Northern Shaolin kung fu is a traditional northern Long Fist style of the Chinese martial arts. The northern Long Fist styles emphasize long range punches and strikes, large stances, various kicking and leaping attacks, powerful circular blocks and strikes and utilizes the methods of “suddenly appear/suddenly disappear”.

Although, just like every traditional system, Northern Shaolin contains many cruel basic training regimens called JiBenGong, the system is best known for its 10 routines sometimes simply referred to as “The Ten Forms”.  The sets/routines are fluid and graceful, alway hiding the true cruelty of the martial applications inside their artistic beauty. Cultivation of the human spirit is of utmost importance this is why we do not want to display the cruelty of kungfu in public. One doesn’t receive karmic credit for never harming anyone just because they were too weak and unskilled to do so … you must make yourself as dangerous as possible and then be kind to every human. I like to call it Constrained Malevolence.

Northern Shaolin was made famous by the late Gu RuZhang. There are so many stories of Master Gu that a library could not contain them all. According to his  students, Gu’s father was a practitioner Tan Tui (Springy Leg).

Among the martial artists who gathered at the Central National Martial Arts Institute in Nanjing in 1928, Gu placed in the top fifteen and was included—alongside Fu Zhensong, Li Xianwu, Wan Laimin, Wan Laisheng, and Wong Shao Chou—in the Five Southbound Tigers (五虎下江南; pinyin: wǔ hǔ xià jiāng nán; literally “five tigers heading south of Jiangnan”), five masters of the Northern Chinese martial arts sent to Guangzhou to organize another National Martial Arts Institute.

The Northern Shaolin curriculum of Gu Ruzhang