Luogushu

01 · Historical Records

The origin and formative period of Luogushu cannot yet be established with certainty; it took shape on the outskirts of Shanghai, and by the late Qing and early Republican period it was already widely popular in the eastern and western suburbs of the Shanghai area and had spread to the Pinghu area of Jiaxing, Zhejiang. In the 1930s and 1940s Taibao Shu was flourishing in Shanghai. After 1949 only a few Shanghai shu performers also sang Taibao Shu. In 1957 the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Culture, in its effort to excavate folk quyi, had the performer Hu Shanyan create the modern medium-form piece "Beating the Salt Office", while the Nanhui County Cultural Centre brought new life to the tradition by composing and performing the first modern short-form piece to carry "Luogushu" as its genre name, "The Scent of Rice in the Reeds". Performances of Luogushu consisted mainly of traditional long-form and medium-form story catalogues, while amateur performances after 1949 centred on short works on modern subjects and on opening passages.

02 · Core Techniques & Process

Luogushu was formerly called "Taibao Shu"; the term "Taibao" evolved from the activity "Taibu" by which the villages of the outlying districts of Shanghai prayed for peace and safety. Because in performance the actors beat the gongs and drums themselves while singing the story, it is also known in folk usage as "tangluo shu" ("hall gong-and-drum book") and "shengu shu" ("spirit drum book"). After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the two names were combined into "Luogushu". The "Taibu" ceremony is similar to a Daoist ritual altar, its purpose being to drive off pestilence and epidemic disease for the living. The ceremony takes the form of speaking and singing, including spoken parts, chanting, solo singing and antiphonal singing. Its content consists of folk legends and historical stories; it is unrelated to religious ritual proper and serves only to honour the gods and entertain the people. In the course of time this form gradually emerged from within the religious ritual and developed into an independent form of folk narrative singing. The basic performance form of Luogushu is that the performers beat the gongs and drums themselves, presenting the story through singing, narration and acting. In the early period it was always a solo seated performance; from the late 1950s it gradually changed to two or more performers standing to narrate, and even to staged song, while the accompanying instruments also increased, with a small ensemble of silk-string instruments such as the pipa and the yangqin. The form most commonly used is solo narrative singing with an ensemble. In the walled town of Nanhui there appeared a teahouse called "Luban Pavilion" that specialised in the narration of Taibao Shu and similar genres. The performer nicknamed Heipi, Xu Liankui, carried Taibao Shu all the way into the City God Temple in the urban area of Shanghai. During the War of Resistance against Japan, Taibao Shu formally entered the urban area, and the more influential performers at the time included Hu Shanyan and Wang Junfa. From then on Taibao Shu was renamed Luogushu and gradually revived, in a renewed form, on amateur quyi stages. The traditional catalogues are divided into "small books", that is, texts carried mainly by singing, and "large books", that is, works carried mainly by narration of martial tales, but the small books are far more numerous, such as "Wangchuan Crossing", "The Ninth Watch", "The Eight Beauties of Gaoqiao", "The Twin Pearl Balls", "The Green Dragonfly", "The Pearl Pagoda", "The White Snake" and "The Fragrant Ball of Martial and Civil Skill"; among the large books are "The Biographies of Heroes", "Luo Tong's Northern Campaign", "The Hu Family Generals", "The Later Tang Founded" and "Seven Swords and Thirteen Knights". Short pieces such as "Old Woman Wang Rebukes the Cock" and "The Scent of Rice in the Reeds", medium-form pieces such as "Beating the Salt Office" and "Lin Chong Flees at Night", and opening pieces such as "Wild Flower Names of the Twelfth Month" and "The Praying Mantis Makes a Marriage" are all more or less representative. The content of Luogushu is drawn chiefly from folk legends, historical romances and stories of family ethics and of history, and it carries a strong local flavour and regional character. Because the times have changed, Luogushu performances have contracted, one after another old performers have passed away, and the number of performers still able to perform it has fallen to five; the whole art form has reached a point at which it can hardly survive and is in urgent need of support and protection.

03 · Regional Records & Related Items

In the course of its transmission, and according to locality, the music of Luogushu is divided into the "eastern countryside" of the Chuansha and Nanhui area and the "western countryside" of the Songjiang and Jinshan area, with tune patterns such as Jinping Diao and Diao. Owing to transmission from one generation of performers to the next, the Xiasha area became a gathering place of Taibao Shu performers known as the "Taibao nest".

04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding

Tan Jingde (official archival record of the associated inheritor): Male, Han ethnicity, born in 1942, native of Shanghai. He began to study Luogushu in 1962 and also served as an ensemble accompanist; from 1963 he taught himself the writing and composition of Luogushu, and in 1978 he became a disciple of Hu Shanyan, head of the Nanhui Quyi Troupe; afterwards he collected and collated from more than twenty folk performers in Shanghai the vocal styles and related history of Luogushu accumulated over forty years. In 2006 he became deputy director of the Nanhui District Intangible Cultural Heritage Survey Office; he is now associate research fellow of the Nanhui District Cultural Centre of Shanghai, and is thoroughly versed in the traditional skills summed up as "hand, eye, body, step and mouth; speaking, presenting, singing, acting and beating". Representative works include "A Kun Moves Sand". Representative inheritor of Luogushu, a national-level intangible cultural heritage project in the second national-level batch. Kang Wenying (official archival record of the associated inheritor): Female, Han ethnicity, born in 1962, native of Shanghai. She is skilled in the singing, the performance and the percussion of Luogushu, and is thoroughly versed in the traditional skills summed up as "hand, eye, body, step and mouth; speaking, presenting, singing, acting and beating". She has been working in the art for more than thirty years, with more than two hundred performed works to her credit, and has a certain influence on the mass culture of the district. Representative inheritor of Luogushu, a national-level intangible cultural heritage project in the second national-level batch.

05 · Associated Representative Bearers

Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:

• Tanjingde 02-0734
• Kang Wenying 02-0735

06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography

1. Luogushu (Nanhui, Shanghai) · China ICH Official Project Archive
2. Tanjingde · National Representative Bearer Archive
3. Kang Wenying · National Representative Bearer Archive

Sources

China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)

Read the official ihchina.cn record ↗