Jia Zhihu
Lineage & School of Heritage
He was born into a family of dockworkers; as a child he helped his father carry small baskets of scattered cargo on a pole or on his back, and imitated his father's work songs.
Mastery, Signature Works & Repertoire
Male, Han ethnicity, born in February 1938 in Shanghai. In 1956 he became a family dependent worker of the Shanghai Port Authority and began stevedoring at Yangzhan Wharf, later renamed the Tenth District of Shanghai Port. Strong and capable, he mastered every dock trade, whether carrying with a pole, lifting, tamping, hauling, stacking or passing the water gate, and was thoroughly versed in every move of the dock loading and unloading work songs. He was especially skilled in the single-carry song for two men and in the double-pair song for four, the four-pair song for eight, the eight-pair song for sixteen and the ten-pair song for thirty-two men within the gangbang work songs. He was adept at weaving his daily observations and thoughts into the songs, using pitch and rhythm to regulate his fellow workers' breathing and pace; with each call and response he lifted their spirits, and he soon became a leading singer of work songs in the Tenth District of Shanghai Port.
Honors & Recognition
National representative bearer of Matou Work Songs (Shanghai Port Dock Work Songs), a fifth-batch national intangible cultural heritage project.
References & Archival Sources
Representative Items of This Bearer
- Matou Work Songs Ⅱ-99
- Matou Work Songs Ⅱ-99
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。