Tongyao
01 · Historical Records
Naxi children's rhymes take the Naxi mother tongue as their vehicle and are songs using the natural rhythm and rhyme of language to express children's thoughts and feelings; they circulate in the Naxi areas of the transitional zone between the Qinghai-Tibet plateau and the Yunnan-Guizhou plateau, the south-western Hengduan mountains and the Yalong river basin, concentrated in the Gucheng district and the Yulong Naxi Autonomous County of Lijiang, Yunnan, and their language and rhymes must have arisen even earlier.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
More than four hundred and sixty Naxi children's rhymes survive, varied in form and rich in kind, with eleven kinds such as lullabies, game songs, question-and-answer songs, head-word songs and herding songs, and with marked features of folk-song form in which lines are not fixed in length, stanzas not fixed in lines and songs not fixed in rhyme. On the basis of giving full play to the characteristics of the Naxi language, they pay special attention to the communication of meaning, the antithesis of words, the rhythm of sentences and the harmony of sounds, the number of lines, sentence pattern, rhyme, padding syllables and repetition all serving the charm and content of the rhymes themselves. Social development has brought great changes to the living environment, the language environment and the ways of communication, and the soil for the survival of traditional culture has changed.
Lullabies
One of the eleven kinds of Naxi children's rhymes.
Game Songs
One of the eleven kinds of Naxi children's rhymes.
Question-and-Answer Songs
One of the eleven kinds of Naxi children's rhymes.
Adobo Builds a New City
A rhyme depicting Adobo's building of the old city of Lijiang six hundred years ago.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Naxi children's rhymes take the Naxi mother tongue as their vehicle and are songs using the natural rhythm and rhyme of language to express children's thoughts and feelings; they circulate in the Naxi areas of the transitional zone between the Qinghai-Tibet and Yunnan-Guizhou plateaus, the south-western Hengduan mountains, the three parallel rivers area and the Yalong river basin, concentrated in the Gucheng district and the Yulong Naxi Autonomous County of Lijiang, Yunnan. The Naxi now living in the Lijiang area are an ethnic group formed by the fusion of Qiang people who migrated south from the ancient Hehuang area of the north-west with the local indigenes. In the Eastern Jin Huayang Guozhi's records of the Jinsha and Yalong river basins the ancient Naxi ethnic names Moshā and Mósuǒ already appear, and their language and children's rhymes must have arisen even earlier. The Naxi children's rhymes are great in number and wide in subject and rich in content, including dialect and slang, allusions and legends, astronomy and geography and climate and products.
Other submitting regions for the same item: Tongyao · Tongyao · Tongyao.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
With the evolution of the ethnic group and the development of the language the Naxi children's rhymes were continually created, spread, evolved and developed in transmission from generation to generation. The surviving rhyme Adobo Builds a New City depicts the building of the old city of Lijiang six hundred years ago; such rhymes as The Snow Mountain Is High and High have been transmitted for five generations in the family of the transmitter He Shunlin and have a long history. Traditionally the Naxi children's rhymes were transmitted chiefly from grandfather to grandson, mother to daughter, playmate to playmate and neighbour to neighbour. For more than thirty years the local cultural and educational departments and related workers have worked together and, in practice, explored a model combining the protection and transmission of Naxi children's rhymes with mother-tongue teaching, music education and festival competitions, and a transmission environment in which formal education and traditional folk transmission work together has taken initial shape. Rich in imagination, humorous in language and full of childlike delight, they combine the national, local, artistic, interesting, philosophical and practical in one and are a vivid expression of the intercommunication of language and literature, music and art, sports and games and etiquette and custom, with relatively high historical, cultural and artistic value.
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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