When the late Wong Shun-leung taught me the Wing Chun pole, I was neither impressed nor excited about the content. The Wing Chun pole form movements are, after all, seemingly very tame and lacking in aesthetics. I took the necessary snaps of Sifu doing the routine, noted down what I considered to be the main points and decided to close that chapter in my learning of the Wing Chun system then. The Nullah Road premise, where Sifu taught, was often noisy, chaotic, confusing and yet challenging. The cacophony of the street noise, together with the blaring TVB broadcast combined with the practitioners coming to practice or to chatter, assaulted my concentration on the subsequent partner practice of the pole form and affected my take of the pole for a long time. Around that time I was also attending training sessions with Sifu Tsui SheungTin who lived only a short walk from Nullah Road. Old Tsui’s (Old as an adjective in Chinese is an affectionate and venerable term) premise was at that time only marginally quieter, and yes, I also watched a lot of TVB there. Although both Sifu and Old Tsui learnt from the same legendary Ip Man, their take on the system was divergent in emphasis and nuances, amongst others. Old Tsui, once told me that the pole should be more advanced than the knife form. Sifu normally would not teach the knife form without a red packet. In Sifu’s days, there were anecdotes of him, learning and arming himself with the Butterfly knives to protect Ip Man when the latter patronized certain dangerous clubhouses. The pole ain’t much mentioned as a practical weapon of choice then. By the early nineties I luckily also learnt some pole from Sifu Derek Fung Bing-Bol back in Sydney. Sifu Derek confessed he learnt everything Ip Man had to offer except the knife form. Understandably, because as I understand it, Sifu Derek wasn’t even 20 when he left Ip to go to Australia. As I remember it, his pole form was also pretty non-descript. This is of course without any disrespect to Sifu Derek. Sifu Derek was one of Ip Man’s most unsung hero disciples. In his days, Sifu Derek was so devastatingly fast that he was called “Lightning Hands”. So why learn the pole? How did it come by into the Wing Chun system? How relevant is it to students, practitioners and teachers nowadays? How should we incorporate the pole form into our curriculum and lesson plan?     ORIGINS of the Wing Chun Pole Like many aspects of Wing Chun, there is NO definitive documentation on where the Pole came from. The anecdotes and stories vary from teacher to teacher, and lineage to lineage. My study of the Triunifiniti Goo-Lo Wing Chun system indicates they have a 3.Half Pole in the Goo-Lo tradition. Along with that, there are also the Wayfarer Staff (“Hang Tse Pang”) and the Beautiful Lady Paddles the Sampan Pole (“May Lui Tsang Tsou Kwan”). Leung Jaarn seemingly did not teach the 6 Point and Half Pole in the Goo-Lo village where he retired in his senior years. Collectively with the stories told of the 6.HalfPole, we can only at best surmise that the Opera Red Junk boaters used a 10 feet 4 inches long pole to help navigate their junks along the narrow waterways around the Pearl River Delta, where they ply their travelling opera shows in those years. We can only conjecture that over time, with the input from one or more sources (including possible spear forms), the kungfu practices they had then, evolved their boating navigational pole into a fighting pole, enabling them to fight with other boaters. This seems to be a realistic scenario playing out into the eventual formalization of the pole form that we see and practice today, as the 6. Half Pole form.     WHY learn and practise the 6.Half Pole  Wong Shun-Leung Sifu mentioned specifically that the 6. Half Pole cultivates the competency of fighting efficiently with one arm. My initial reaction to that was – huh? It remained so for quite a while until I realized that we need to see past the physical movements of the 6.Half Pole. It is one of the most potent power enhancers in the Wing Chun system. It also cultivates a structural geometric mindset. This means instead of swinging the pole as a weapon to hit, swipe, poke etc, we focus more on the pole mapping the horizontal plane, and the vertical plane, tracing both the eccentric and concentric cone shape, power lining and dotting the space the pole can probe comfortably with. While doing so, we cultivate the ability to use the shoulder, the hip, the Kneeling Horse (“Gwai Ma”) and the Hanging Horse (“Diu Ma”).     “The secret? You will be pleased to know like I was, lies in applying bodily leveraging.” By leveraging different parts of the body, including the arms of course, we train up different parts to move and accelerate independently and interdependently. At the advanced level, you train all major moving parts of the body to generate the requisite power for fighting. At the most elementary level, we, of course, train the arms first. To train the arms to have the capability to operate independently with confidence and competence in combat. Some misunderstand this to mean strengthening the arms to get the job done. So, I suspect, some Wing Chun practitioners may replace the Pole training with gym work, performing weight lifting routines as a modern alternative. This, based on my understanding and experience, limits considerably their progress and retards tremendously their ultimate actualizationof what Wing Chun can do for them. Powerlifting in the gym has a proven place in body sculpting and overall body muscular strength. We cannot deny their value to gymnasts and other athletes. Even many of the old masters who could easily kill their enemies with their bare hands, trained with weights. What is not so obvious is the weights seem unbalanced like the Okinawan chiishi weighted levers (also referred to as sticks or weights). One of Bruce Lee’s favourite wrist training exercises was using a one-sided handheld barbell, where weights were removed from one end and kept at the other. The 6. Half Pole is like that.