---
title: "The Tibetan-Lama Arts of Canton (喇嘛派) — the Southern arts that aren't Southern"
---

Not every martial art practised in old Canton is **Southern Chinese**. A whole family of long-armed, long-range Cantonese arts — **Hap Ga (俠家)**, **Lama Pai (喇嘛派)**, and **Tibetan White Crane (白鶴派 / Pak Hok Pai)** — are actually **Tibetan in origin**, descended from a system known as the **Lion's Roar (獅子吼)**. They sit inside the Southern martial world geographically while standing outside it by ancestry, and untangling that is a small but satisfying piece of honest categorization.

## A different body, a different root

Where the typical Southern arts are **short-bridge and close-range**, the Tibetan-Lama arts are the opposite: **long-arm, long-range, big swinging and circling strikes, and powerful open-palm work**, generated from a tall, mobile frame. The feel is closer to a Northern long-arm style than to [Hung Ga](https://wulin.openmindspace.org/hung-ga) or the [Hakka short-bridge arts](https://wulin.openmindspace.org/hakka-arts) — which is exactly what you'd expect of an art that did not grow from the southern Chinese tradition at all.

By tradition the family descends from the **Lion's Roar (獅子吼)** system, attributed to a **Tibetan lama** of the high plateau, and was carried into Guangdong in the nineteenth century, where it split into its Cantonese branches.

<Callout type="warning">
  **Legendary founder, documented spread.** The founding-lama story and the deep Tibetan pedigree are **traditional**, and the early details are hazy. What is **documented** is the nineteenth-century Cantonese transmission — above all through **Wong Yan-lum (王隱林)**, one of the [Ten Tigers of Canton](https://wulin.openmindspace.org/stories), who spread **Hap Ga** in Guangdong. As with every art on this wiki, the recent, traceable history is firm; the origin myth is labelled as such.
</Callout>

## The branches

- **Hap Ga (俠家, "Hero Family")** — the branch popularised by **Wong Yan-lum**; long-arm swinging power, a Canton mainstay.
- **Lama Pai (喇嘛派, "Lama School")** — the branch that keeps the Tibetan name most explicitly.
- **Tibetan White Crane (白鶴派 / Pak Hok Pai)** — a crane-imagery branch of the same Lion's Roar root.

<Callout type="info">
  **Two "White Cranes" — do not confuse them.** **Tibetan White Crane (白鶴派, Pak Hok Pai)** of this Lama family is **completely different** from [**Fujian White Crane (白鶴拳)**](https://wulin.openmindspace.org/white-crane) — different origin (Tibetan vs Fujianese), different body (long-range vs shaking-crane short power), different lineage. They share only the crane image and the English words "white crane." It is one of the most common style-naming confusions in southern kung fu.
</Callout>

## See also

<PageRef space="notes" slug="southern-styles" text="Southern Kung Fu Styles — the field guide (and where these sit as 'independents')" />

<PageRef space="notes" slug="white-crane" text="Fujian White Crane (白鶴拳) — the unrelated southern crane art" />

<PageRef space="notes" slug="stories" text="Stories &amp; Legends — the Ten Tigers of Canton, including Wong Yan-lum" />

## Sources

**[1]** English Wikipedia, *Lama Pai*, *Hap Ga*, and *Bak Hok Pai (Tibetan White Crane)* — the Lion's Roar origin, the Cantonese branches, Wong Yan-lum's role, and the distinction from Fujian White Crane.

**[2]** Benjamin Judkins, *Kung Fu Tea / Chinese Martial Studies* — context on the non-Han martial traditions practised in southern China.