Poya Love Songs
01 · Historical Records
The Poya love songs are a collection of love folk songs recorded on homespun cloth by eighty-one pictorial symbols, called buwa fen in Zhuang, meaning mountain songs with patterns painted on homespun cloth, now called by the local people the Poya song book; they circulate mainly in the Zhuang villages of Liuyi and Zhening in Funing county of Yunnan, Nagu and Laojie of Guichao, Baibi of Zhesang township and Huajia township, centred on Poya village of Boai town.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
The pictorial symbols include moon, stars, trees, rice, plough, axe, fowl, horse, man, clothes, bird, house and maple leaf, simple and plain. Each pictorial symbol represents one love song or one kind of love song; the singer need only look at the symbol to sing the corresponding song. The collection recounts in detail the moving story of a young man and woman from meeting and knowing each other to falling in love and pledging to grow old together. It uses the linked-tune structural mode, rising layer by layer, with the coherence and completeness of a plot, rare among the love short poems of minority peoples. The protagonists' winding love process reflects the production and life and the folk customs of the ancient Zhuang and embraces such folk arts as literature, music and painting, rich in content and with the lingering style of the Book of Songs. Its tunes are mainly such Zhuang mountain-song ditties as fen dalao, fen biao, fen e'ai and fen gema. Its lines are mostly five-character, each song of four or of several dozen lines, its main rhymes the head-tail rhyme, the waist-tail rhyme and the tail rhyme, its rhythm strict and harmonious. The tunes are beautiful and softly moving, the technique flexible and varied and the rhetoric apt, with very high artistic value.
The Poya Song Book
The Zhuang love folk-song collection recorded on homespun cloth by eighty-one pictorial symbols.
The Linked-Tune Structure
The structural mode of the Poya love songs rising layer by layer with the coherence and completeness of a plot.
The Pictorial Symbols
The simple and plain symbols such as moon, stars, trees, rice, plough and axe representing love songs.
Antiphonal Singing Between Man and Woman
The form sung in the northern dialect of Zhuang, man and woman facing each other, one singing and one answering.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
The love songs are sung in the northern dialect of Zhuang, man and woman facing each other, one singing and one answering.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
The Poya love songs have a wide popular base and folk transmission and are a classic love masterpiece of Funing Zhuang folk song, with very high artistic value. The ancient Zhuang farming mode of production, folk ritual, costume culture and so on involved in the songs are of important value for studying Zhuang history, folklore and folk music. The pictorial symbols used in the songs are called by experts in writing the buds of writing, providing valuable clues for studying the origin of writing.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Nongfengmei 04-1504
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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