Some of the most important things in history begin with someone getting kicked out of somewhere.
Grandmaster Tarm Sarm was born in 1873 in To Ting Village, in the Hoi Ping suburb of Canton, China. The third child of his family, he was named Sarm, meaning simply ‘the number three.’ Nothing about his name suggested greatness. Nothing, except what he did with the life it was attached to.
He trained in Hung Gar kung fu from childhood. By the time he was 15, he had the kind of ability that made him restless and skill that sharpened his appetite for something more. One day, walking past the Hung Sing Choy Lay Fut school near his home, he decided to go in and test himself against it. He walked through the door, asked to spar with one of the students, and the match began.
It didn’t go quite the way he planned. The student, Wong Sum, landed a Sau Chui, a round-house swinging punch, that Tarm struggled to answer. Wong came again with a Jo Ma Gwa Sau, a back fist and sweeping kick combination, and Tarm found he had no clean answer for that either. The first round ended and Tarm was still standing – but he wasn’t happy.
Another man might have nodded respectfully, said his thanks, and walked home to think about what he’d learned. Tarm Sarm was not that man. He looked around the room, found the master, and asked to fight him instead.
His friends stared at him. They told him not to. He ignored them completely.
Master Lui Chang put him on the floor in short order, using a technique called ‘Wun Yuen Ping Jong Sau.’ Tarm had to be helped to his feet. His friend stood over him and said words to the effect of: you’re lucky the Sifu held back.
It should have been the end of it. A brash young fighter walks in uninvited, demands to test himself against a master, and gets exactly what he asked for. The polite thing, the sensible thing, would have been to bow and leave.
But there was something in the way Tarm Sarm took the defeat. Lui Chang had seen enough fighters to know the difference between someone who came looking for a win and someone who came looking for knowledge. Tarm Sarm, it turned out, was the second kind.
Master Lui Chang accepted him as a student.
The incident that changed everything
Tarm Sarm trained hard. Within a few years he was teaching the younger students himself, respected enough that everyone in the school addressed him as ‘Sarm Sook,’ third uncle.
Traditional kung fu schools ran on a strict order. Seniors were seniors, and your Si Sooks outranked you regardless of your talent. You didn’t challenge them. That was the code.
Tarm Sarm held to this code, until the day his Sifu left on a trip and something between him and a senior classmate named Ngan Yui Ting boiled over.
A fight broke out between Tarm Sarm and Ngan Yui Ting, and when Ngan’s family members stepped in (both of them ranking above Tarm), he still didn’t back down. Tarm Sarm fought all three Si Sooks, and he didn’t lose.
The incident was given a name: ‘Kuen Da Sarm Ngan.’ Fist defeated three Ngans. People talked about it in the way they talked about challenge matches and tournament victories. A junior who took on three seniors and walked away standing.
When Master Lui Chang returned and the story reached him, there was no deliberation. The code had been broken, loudly and publicly, and the school’s integrity depended on consequences being real. He expelled Tarm Sarm.
The problem was that Tarm Sarm hadn’t yet completed his training.
What he built from the ruins
Expelled, incomplete, and with a reputation that was growing fast, Tarm Sarm found his way to a friend and fellow martial artist named Wong To. Together they filled in what the expulsion had left unfinished. They trained together relentlessly, and their shared notoriety spread across the region.
People started talking about Tarm Sarm not because of what he had learned, but because of how he fought. He was curious and creative. He studied other styles, challenged their practitioners, and frequently those challenges ended in bloody combat. He wasn’t interested in keeping things tidy. He was interested in what worked.
As his reputation grew, he realised something: his fights were starting to reflect badly on Master Lui Chang’s school. Despite the expulsion, he still carried that lineage. Out of respect, he made a decision. He left Canton and headed north.
He settled in an area called Sui Buk, meaning ‘little North.’ There, he opened his first school, which he named the Buk Sing Kwoon. ‘Buk Sing’ meaning northern victory.
The rebel had built something of his own.
The style that changed the art
What came next is what separates Tarm Sarm from a story about a talented troublemaker and turns him into one of the most significant figures in Chinese martial arts history.
He encountered a Northern Shaolin master named Ku Yu Cheung, one of the most formidable martial artists of the era. The two men sparred for three days and neither could gain the upper hand. Out of mutual respect, they agreed to exchange students so each could learn from the other’s system.
What Tarm Sarm saw in Northern Shaolin stopped him in his tracks. It was a long-range fighting system. It used the full reach of the body. Every inch was an inch of power.
He took that principle and poured it into his own Choy Lay Fut, transforming the style from the inside out. The wide horse stance, the long extended strikes, the sideways stance that puts maximum reach behind every technique. These became the defining features of Buk Sing Choy Lay Fut, a system that went undefeated for fifty years.
He didn’t just create a new school. He created a new branch of the art.
Why any of this matters today
Tarm Sarm died in 1942. He had spent nearly 7 decades fighting, teaching, and refining a system that nobody else had thought to build. He left behind 6 top disciples, a style that went undefeated for 50 years, and a lineage that would eventually cross oceans.
The lineage that flows from Tarm Sarm reaches directly into our Academy. Through Kong On, then Kong Hing, then Masters Vince and Dave Lacey, then Sifu George Michielsen, the knowledge that Tarm Sarm forged iis still being passed on in Perth today, and around the world through our online training.
Tarm Sarm started with a brawl in a Canton training hall. He ended with a dynasty.
