Every style of Kung Fu has a story. Ours is a particularly good one. It begins with a young man being knocked off his feet by a master he had no business challenging, and ends, for now, with students around the world training a system that was never supposed to leave the closed rooms where it was born.
This is what happened in between.
Where it all began: Chan Heung and Choy Lay Fut
The foundation of our system is Choy Lay Fut, one of the most influential and widely practised styles of Southern Chinese Kung Fu. Its founder, Chan Heung, developed it in the 1830s by drawing on three distinct lineages, combining the power and structure of Choy Gar, the flowing circular techniques of Lay Gar, and the Buddhist palm methods of Fut Gar into a unified fighting system. The name reflects those roots directly: Choy, Lay, Fut.
From Chan Heung, the art passed to Grandmaster Cheung Hung Sing, and from him to Master Lui Chang, a second-generation master who was as known for his depth in Chinese philosophy and literature as he was for his martial skill.
The man who transformed it: Grandmaster Tarm Sarm
It was under Master Lui Chang that Tarm Sarm began training, and the story of how he got there says everything about the kind of person he was. Walking past the school one day, he decided to go in and test himself. He sparred with a student, who gave him more than he expected. Undeterred, he asked Master Lui Chang himself for a match. Lui Chang put him on the floor without ceremony. Tarm Sarm signed up immediately.
He trained hard and proved to be an exceptional student, eventually teaching younger students himself. His path through the school ended abruptly when, during Lui Chang’s absence, he fought and beat three senior classmates in a confrontation that became known as ‘Kuen Da Sarm Ngan’, the fist that defeated three Ngans. His teacher, returning to find this, had no choice but to expel him. Tarm Sarm had not yet finished his training.
He completed it later with the help of his friend and colleague Wong To, who had by then struck out on his own, eventually settling in a region called Sui Buk, Little North, where he opened his first school. He named it the Buk Sing Kwoon. Buk Sing means ‘northern star.’
The exchange that changed everything
What Tarm Sarm built over the following decades was formidable. But the pivotal moment in the development of Buk Sing as we know it came through an unexpected collaboration.
When Japan invaded China, one of Tarm Sarm’s top disciples, Kong On, joined the army as a martial arts instructor. There he met Ku Yu Cheung, a master of the Northern Shaolin system (Buk Sil Lum) and a man of almost legendary physical capability, known for bending iron bars, breaking twelve bricks with his bare hands, and reportedly killing a horse with a single strike. The two men discovered a mutual respect for Tarm Sarm’s reputation and arranged a meeting.
When Tarm Sarm and Ku Yu Cheung finally tested each other, neither man held back. They sparred for three days – these elite practitioners pushing with everything they had. At the end of it, neither had gained the upper hand. It was one of the few times in either man’s life that the match ended without a clear victor.
What happened next says a great deal about both of them. Where lesser men might have walked away with bruised egos, Tarm Sarm and Ku Yu Cheung walked away with something rarer: genuine, earned respect for each other’s system. They recognised that what the other had built was real. And they decided that rather than keep their knowledge separate, they would share it.
They agreed to exchange students. Kong On, one of Tarm Sarm’s six top disciples, went to train under Ku Yu Cheung in the Northern Shaolin system. In return, a group of Ku Yu Cheung’s practitioners came to learn under Tarm Sarm. It was, by any measure, an extraordinary moment in Chinese martial arts history, two of the era’s most formidable masters openly pooling their life’s work out of mutual respect rather than competition.
What Tarm Sarm discovered through this exchange became the defining insight of his career. The Northern system was a long-range fighting art that used the full reach of the body in a way his Southern system didn’t. He took that principle and applied it to Choy Lay Fut, rebuilding his techniques around maximum reach, full-body rotation, and extended power. The result was a fighting system that went undefeated for fifty years. That system is Choy Lay Fut Buk Sing.
Kong On, Kong Hing, and the lineage that followed
Kong On went on to become one of the most celebrated martial artists Hong Kong ever produced. He mastered not only the striking arts but also hard and soft Qigong, iron body conditioning, Chinese medicine, and bone setting. Today, according to those who knew him, it is genuinely rare to find anyone of comparable depth even within elite martial arts circles.
His son, Kong Hing, inherited those qualities and that knowledge. It was Kong Hing who, against his own father’s express wishes, agreed to teach two half-Chinese, half-Irish brothers who had come to him with nothing but hunger and determination. Their names were Vince and Dave Lacey. They had grown up in Kowloon, trained alongside a young Bruce Lee, and found their way to the Buk Sing system through Master Lai Hung, one of the Five Black Panthers of Choy Lay Fut.
Kong Hing drilled the Lacey brothers in the foundations of Buk Sing: punches, kicks, fighting techniques, iron palm conditioning. The knowledge passed directly, as it always had, from master to student.
Into Australia, and forward
The Lacey brothers carried that lineage to Australia in 1962, founding the first Buk Sing school in Perth in 1966. When Sifu George Michielsen walked through the door of their Cremorne Arcade school in 1977 at the age of seventeen, he stepped into a chain of transmission that stretched back through Kong Hing, Kong On, Tarm Sarm, and the original founders of Choy Lay Fut.
That transmission didn’t stop with the Lacey brothers. Sifu George spent the following decades travelling to Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam, earning the trust and respect of masters who had every reason to keep their knowledge within closed circles. Each one who shared their knowledge with him did so because they recognised someone genuinely committed to preserving what they had spent their lives building.
The Chinese Kung Fu and Tai Chi Academy exists because of that commitment. The system taught here, Buk Sing Choy Lay Fut in its authentic form, is the living continuation of everything Tarm Sarm built, Kong On preserved, Kong Hing passed on, and the Lacey brothers brought across the ocean.
When you train it, you train something real. Something earned. Something that was never meant to disappear.
If you’d like to begin, the courses are here waiting for you. Explore them here.
