Is Kung Fu Chinese and Karate from Japan?

What are the origins of these art forms and how long have they been around?|||My Kung Fu schools principals are said to be over 5000 years old, and they originated in china. We are one of the three main 'practises'. Next to us there is Taoism and Buddhism. The latter being fairly recent.


As for Shaolin Kung Fu, if some stories are correct, came from an Indian martial art system with Bodidarma (excuse spelling) who brought Buddhism into China.


As for Karate, it was not 'Japanese' but Okinawan. It was later introduced to Japan. Approximate dates and that are easy for you to find concerning Karate's intro into Japan. But how it got to Okinawa, the story goes that some Okinawan, fishermen, travellers maybe even soldiers, learnt the Fukien White Crane Kung Fu system and then brought it back to Okinawa and from there it developed into two main divisions. White Crane, some systems anyway, are Shoalin. Dates and that are easy to find, if I put them here though it just makes this look like a history time line.


So yes, some forms of Kung Fu (the originators of Karate) came from India. But if you go to the middle east, one step to the left of India, you came across pots and vases of warriors practising two person drills or exercises, and these date back thousands and thousands of years. Further than Shoalin's ancestry. Look at Mesopotamia, Ur and Egypt and you can see that martial arts history goes back and back and back into pre-history.|||both from india.|||Kungfu was first systematiced in the Shaolin Temple(though there were other arts that've existed in other parts of China before the establishment of shaolin). It later on branched into the hundreds of schools in China thru the milleniums. two big families: northern arts(focus mainly on kicks, higher stances) and southern arts(focus mainly on fists, lower, more stable stances).








Karate originated in Ryuku Islands, Japan. practiced by the people by the fishing villages there. in the 19th century a group of these karate masters pay pilgrimage to Fukkien (a province in southern china) to learn from a respectable kung fu pugilist. Thus, some kata's(forms) in karate share the same form to some southern chinese kungfu: (e.g. the "Sanchin" kata in karate originated from White Crane/Five Ancestor's Fists)|||Kung fu -Chinese martial arts, indigenous fighting styles mixed with Indian fighting style called kalaripayattu.





Karate - Okinawan martial arts, indigenous fighting style called te, mixed with chinese martial arts. Kara te was originally translated as China hand.|||If you think about the names, "Kung Fu" would relate to Chinese martial arts and "Karate" to Japan.


If you want to know how some style developed, it's very much a question of interpretation. It's easy to follow a line to India, but I think that you can follow a line of masters to any part of the world. All nations have there own self defense styles and masters have traveled - learned from other, but others have learned for them too.


Kung Fu is also called "wushu".|||That is essentially correct, altough Karate originated in Okinawa which is now part of Japan but at the time was not.





Both systems go back a considerable amount of time well over 1500 years, Kung fu somewhat longer than karate.|||They all diiferentiate really. Like there are some karate styles in N. and S. Korea to.