The Tibetan-Lama Arts of Canton (喇嘛派) — the Southern arts that aren't Southern

Not every martial art practised in old Canton is Southern Chinese. A whole family of long-armed, long-range Cantonese arts — Hap Ga (俠家), Lama Pai (喇嘛派), and Tibetan White Crane (白鶴派 / Pak Hok Pai) — are actually Tibetan in origin, descended from a system known as the Lion's Roar (獅子吼). They sit inside the Southern martial world geographically while standing outside it by ancestry, and untangling that is a small but satisfying piece of honest categorization.

A different body, a different root

Where the typical Southern arts are short-bridge and close-range, the Tibetan-Lama arts are the opposite: long-arm, long-range, big swinging and circling strikes, and powerful open-palm work, generated from a tall, mobile frame. The feel is closer to a Northern long-arm style than to Hung Ga or the Hakka short-bridge arts — which is exactly what you'd expect of an art that did not grow from the southern Chinese tradition at all.

By tradition the family descends from the Lion's Roar (獅子吼) system, attributed to a Tibetan lama of the high plateau, and was carried into Guangdong in the nineteenth century, where it split into its Cantonese branches.

The branches

• Hap Ga (俠家, "Hero Family") — the branch popularised by Wong Yan-lum; long-arm swinging power, a Canton mainstay.

• Lama Pai (喇嘛派, "Lama School") — the branch that keeps the Tibetan name most explicitly.

• Tibetan White Crane (白鶴派 / Pak Hok Pai) — a crane-imagery branch of the same Lion's Roar root.

See also

Southern Kung Fu Styles — the field guide (and where these sit as 'independents')

Fujian White Crane (白鶴拳) — the unrelated southern crane art

Stories & Legends — the Ten Tigers of Canton, including Wong Yan-lum

Sources

[1] English Wikipedia, Lama Pai, Hap Ga, and Bak Hok Pai (Tibetan White Crane) — the Lion's Roar origin, the Cantonese branches, Wong Yan-lum's role, and the distinction from Fujian White Crane.

[2] Benjamin Judkins, Kung Fu Tea / Chinese Martial Studies — context on the non-Han martial traditions practised in southern China.