Hua'er
01 · Historical Records
The Laoyeshan flower fair is a large folk-song singing event held on the sixth day of the sixth lunar month each year on Laoye mountain in the Datong Hui and Tu autonomous county of Qinghai. It arose in the Ming dynasty and, over several centuries of development, and in company with the activity of “paying court to the mountain and roaming the fair”, gradually evolved from a mainly god-entertaining affair into a large folk seasonal festival mainly for the entertainment of people.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
It is sung on two main kinds of occasion: daily production and life, and the “flower fair”. The “flower fair” is a large folk song gathering, also called “singing the mountain”. The Laoyeshan flower fair has two forms of singing. The first is the spontaneous singing of the masses, who on the “sixth of the sixth” in the dense woods and flowering thickets of Laoye mountain sing freely in groups of scores or hundreds, feeling and scene merging into one. The second is the organized singing that arose after 1949, with fixed places and stages, where singers chosen through round after round of selection compete in song on the stage. The Laoyeshan flower fair is chiefly a singing of the “Hehuang hua'er”. The singers are men and women of the Han, Hui, Tu, Tibetan and other nationalities, who all sing the hua'er in Chinese. The content of the Laoyeshan hua'er is mainly the singing of love and courtship life but also touches religion, folk custom, production labour, historical story and new persons and new affairs. Its lyrics are mostly in the four-line form of alternating seven-character lines (the first and third) and eight-character lines (the second and fourth), with the special rule that the second and fourth lines must end in a “double-character” word and that the first and third lines and the second and fourth lines rhyme separately, forming a special lyric metre that is also an exception among the Han folk songs of the whole country. The language of the Hehuang hua'er is vivid, vivid in image, beautiful and sprightly, making much use of the rhetorical devices of exposition, comparison and association, and possesses extremely high literary value. Representative pieces of the Datong Laoyeshan hua'er include The Datong Tune, The Dongxia Tune and The Laoyeshan Tune. These tunes are distinctive in rhythm, beautiful and lyrical, high and ringing, sweet and drawn out, and are deeply loved by the people of every nationality in Datong.
The Datong Tune
The Datong Laoyeshan hua'er has such representative pieces as The Datong Tune, The Dongxia Tune and The Laoyeshan Tune.
The Dongxia Tune
A representative tune of the Datong Laoyeshan hua'er, distinctive in rhythm and sweet and drawn out.
The Laoyeshan Tune
A representative tune of the Laoyeshan flower fair, sung by the Han, Hui, Tu and Tibetan singers of Datong.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Hua'er is a mountain-song kind widely current among the eight ethnic groups—Hui, Han, Tu, Dongxiang, Bao'an, Salar, Tibetan and Yugur—of the four provinces and regions of Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia and Xinjiang. It is always sung in the local Chinese dialect and may be sung only outside the villages and stockades; it is commonly called a “wild song” (as opposed to the “home song”, that is, the banquet song) and is also known as the “youth”. This is the marked feature by which the Laoyeshan “hua'er” and “flower fair” differ from other folk songs and song fairs.
Other submitting regions for the same item: Hua'er · Hua'er · Hua'er · Hua'er · Hua'er · Hua'er · Hua'er · Hua'er · Hua'er · Hua'er.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
(Associated bearer recorded in the official archive:) Ma Delin, male, Hui, born 1949, a native of Datong, Qinghai. He began learning to sing the hua'er at thirteen. From 1986, on the basis of the traditional hua'er, he composed 1,059 “newly composed great traditional hua'er” that take myths, legends and historical allusions as their starting points. After retiring from the Yaodong primary school in 2004 he still devoted himself to the singing and transmission of the hua'er. The hua'er he composes are true, vivid and lively, and he sings them in a sweet and elegant manner, having both the plainness of the mountain folk and the quickness of the man of letters. In 2003 he compiled and published the Newly Composed Great Traditional Hua'er. He is a representative bearer of the second batch of national-level intangible cultural heritage items, the hua'er (Laoyeshan flower fair).
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Ma Jinshan 02-0241
- Ma Delin 02-0242
- Ma Mingshan 02-0243
- Zhao Cunlu 02-0244
- Zhang Yingzhi 02-0245
- Wang Cunfu 02-0246
- Ma Shenglin 02-0247
- Wang Lianlian 03-0819
- Liu Guocheng 03-0820
- Zhang Mingxing 03-0821
- Han Shengyuan 03-0822
- Su Ping 05-2040
- Li Guiying 05-2041
- Wang Deqin 05-2042
- Ma Handong 05-2043
- Wang Xiufang 05-2044
- Song Baoyuan
- Zhang Jianjun
- Wen Xianglian
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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