Manchu Folk Tales
01 · Historical Records
Eastern Liaoning Manchu folk stories arose in the period when the Manchu turned from fishing and hunting to farming and, in close contact with Han culture, mutually fused with it, having the cultural feature of a Manchu-Han mixture. Their content mostly traces the ancestral legends and national memory of the Manchu, such as The Swan Fairy, Bukūri Yongšon, The Pool Where the Heavenly Maiden Bathed and The Sun and Moon Peak.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
Eastern Liaoning Manchu folk stories are a broad cultural concept, including such prose oral narrative forms as Manchu myth, legend and story. In The Swan Fairy, Bukūri Yongšon and The Pool Where the Heavenly Maiden Bathed, the youngest and most beautiful daughter of the heavenly god conceives and gives birth to Aisin Gioro Bukūri Yongšon, the founder of the Manchu, after eating the red fruit brought by a vermilion bird or magpie. The Sun and Moon Peak tells how in remote antiquity, when the world was deadly still, the heavenly emperor's youngest daughter threw her left eye into the sky to become the sun, her right eye to become the moon and a string of pearls from her neck to become the stars, while the little fairy, to save the world, turned into a mountain, the Sun and Moon Peak. The Manchu folk stories arose in the period when the Manchu turned from fishing and hunting to farming and, in close contact with Han culture, mutually fused with it, having the cultural feature of a Manchu-Han mixture.
The Swan Fairy
The ancestral legend telling of the birth of the Manchu founder Bukūri Yongšon.
Bukūri Yongšon
The legend of the Manchu founder Bukūri Yongšon.
The Sun and Moon Peak
An ancient myth in which a fairy turns into the Sun and Moon Peak to save the world.
Nurhaci Flees Disaster
A representative story reflecting legends of the Manchu forebears.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Manchu folk stories are distributed mainly within the eastern Liaoning Manchu cultural sphere, which is the vast area of the Changbai mountain outranges called by the Manchu people of Liaoning and Shenyang the mountains of the east.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
Eastern Liaoning Manchu folk stories are the collective memory of Manchu society and the cultural wealth created by the Manchu people, with important historical, cultural and scientific research value. In recent years, because modern mass media have replaced the traditional oral transmission of information and especially because the older generation of story-tellers who transmitted the ancient Manchu narratives has died one after another, the modern Manchu people's historical memory of their national tradition and culture has become ever more blurred, and it is necessary to protect the transmitters of Eastern Liaoning Manchu folk stories.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Aixinjueluo Qingkai 03-0790
- Cui Yong
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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