Yan Shuihua
Mastery, Signature Works & Repertoire
Female, Tujia ethnicity, born in January 1962 in Yongshun County, Hunan Province. She is a singer of the Tujia kujiage, the bridal lament. At the age of six she began learning the kujiage from her mother, Zhang Youfeng, and has now been singing it for more than fifty years. She can sing the kujiage in both the Tujia language and Chinese; her singing is authentic in style, beautiful in timbre and tenderly moving. She is the most representative bearer of the kujiage in the Tujia-inhabited areas, knows the entire performance and its sequence of proceedings intimately, and can perform and conduct dialogue fluently in the Tujia language. She took part in the filming of a China Central Television documentary on folk customs, and has received experts and scholars on more than a hundred occasions, performing the kujiage for them and thereby extending its influence. She regularly instructs her children and grandchildren in practice and is devoted to carrying forward the kujiage, China's own "aria", so that it is handed down through the generations.
Honors & Recognition
National representative bearer of Tujia Kujiage, a fifth-batch national intangible cultural heritage project.
References & Archival Sources
Representative Items of This Bearer
- Tujia Kujiage Ⅰ-112
- Tujia Kujiage Ⅰ-112
Profile
This static English edition is rendered at the edge for search engines, AI crawlers and readers without JavaScript. Compiled from official national representative bearer archival records, organized by topic and translated into English. 阅读中文版。