Si Opera
01 · Historical Records
Sizhou opera was originally called lahun qiang; it originated at Shangtang town in Sihong county, Jiangsu, and through folk artists' recording and collation gradually formed the fixed tunes of lahun qiang, with a history of more than two hundred years. Before 1949 the locality alone had thirty-eight family troupes. In 1952 it was named “Sizhou opera” and in 1953, with the approval of the Sihong county government, the Sihong County Sizhou Opera Troupe was formally founded. Drawing on the Jiangsu volume of the Annals of Chinese Xiqu, Sizhou opera grew out of lahun qiang and was named in 1952, the Sihong troupe being founded in 1953 with county approval; in 2006 Sizhou opera was inscribed in the first batch of the national intangible cultural heritage list.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
Sizhou opera has a strong local character, its singing plaintive and gorgeous, fine and pleasing. The female voice especially, at the end of each passage, soars an octave upward with a small-voice flourish, and the male voice adds filler words to the trailing tune, with a soul-stirring charm. Its features are: half-singing, half-speaking; its recitation, singing and performing style are closely bound up with the local spoken language and customs, and its accompaniment is based mainly on the native pipa, erhu and bamboo flute. It is accompanied by the native pipa, erhu and bamboo flute, and on the basis of lahun qiang its singing has developed various ban patterns, the female voice marked by an octave-soaring flourish at the close and the male voice by a trailing tune with filler words, its recitation close to northern Jiangsu speech and rich in narrative-song flavour.
Shi Mianhua (Picking Cotton)
One of the traditional short plays of Sizhou opera (lahun qiang), noted for its song-and-dance and life-like performance.
Da Gan Bang (Beating the Dry Rod)
One of the traditional short plays of lahun qiang, its singing rich in narrative-song flavour and long circulating among the people of northern Jiangsu and northern Anhui.
Wang Sanjie Pao Caiqiu (Wang Sanjie Throws the Brocade Ball)
One of the traditional plays of lahun qiang, often performed on folk wedding occasions.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
In the late Qing Sizhou opera was distributed mainly across twenty townships in Sihong, including Shangtang, Weiying, Fengshan, Guiren, Zhuhu and Meihua. The genre's plain and warm style is much loved by the local people. Sizhou opera is found in northern Jiangsu, northern Anhui, eastern Henan and southern Shandong; the Jiangsu line centres on Sihong and shares an origin and interpenetrates with Anhui Sizhou opera and Liuqin opera, the townships of Shangtang, Weiying and Fengshan in Sihong once being areas dense with troupes.
Other submitting regions for the same item: Si Opera · Si Opera.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
At present, as the old artists gradually leave the stage and young actors cannot keep up, the genre lacks successors and its traditional craft faces loss, so protection is urgently needed. Growing out of folk lahun qiang, Sizhou opera preserves a wealth of folk music and dialect information and is an important sample for studying operatic transmission along the Jiangsu–Anhui border; the Sihong county authorities, relying on the Sizhou Opera Troupe, sustain the genre through reviving traditional plays, collating scripts and stage photographs, and school programmes. Li Hongxiang (as recorded in the official dossier of an associated inheritor): female, Han, born in February 1960 in Sihong county, Jiangsu. A national first-grade actor. She studied Sizhou opera under Xiao Changyu and Zang Qingluan and after graduating from senior middle school in 1977 entered the Sihong County Sizhou Opera Troupe to study and perform the art. Over more than forty years she has been engaged in arranging and performing Sizhou opera, staging many full-length and excerpt plays and performing nearly a thousand times. She is a representative inheritor of Sizhou opera in the fifth batch of national intangible cultural heritage projects. In recent years she has been chiefly responsible for collecting and collating traditional Sizhou opera repertory and stage photographs and for organising protection and transmission work, training more than twenty Sizhou opera actors and taking part all year round in intangible-heritage-in-schools activities, doing a great deal of foundational work for the genre's development.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Chen Ruomei 02-0588
- Li Baoqin 02-0589
- Lushibin 02-0590
- Li Hongxiang 05-2373
- Tao Wanxia 05-2374
- Zhou Bin 05-2375
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
This static English edition is rendered at the edge for search engines, AI crawlers and readers without JavaScript; it mirrors the bilingual dossier. 阅读中文版，或返回 英文名录。