Kanryo Higaonna (Higashionna) (1853-1916) was a native of Naha, Okinawa. He was born into a merchant family, whose business was selling firewood, an expensive commodity in the Ryukyu Islands. He founded the fighting style later to be known as Shorei ryu.

The characters of his family name are pronounced "Higaonna" in Okinawan, and "Higashionna" in Japanese. In Western articles the two spellings are often used interchangeably.

In the early 1860s he began studying the Okinawan martial arts under a teacher named Aragaki Seisho. At that time the word karate was not in common use, and the martial arts were often referred to simply as Te ("hand"), sometimes prefaced by the area of origin, as Naha-te, Shuri-te, or simply Okinawa-te.

In 1869 Higaonna sailed to Fuzhou in the Fukien province of China, here He spent his time studying with various teachers of the Chinese martial arts. One of his first teachers was a kempo teacher named Ryoto. It was he who introduced Higaonna to the kempo master by the name of RyuRuKo (or To Ru Ko, or Lu Lu Ko, his name was never recorded as Kanryo Higaonna was illiterate). According to oral account, Higaonna spent years doing household chores for master RyuRuKo, until he saved his daughter from drowning during a heavy flood and begged the master to teach chuanpa as a reward. Seiko Higa’s father and grand father remembered RyuRuKo and Wai Shin Zan as military officers of commander and a vice commander when the representative of Chinese Emperor came to Okinawa for the last time.

In the 1880s Higaonna returned to Okinawa and continued the family business. He also began to teach the martial arts in and around Naha. His style was distinguished by its integration of both go-no (hard) and ju-no (soft) techniques in one system. He became so prominent that the name shorei ryu became identified with Higaonna's system.

Higaonna was noted for his powerful Sanchin kata, or form. Students reported that the wooden floor would be hot from the gripping of his feet.

Several of Higaonna's students went on to become influential masters of what came to be called karate, amongst them Chojun Miyagi, Kenwa Mabuni, Kyoda Juhatsu, Koki Shiroma, Seiko Higa, and Shiroma Shinpan.