The Twelve (Sometimes Ten) Sounds of the Southern Shaolin Iron Wire

Oily Dragon

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I've been putting this off too long, but rather than write a whole bunch, I decided to seek out a decent intro, written by someone else.

Here's an icebreaker question: Is it 10 or 12 sounds? I have made some pretty spooky sounds performing this fist set, sometimes I forget which sound goes with what function, sometimes it just works.


Best Deep Fake Ever.

 
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Oily Dragon

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Here's an icebreaker question: Is it 10 or 12 sounds?

Nobody tried answering, so...

It's both!

The Iron Wire is, basically, a one-man play dancing between Chan, 5 animal styles, 5 element styles, 12 Shaolin bridges, Neigong, Wing Chun, TCC, and a lot of older material, a lot of which is clearly Indian. "Yogic" is my word for it.
 

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I've been putting this off too long, but rather than write a whole bunch, I decided to seek out a decent intro, written by someone else.

Here's an icebreaker question: Is it 10 or 12 sounds? I have made some pretty spooky sounds performing this fist set, sometimes I forget which sound goes with what function, sometimes it just works.


Best Deep Fake Ever.


Interesting form, definitely saw the Wing Chun influence

Never heard of Shaolin Iron Wire, but it looks very Shaolin. The closet I got would be a Shaolin Luohan 13 Forms qigong I use to do, and that is not all that close
 
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Oily Dragon

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Interesting form, definitely saw the Wing Chun influence

Never heard of Shaolin Iron Wire, but it looks very Shaolin. The closet I got would be a Shaolin Luohan 13 Forms qigong I use to do, and that is not all that close
You've seen it before, it's baked into a lot of modern kung fu. This form is much older than Wing Chun's, but it also has material from Lion's Roar, Tiger Crane, Southern Dragon. The person who is best known for practicing it died in 1887, but the form lived on mainly in the two main Hung Ga lineages (in mildly different variations), with some other weird tangents out there (like alternative timeline Lokis).

It's the fourth and "final" Hung Ga Kuen form, basically the Internal form you get to after the first three External forms (Taming the Tiger in I Pattern, Tiger Crane Paired Fist, and the 5 Animal/5 Element/10 Pattern Fist).

This is the Yau Kiu of Tid Sin Kuen, 2nd, Soft Bridge, in Sei Ping Dai Ma Bo.

The sound is "Mmmmmm".

1652284192948.png
 
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Oily Dragon

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The closet I got would be a Shaolin Luohan 13 Forms qigong I use to do, and that is not all that close
The various Shaolin Neigong out there is generally more similar to early Tai Chi practice (since Tai Chi flips the whole external-internal chain to internal-external).

The "Arhat" forms like Luohan come in different flavors, for instance the 13 you learned might be some part of the 18 Luohan, which can be done separately or tied together in a slow moving form like this.


Included in these 18 here are half the very common 8 Brocades, (none of which are very strenuous, but also some of the Shaolin Yi Jin Jing, which gets a bit stretchier and harder to do (lower stances). Still, these don't represent the full set of the Muscle Changing Classic below (which includes things like tiger lunges and ox pulls, which are tough on the body).

1652287436134.png


1652287827098.png
 

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The various Shaolin Neigong out there is generally more similar to early Tai Chi practice (since Tai Chi flips the whole external-internal chain to internal-external).

The "Arhat" forms like Luohan come in different flavors, for instance the 13 you learned might be some part of the 18 Luohan, which can be done separately or tied together in a slow moving form like this.


Included in these 18 here are half the very common 8 Brocades, (none of which are very strenuous, but also some of the Shaolin Yi Jin Jing, which gets a bit stretchier and harder to do (lower stances). Still, these don't represent the full set of the Muscle Changing Classic below (which includes things like tiger lunges and ox pulls, which are tough on the body).

View attachment 28410

View attachment 28411
Muscle changing and marrow washing are both incorporated into our workout training. A large part of our warmup is muscle changing classic.
 

Wing Woo Gar

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I've been putting this off too long, but rather than write a whole bunch, I decided to seek out a decent intro, written by someone else.

Here's an icebreaker question: Is it 10 or 12 sounds? I have made some pretty spooky sounds performing this fist set, sometimes I forget which sound goes with what function, sometimes it just works.


Best Deep Fake Ever.

Been waiting on this like Xmas. Thank you. Next piece please.
 
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Oily Dragon

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Muscle changing and marrow washing are both incorporated into our workout training. A large part of our warmup is muscle changing classic.

There is a lot of overlap between different legit Qigong sets and Shaolin Iron Body training. The 7 Golden Gates, 8 Brocades, the Tai chi 13 postures, the Zhan Zhuang and the Yijin have had a long time to grow and interact.

And these sets we train today, even Iron Wire, are compilations of really old, mostly lost family forms like "Five Phoenix Combined Shouting Tortoise Resting Method", which today can only be found in older Chinese manuals that have never been translated into English. I'd buy them to check them out, but I don't want to memorize a new credit card number...
 

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There is a lot of overlap between different legit Qigong sets and Shaolin Iron Body training. The 7 Golden Gates, 8 Brocades, the Tai chi 13 postures, the Zhan Zhuang and the Yijin have had a long time to grow and interact.

And these sets we train today, even Iron Wire, are compilations of really old, mostly lost family forms like "Five Phoenix Combined Shouting Tortoise Resting Method", which today can only be found in older Chinese manuals that have never been translated into English. I'd buy them to check them out, but I don't want to memorize a new credit card number...
Your depth of historical knowledge is amazing. By chance could you happen to know who taught Tong Long Pai in Canton in the 1930s? The answer would be valuable to me. Also, any connections to the Mok Gar around that time and place. I know that Lam Sai Wing‘s widow was named Mok Kwai Lan.
 

