Snake Kung Fu Style: The Complete History, Philosophy, Technique and Practice of the Serpentine Martial Art: Ancient Principles, Qi Flow, Striking, ... for Internal Power and Applied Efficiency

You don’t choose Snake Kung Fu. It chooses you, usually when you’ve failed at everything that requires brute force.I was twenty-two years old, fresh out of a relationship that had unspooled like cheap twine, living in a damp basement flat in Leeds. I’d tried the hard styles first. Northern Shaolin, with its deep horse stances and thunderous fists, left me with strained knees and a bruised ego. Karate – the sort taught in church halls on Tuesday nights – felt like punching a wall with a rulebook. Every style I touched asked me to be something I wasn’t: strong, fast, loud, linear.Then an old Cantonese woman named Lian – who ran a launderette on Chapeltown Road – saw me sulking over a cup of lukewarm tea and said, without looking up from her ironing: “You move like a broken ruler. Come see the snake.”I laughed. She didn’t.The next Saturday, I followed her to a back room behind the dry-cleaning presses. The air smelled of starch and old incense. There were no mirrors, no belts, no slogans on the wall. Just a concrete floor and a faded painting of a white snake coiled around a staff.For three hours, she taught me one thing: how to stand. Not a horse stance. Not a bow stance. A snake coiling stance – weight on the rear leg, front knee soft, spine rolled forward, hands open like the head of a serpent tasting the air. My lower back screamed. My wrists ached. But for the first time in years, my mind went quiet.“You see?” she said. “The snake has no fight until the fight arrives. Until then – only patience.”That was nineteen years ago. Lian has since returned to Guangdong, and I have kept my promise: never to teach the snake as a weapon first. It is a mirror. It is a question. It is the art of moving so softly that the world does not realise it has been touched until the touch has already passed.This book is not a certificate of mastery. I possess none. It is a field guide. A travel journal. A warning and an invitation. If you came here looking for quick knockouts or “deadly secrets” – put the book down and go kick a heavy bag. That is honest work, but it is not serpentine.If, however, you have felt the quiet call of the spiral – the sense that power need not shout, and that the softest thing in the room (a tongue, a breath, a turning wrist) can become the strongest – then turn the page.But first, let’s speak plainly about what Snake Kung Fu is not.It is not a sport. It has no points, no rounds, no judges. It is not a system of “dirty tricks” – though it does prefer the elbow to the fist, the fingertip to the knuckle, and the instant between breaths to any grand wind-up. And it is not a religion, though it borrows gratefully from Taoist and Chan wells of wisdom, as a stream borrows from rain.What it is: a complete martial dialogue between inside and outside, tension and release, stillness and detonation. A method for turning the spine into a spring, the breath into a hiss, and the intention into a ripple that begins in your heels and ends an inch past your opponent’s guard.Over the next ten chapters, I will walk you through the history that survives (much of it oral, much of it lost – and I will tell you honestly when I am guessing), the philosophy that holds it together, the Qi work that fuels it, and the physical techniques that have survived centuries of temple suppressions, family feuds, and modern indifference.You will get detailed descriptions. Illustrated training drills (described clearly enough for a 6x9 page, with spatial cues). Warnings about common injuries. And – because I am not a traditionalist for tradition’s sake – adaptations for the modern practitioner who has forty-five minutes and a yoga mat, not three hours and a monastery. Read more