Luo Guangyu (羅光玉, 1888–1944)

Luo Guangyu (羅光玉 / Luó Guāngyù, 1888–1944) was the 6th-generation Seven Star Praying Mantis master who taught at the Shanghai Chin Woo (上海精武體育會) and trained Wong Hon Fan, through whom the art reached the world. Luo himself inherited the system from Fan Xudong (范旭東) along with the screen-and-frame manuscript transmission that descends from the legendary 升霄道人 (Shengxiao Daoren). His Shanghai teaching, from the 1910s through the 1930s, made the Chin Woo network the primary diffusion channel of Seven Star.

Life

Born in Penglai, Shandong in 1888 — in the same Shandong mantis heartland that produced most of the senior lineage holders. From his late teens he trained Seven Star with Fan Xudong (范旭東) — a major lineage holder who himself inherited from 李之箭 (Li Zhijian) in the descent from 升霄道人. Luo became Fan's principal disciple and the inheritor of the 范旭東 source manuscript (subsequently passed to Wong Hon Fan and now preserved in the CUHK special collection).

Luo's teaching career was centered at the Shanghai Chin Woo Athletic Association (上海精武體育會), which from its founding in 1910 became the principal urban node for cross-style northern martial-arts dissemination in China. Through Chin Woo, Luo taught Seven Star Praying Mantis to many students — most consequentially the young Hong Kong native Wong Hon Fan in the 1930s, who would carry the art onward to Hong Kong and the worldwide diaspora.

Luo died in 1944, during the Japanese occupation.

Place in the lineage

升霄道人 (Shengxiao Daoren, legendary) → 李之箭 (Li Zhijian) → 范旭東 (Fan Xudong) → 羅光玉 (Luo Guangyu, 1888–1944) → 黃漢勛 (Wong Hon Fan) → world

See also

Praying Mantis (螳螂拳) — the full style overview

七星螳螂 Seven Star Mantis — branch deep-dive

Wong Hon Fan — Luo's foremost student, the disseminator

Sources

[1] 羅光玉, Chinese Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/羅光玉) — biography.

[2] Wong Hon Fan Praying Mantis Special Collection, CUHK (repository.lib.cuhk.edu.hk/en/collection/whf) — institutional records of the lineage manuscripts Luo preserved and transmitted.