Tongyao
01 · Historical Records
Children's rhymes have a history of a thousand years in China, and the officially compiled histories and miscellaneous biographies, notebooks and novels of successive dynasties abound in records of them. Beijing children's rhymes carry the urban character of Beijing in various periods and the thoughts and feelings of the people of Beijing.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
Children's rhymes mean the songs without musical notation sung by children, a kind of folk song of special significance recited and spread by a special group and current throughout the country. Children's rhymes hold a deposit of excellent national culture and contain rich educational content. Beijing children's rhymes display the urban character of Beijing in various periods and the thoughts and feelings of the people of Beijing, carry several thousand years of Chinese history and are strongly infectious and penetrating, valuable educational resources to be excavated and drawn on. Beijing children's rhymes may be divided into three categories by content: first, those composed and sung by elders and parents to educate children; second, those describing the life, feelings, ideas and views of adults; third, those worked up from customary phrases in ancient ceremonies or historical subjects. They have many forms of expression, including anadiplosis, string words, tongue-twisters, proverb-and-rhyme form, lullaby, riddle form, chain tune, counting song, question-and-answer song and parallelism. In composition they must fit the rhyme, including rhyming on alternate lines, on every line and every two lines. Examples include A Plaque Hangs at Dongzhimen, Big Head Is Big, A Garden of Greens Turned into Spirits, Noodles in Cold Water, Granny Wind and Jin Gulubang. Bearing the urban character of Beijing in various periods and the feelings of its people, they are precious oral material for studying Beijing folklore and urban culture.
A Plaque Hangs at Dongzhimen
One of the representative works of Beijing children's rhymes.
A Garden of Greens Turned into Spirits
One of the representative works of Beijing children's rhymes.
Jin Gulubang
One of the representative works of Beijing children's rhymes.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Beijing children's rhymes take the Xuanwu district of Beijing, now Xicheng district, as their core area of circulation and are current in the streets, lanes and courtyard houses of the capital, mostly recited and sung in the Beijing dialect and sung by every household in the course of bringing up children, with a strong local character.
Other submitting regions for the same item: Tongyao · Tongyao · Tongyao.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
Children's rhymes have mainly two modes of transmission, written and oral; their language is simple and easy to understand and their content plain and natural, and they are an excellent representative of folk literature and art. Today Beijing children's rhymes, a literary form reflecting children's innocence and delight that has had an important influence on the growth of countless people, are gradually fading from children's lives, and the familiar rhymes sung by people for a thousand years have begun to be forgotten by today's children. Protection, transmission and development of Beijing children's rhymes, this treasure of the nation, must be begun at once so that they may better serve the growth of children and young people.
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。