Jiefang
Lineage & School of Heritage
He loved listening to stories from childhood; his grandfather became his first teacher, and from the hired hand Shang Chunxiang he also learned a great many Ronghe zheng (teasing tales).
Mastery, Signature Works & Repertoire
Male, Han ethnicity, born in February 1936, a native of Wanrong County, Shanxi Province. A teller of Wanrong jokes. From the 1980s he began the work of collecting and arranging Wanrong jokes, and in 1989 seventeen of his jokes were included in the Wanrong County Gazetteer. In 1999 he published in the Shanxi Radio and Television University Newspaper the article A Distinctive Spiritual Culture of Wanrong: A Documentary Account of Wanrong Zheng. From 2003 to the present he has published, one after another, books including Wan Rong Xiao Hua ABCD Dang An (The ABCD Archive of Wanrong Jokes) and Wan Rong Xiao Hua Tan Yuan (Tracing the Sources of Wanrong Jokes). In 2014 he wrote Wan Rong Xiao Hua Zhuan Juan (A Special Volume on Wanrong Jokes) and introduced the history and artistic appeal of Wanrong jokes on television stations. He has been engaged all year round in activities transmitting Wanrong jokes and has developed his own distinctive manner of telling them; at present he continues, together with his disciples Zhang Xuguang, Li Tingyu and others, to collect, arrange, disseminate and research Wanrong jokes.
Honors & Recognition
National representative bearer of Humorous Stories (Wanrong Jokes), a fifth-batch national intangible cultural heritage project.
References & Archival Sources
Representative Items of This Bearer
- Humorous Stories Ⅰ-84
Profile
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