindness to Lum won the
driver some basic instruction from one of Lum's disciples). It was the
following generation of Kwong Sai Jook Lum masters who made the art
available to non-Chinese.
Lau Shui's acceptance of the
non-Hakka Ip Shui as a disciple had much to do with the kindness that
Ip and his wife showed Lau when he had fallen ill and was isolated
from any relatives by the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong. Each of
Lau's four other disciples Chu Kwong-Wha, Chu Yu-Hing, Lum Wha, and
Wong Hong-Kwong were all Hakka.
Chu Gar Southern Praying Mantis
tradition contends that the Hakka descend from loyalists of the Ming
Dynasty who fled south when it was overthrown by the Qing Dynasty.
However, according to mainstream Chinese historical scholarship, the
term "Hakka" originally referred, not to refugees fleeing
persecution by the Qing Dynasty, but to those whom the Qing Dynasty
paid to settle in underpopulated regions of southern China. Among
southern Chinese martial arts, the Chu family branch of Southern
Praying Mantis is far from alone in claiming an anti-Qing heritage;
that most do reflects the prominence of anti-Qing partisans in
southern Chinese martial arts. Both Guangdong and Fujian are provinces
that the Hakka call home, both are strongly associated with the
southern Chinese martial arts, and both saw strong and persistent
opposition to Qing rule, such as the Hakka-led Taiping Rebellion and
the Heaven and Earth Society, whose founders were from the prefecture
of Zhangzhou in Fujian Province, on its border with Guangdong.
Societies like Heaven and Earth were noteworthy for how their
membership transcended traditional Chinese social barriers like those
separating Hakka from non-Hakka. In fact, a precursor to the Heaven
and Earth Society was organized by Ti Xi, one of the Heaven and Earth
founders, in Huizhou, part of the aforementioned "heartland"
of Hakka Praying Mantis. The Heaven and Earth Society developed myths
of Shaolin origins as part of a larger anti-Qing narrative. Perhaps
Hakka opposed to the Qing Dynasty did something similar, redacting
their own migration and the southward flight of Ming loyalist refugees
into a single narrative.
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