Life
Liao Sifu is the least documented figure in this archive, and the gap is not incidental — it is the shape of the whole lineage problem in one person.
What is said of him: that he was a Chinese immigrant living in Java, that he held the third generation of the Mo Pai transmission, and that he taught Chang some time in the 1960s or 1970s. That he forbade transmission outside the Chinese community, a prohibition Chang later broke and, by every account, agonised over. That he was surpassed by his own student, which the accounts present without embarrassment as an ordinary thing that happens in a transmission.
That is the whole of it. There is no photograph, no dates, no place of origin, no independent record of any kind, and nothing written by him. Everything above reaches us through Chang, and reaches us second-hand from there — students reporting what their teacher told them about his teacher.
None of that is unusual for the kind of transmission being described. Martial and healing knowledge moved through the Chinese communities of Java exactly this way, inside families and small circles of trusted students, and nobody kept a register because there was never a reason to. But it does mean the second link in a claimed four-generation chain is an unverifiable report of an unnamed man, which is worth stating plainly whenever the chain is invoked. See the lineage article.