Xingguo Mountain Songs

01 · Historical Records

The Xingguo mountain songs arose after the Hakka forebears migrated south and settled in southern Jiangxi, formed by the fusion of the ancient manners of the Central Plains with the local indigenous culture.

02 · Core Techniques & Process

Xingguo county lies in southern Jiangxi under the jurisdiction of Ganzhou city. More than ninety-five per cent of Xingguo's population are Hakka who migrated south from the Central Plains and their descendants. Because of the peculiar geographical environment and their Hakka background, the Hakka who lived generation after generation in the high mountains and dense forests led a hard life, and at leisure from labour they had only mountain songs with which to give vent to their inner feeling. In the towns and villages of Xingguo song is heard everywhere and everyone is a singer, so Xingguo has always been praised as a “home of mountain songs”. Representative pieces of Xingguo mountain songs include The Mustard Greens in the Garden Have Bolted, Embroidering a Sachet, Every Trade Produces a First-Rate Scholar and Praising the Eight Immortals. Xingguo mountain songs are lively and varied, full of the breath of life, and have such forms as solo, antiphonal singing, “three striking iron”, linked singing and round singing, and such kinds as locked songs, plate songs, duelling songs, guessing flowers, throwing Guanyin, loach biting its tail, embroidering the sash, vine twining round the tree and tree twining round the vine. Divided by the larger performance forms, Xingguo mountain songs are roughly as follows: singing to and fro in the fields and hills, varying with the feeling, the scene and the person, with content covering man-woman love, production, life and current affairs; “jumping the sorcerer”, divided into the South River mountain songs and the East River mountain songs, the South River ones again divided into love songs and the buffoonish comic songs, performed in costume by the male and female sorcerers, while the East River mountain songs are congratulatory; the custom songs, sung at temple fairs, weddings and funerals, birthday congratulations, house-building and a child's first-month celebration, the singers being mostly professional song masters; the narrative mountain songs, mostly antiphonal singing of question and answer, pro and con, on public occasions, with a strong narrative quality, often unfolding around a single theme, and nowadays often used by local government as a means of publicity; and the singing contest, a special form in which singers gather to hold a tournament, testing their store of knowledge and comparing their quickness, with climaxes following one another and the champion of the platform decided at the end. Xingguo mountain songs are rooted in the deep soil of Hakka culture, covering every aspect of Hakka life and full of rich Hakka cultural information. In a sense the Xingguo mountain songs are a historical scroll of the Hakka's living and multiplying.

03 · Regional Records & Related Items

The fusion of the ancient manners and lingering charm of the Central Plains with the local indigenous culture formed the Xingguo mountain songs with their distinctive character.

04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding

To protect, study and interpret the Xingguo mountain songs and bring out their essence is undoubtedly a measure of the utmost importance for carrying forward the nation's fine culture. (Associated bearer recorded in the official archive:) Xu Shengjiu, male, Han, born 1926, a native of Xingguo, Jiangxi. He was passionately fond of singing mountain songs from childhood, and in 1947 took the folk artist Zhu Xianzhao as his master to learn “jumping the sorcerer”, which fuses the drawing of talismans and chanting of spells, guessing flowers and singing, and mountain-song singing, and began his career as a professional song master. After the founding of New China he sang with the county and township spare-time mountain-song teams in the villages, never stopping even past the age of eighty, and taught many mountain-song inheritors. His performance—singing and dancing at once, a man dressed as a woman, improvising, vivid in image, with a high and ringing voice—has a style of its own, and he has many times won the title of “outstanding singer” in county-wide mountain-song tournaments. He is a representative bearer of the second batch of national-level intangible cultural heritage items, Xingguo mountain songs. Wang Shanliang, male, Han, born June 1941, a native of Xingguo county, Jiangxi. He loved singing mountain songs from childhood and often sang to himself while herding cattle in the hills; at the age of eight he was chosen to sing mountain songs in the township to celebrate liberation. While at the old-style private school he often learned the techniques of mountain-song singing from such song masters as Yu Zhonglu, Xie Wenleng and Liu Chengda, becoming a famous little mountain-song singer in the township. At fifteen he began his career as a professional song master; in 1959 he was selected by the township to study at the county-run agricultural university, and on graduating was assigned to work at the horticultural farm under the Xingguo county agricultural bureau. For many years he toured the villages of the whole county in many performances with the spare-time mountain-song teams organized by the county and townships. He is a representative bearer of the third batch of national-level intangible cultural heritage items, Xingguo mountain songs.

05 · Associated Representative Bearers

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

• Xu Shengjiu 02-0233
• Wang Shanliang 03-0812
• Guo Dejing

06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography

1. Xingguo Mountain Songs (Xingguo, Jiangxi) · China ICH Official Project Archive
2. Xu Shengjiu · National Representative Bearer Archive
3. Wang Shanliang · National Representative Bearer Archive

Sources

China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)

Read the official ihchina.cn record ↗