Welcome to the Falkirk School of Kung-Fu website.
(With our new website students & users are welcome to post comments and interact with each other, or contact an instructor).
We at the Falkirk School of Kung-Fu operate a colour system in regards teaching structure; to help new students and visitor’s recognise the instructors, our students have the orange design on their t-shirts while the instructors have green.
Many people are under the impression that Kung Fu originated with the Shaolin Temple – It did not.
Although many people believe that the Chinese martial arts originated at the Shaolin Temple there is some evidence to suggest that the Chinese martial arts were well developed before the Shaolin Temple was built. The temple was built in the third century A.D. but there are references to such individuals as the physician Hwa Tuo who was using exercises based on animal movements to improve the physical health of his patients well before that date.
Hwa Tuo lived at the time of the Three Kingdoms, around A.D. 220-65. Hwa Tuo is said to have created a set of exercises based upon five animals: the tiger, bear, monkey, stork and dear. The reason this is significant is that there is even today a strong relationship between animal movement and the Chinese martial arts.
In fact the Shaolin temple did become a centre of development for the martial arts and remained so for more than a thousand years before it was dissolved by the Ching Dynasty in the Eighteenth Century. As a side note the Shaolin Temple is situated at the foot of the ‘Songshan’ mountain in Dengfeng County, Honan Province. It should also be said that there have been many Shaolin Temples built all around China. Whether these were set up as competitors to the temple at Songshan or represented an extension of the original Shaolin Temple is not known.
