I’m talking about the “schools” from mostly Chinese kung fu movies from the 70s-90s, for example in The Chinese Connection (Bruce Lee), The Young Master (Jackie Chan), or Warriors Two (Sammo Hung).
The common theme is that there is a big building or compound with several buildings, a master (who basically spends all his time teaching the art and walking around observing others learn), and a few dozen students (mostly young adults) who seem to live at the place, do all the maintenance, and spend most of their waking hours training. Did these ever exist in real life, or are they an invention for the movies?
They seem sort of like Shaolin Temples but staffed by regular people (not monks).
How would such establishments pay the bills? Nobody seems to work
Where do the students come from, and are they stuck at the school?
The schools are able to pay the bills because students pay tuition. Far from being “stuck” at the school, for example (from the Wikipedia article about Ip Man) “Initially, Ip Man’s teaching business was poor in Hong Kong because Ip’s students typically stayed for only a couple of months.” That is, it is a competitive business, and retaining students was not a given.
That kind of thing isn’t too popular in the west, though. I get the impression that people go over there to train and then come back to their home Western country and open schools in strip malls, which is more attune to what we’re looking for here.
I go to a kung fu school in the US for tai chi. My instructor has been in kung fu for 20+ years but he’s not a sifu (master) just an instructor (sihing, or elder brother). His sifu HAS gone to China and studied in such a school. There’s lots of videos out there of non-monk people training in those schools.