Archive History: Golden Eagle Martial Arts Since 1997

Foundation, 1997

Golden Eagle Martial Arts Centers was founded in 1997 by Steffan de Graffenried in northern Alabama. Over the following two decades the schools operated at locations in Huntsville, Moulton, Florence, Decatur, Athens, and Muscle Shoals. The curriculum centered on Choy Li Fut kung fu and Yang Family Tai Chi Chuan, together with traditional weapons training, Chin Na, and practical self-defense.

The first websites, late 1990s

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.

Two decades of teaching, 1997–2018

Through the 2000s the school's web presence grew with it: early static sites, then a community portal, then a long-running set of pages on forms, weapons, and translations. Translations completed in this period include Wang Zongyue's Taijiquan Treatise and Wu Yuxiang's Four-Character Secret, published with their source texts and translator's notes.

Re-establishment as an archive, 2020s

The archive now restores that record rather than replacing 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. The goal is a permanent scholarly record of Chinese martial arts in North America: every document sourced, dated, and cross-referenced.

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.