Archive History: From a School Record to a Reference Archive

The record this archive was built on

Golden Eagle Martial Arts Centers was a school in northern Alabama, founded in 1997 by Steffan de Graffenried. Across two decades it operated at sites in Huntsville, Moulton, Florence, Decatur, Athens, and Muscle Shoals, and taught Choy Li Fut kung fu and Yang Family Tai Chi Chuan alongside traditional weapons training, Chin Na, and practical self-defense.

The school is a subject of this archive, not its publisher. It appears throughout these pages wherever its curriculum materials, translations, or photographs are the source for a claim — the same way any other dated document does.

Why those pages mattered

The school went online while the web itself was young. Its late-1990s pages documented lineages, weapons, and classical texts for English readers — material that was scarce at the time. Three of those pages in particular became reference works:

1. the study of the Nine Dragon Trident, a polearm of the Choy Li Fut curriculum (1998);
2. the biography of Li Shuwen, the Bajiquan spear master (1864–1934);
3. the biography of Yang Chengfu, the standardizer of Yang style Tai Chi (1883–1936).

Encyclopedias and martial arts researchers cited these pages at their original addresses, and the citations endured for decades. That citation record — not any claim of ownership over the school — is why this archive exists.

What the archive is

This archive is a separate undertaking: a scholarly record of Chinese martial arts and the masters who carried them beyond China, built from dated documents rather than from a single school's teaching. Its scope runs wider than any one lineage or location — Choy Li Fut and Yang family Tai Chi sit alongside Bajiquan, Shaolin, and Shorinji Kempo, and each page stands on its own sources.

Where the archive restores older material, it restores rather than replaces it. The three legacy pages returned at their original web addresses, recovered from archived captures and checked line by line. New entity pages — systems, masters, classics, concepts, and artifacts — are added only when their claims can be sourced and dated.

How the archive is maintained

The work follows the publishededitorial method, uses the materials described on the sources page, and accepts corrections and contributions through thecontact page.