Wulin (武林) — Chinese Martial Arts & Kung Fu

Wulin (武林, "the martial world") is an open, carefully-sourced knowledge base for Chinese martial arts — what most of the world calls kung fu (功夫). It gathers the histories, lineages, forms, principles, primary-source manuals, and video of the Chinese fighting and cultivation arts in one place, written for curious newcomers and serious practitioners alike.

What is "kung fu"?

Kung fu (功夫, gōngfu) literally means skill refined through patient effort — any deep skill, not only fighting. Applied to the martial arts it spans the whole Chinese family: the internal arts (內家), which lead with intention, breath, and whole-body connection, and the external arts (外家), which lead with conditioned structure, speed, and power.

What is Kung Fu? — the term, the history, and how the styles fit together

Explore Wulin

The wiki is organized into sections — start with whichever pulls you in.

🥋 The Styles

Field guides to each art — how it moves, where it came from, its signature forms — across both great families: the Northern styles (Mantis, Bagua, Xingyi, Baji, Tongbei, Pigua, Chuojiao, Cha, Northern Shaolin) and the Southern styles (Hung Ga, Choy Li Fut, the Hakka short-bridge arts, and the Fujian crane family).

Northern Kung Fu Styles — a field guide to the Northern canon

Southern Kung Fu Styles — a field guide to the Southern canon

🗡️ Forms & Weapons

The routines (套路) and the arms: foundational drills, the deep Mantis form library with move-by-move scripts, and the weapons — saber, staff, sword and halberd — bridged to the Ming manuals where they were first written down.

Forms & Weapons (套路・兵器) — the routines and the arms

👤 The Masters

The generals, monks, patriarchs and reformers who made and carried the arts — from the Ming military writers to the Republican synthesizers and the lineage-holders of the diaspora.

The Masters (宗師) — a sourced who's-who of Chinese martial arts

🧭 Concepts & Principles

The ideas every art shares: trained force (勁), standing practice (站樁), the Five Elements, the four gates of technique, martial virtue, and the cultivation language of qi — honestly framed.

Concepts & Principles (拳理) — the ideas behind the movement

📜 Source Texts

The actual old manuals (拳譜) this wiki is built on — in the original Chinese, public-domain where possible, arranged in the order they were written.

Source Texts (原典) — the manuals, in order

🏛️ History, Institutions & Lineage

The real textual and institutional story — Ming military roots, the internal/external split, the Republican Guoshu reform, and the post-1949 diaspora — with legend clearly labeled.

A Short History of Chinese Martial Arts

Internal-Arts Lineage Map — who taught whom, drawn out

📖 Stories & Legends

The famous tales martial artists love to tell — challenge matches, foreign strongmen, bodyguards — sourced and labeled where we can.

Stories & Legends — the tales, documented where possible

🎬 Video

Form walkthroughs and rare archival footage of the past masters, indexed by style.

Video Library — form footage and archival film, by style

How this wiki works

Wulin aims to be rigorously sourced, not received opinion. We build on public-domain primary texts and reputable scholarship, we cite what we claim, and we label legend as legend — no art was really "invented" in a single tidy myth. Where a text or film is still in copyright, we link to it at its source rather than reproducing it.

Sources & Method — our citation policy and where the original scans live

A sister project

Wulin grew alongside a companion wiki devoted to the internal art of Taiji:

• taiji.openmindspace.org — Taiji (Tai Chi) in the same depth.