In 1993, through the efforts of cultural and historical workers in Fuqing City, the Southern Shaolin Ruins were finally found in the Shaolin Natural Village of Dongzhang Town.
With the discovery of the Fuqing Southern Shaolin Ruins, the thesis that "Fuqing Southern Shaolin Martial Arts is the birthplace of the world's Southern Shaolin Martial Arts" was put forward. Since the reconstruction of the Southern Shaolin Temple in Fuqing in 1996, countless teams and individuals from Singapore, Indonesia, the United States, Japan, Russia, Britain, Canada, France and other countries from all over the world have come to Fuqing to find their roots.
In 2004, Fuqing City established the Southern Shaolin Martial Arts Research Association, members went deep into the folk, visited many old boxers, rescued, excavated and sorted out a variety of boxing, weapons and martial arts, and has sorted out 75 kinds of Fuqing Zen boxing, folk boxing (including instruments) routines, 47 kinds of instruments, 11 kinds of hard qigong and point acupuncture techniques, etc., which provide valuable information for the study of Southern Shaolin martial arts, and also prove that Fuqing Southern Shaolin has both temples and fists.
In particular, the deceased centenarian Zhang Benli, who was highly skilled in martial arts, won the overall victory in the individual martial arts of the Second Fuqing County Games in 1936, and later served as the curator and head coach of the Fuqing Guoshu Museum. He can play more than 20 kinds of routines such as Southern Shaolin Boxing, swords, knives, guns, etc., and is known as the "living fossil" of Fujian Southern Shaolin Fist.
As early as 1949, almost every village opened a martial arts hall to teach martial arts, and the county town was officially set up by the Fuqing Guoshu Museum, which trained more than a thousand famous martial artists in 30 years. Fuqing Southern Shaolin Martial Arts is a wonderful flower in the soul treasure of Chinese martial arts, and wing chun and Zonghe fist in the genre have been included in the list of representative items of intangible cultural heritage in Fujian Province.