Wing Woo Gar

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There is a lot of overlap between different legit Qigong sets and Shaolin Iron Body training. The 7 Golden Gates, 8 Brocades, the Tai chi 13 postures, the Zhan Zhuang and the Yijin have had a long time to grow and interact.

And these sets we train today, even Iron Wire, are compilations of really old, mostly lost family forms like "Five Phoenix Combined Shouting Tortoise Resting Method", which today can only be found in older Chinese manuals that have never been translated into English. I'd buy them to check them out, but I don't want to memorize a new credit card number...
Thank you! That is fascinating. I appreciate these kind of replies so much, they are the main reason I come here.
 
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Oily Dragon

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Your depth of historical knowledge is amazing. By chance could you happen to know who taught Tong Long Pai in Canton in the 1930s? The answer would be valuable to me. Also, any connections to the Mok Gar around that time and place. I know that Lam Sai Wing‘s widow was named Mok Kwai Lan.
Mok Gwai Lan was Wong Fei Hung's widow, not Lam Sai Wing's. But that's where Mok Ga influenced modern Hung Ga Kuen. Off the top of my head, Mok Ga added a couple weapons and helped Fei Hung refine his knowledge of Crane styles, etc as he developed his classwork.

Thong Loong Pai around 1930 would have been most associated with Chen Kiu and his disciple Hsung Khan Seong (pic below), but not in Canton. They ran a school in Calcutta, India's Chinatown for a few decades before shutting down in 2010, but it's hard to know if kung fu training was still done there by then.


I'll dig further and see where I can find southern masters of that particular branch in southern China 1930s, but I think it would have been hard since the founder and chief students were in a different country at that time.

1652375124869.png
 
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Wing Woo Gar

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Mok Gwai Lan was Wong Fei Hung's widow, not Lam Sai Wing's. But that's where Mok Ga influenced modern Hung Ga Kuen. Off the top of my head, Mok Ga added a couple weapons and helped Fei Hung refine his knowledge of Crane styles, etc as he developed his classwork.

Thong Loong Pai around 1930 would have been most associated with Chen Kiu and his disciple Hsung Khan Seong (pic below), but not in Canton. They ran a school in Calcutta, India's Chinatown for a few decades before shutting down in 2010, but it's hard to know if kung fu training was still done there by then.


I'll dig further and see where I can find southern masters of that particular branch in southern China 1930s, but I think it would have been hard since the founder and chief students were in a different country at that time.

View attachment 28418
Thank you so much. I apologize for my error, it was Wong feI hung‘s widow I meant to reference. We have Mok Gar Kuen in our forms, it was one of the arts Sifu Woo studied in Canton in the 1930’s along with Hung Gar and others. Sam Bo Jin ( spelling?) is one of the southern mantis forms we have in our system, are you familiar with any of these? Chan Kuen? Any help or info on these would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much!
 
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Oily Dragon

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Thank you so much. I apologize for my error, it was Wong feI hung‘s widow I meant to reference. We have Mok Gar Kuen in our forms, it was one of the arts Sifu Woo studied in Canton in the 1930’s along with Hung Gar and others. Sam Bo Jin ( spelling?) is one of the southern mantis forms we have in our system, are you familiar with any of these? Chan Kuen? Any help or info on these would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much!
Yeah, and we can keep it tied to the Iron Wire too.

This is Mok Ga technique, Mo Ying Gerk. It became one of the most famous, if not the most famous, of all CMA kicks because of Wong Fei Hung.

Plum Flower, Wing Chun kick, yadda yadda. In the good old days you didn't even have a stick man dummy, you just had a stick, and only if you were that lucky.

1652380152451.png


Not unlike Robert Chiu's Wing Chun version

1652380285719.png


Another great book. It was even referenced by Judkins.

1652380354687.png
 
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Oily Dragon

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It's worth noting there are no kicks at all in the Iron Wire, in fact the most traditional methods neither foot ever leaves the ground, it's all shuffle steps, and there's a very specific reason for this constant rooting. It ties to the sounds because a lot of them are natural sounds made when doing things like tensing the core or forcing breaths, sinking weight, but in the system they are exaggerated.

How exaggerated depends on who and how the form is displayed. Some dudes like Chiu Chi Ling are famous for being a little goofy loud when doing certain Iron Wire sounds like Fu How Loong Yam (Tiger Roars, Dragon Howls). He's almost laughing.

Gordon Liu was completely over the top in 36th Chamber of Shaolin, but that's understandable, it was a kung fu movie intro montage.
 

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It's worth noting there are no kicks at all in the Iron Wire, in fact the most traditional methods neither foot ever leaves the ground, it's all shuffle steps, and there's a very specific reason for this constant rooting. It ties to the sounds because a lot of them are natural sounds made when doing things like tensing the core or forcing breaths, sinking weight, but in the system they are exaggerated.

How exaggerated depends on who and how the form is displayed. Some dudes like Chiu Chi Ling are famous for being a little goofy loud when doing certain Iron Wire sounds like Fu How Loong Yam (Tiger Roars, Dragon Howls). He's almost laughing.

Gordon Liu was completely over the top in 36th Chamber of Shaolin, but that's understandable, it was a kung fu movie intro montage.
I have seen it done by a long time student of Sifu Woo around 2003. It was late in the evening after more than 6 hours of training. I didn’t absorb as much as I would have hoped.
 

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