Salar Hunli
01 · Historical Records
The Duiwei Aoyina preserved in Salar weddings is an ethnic dance with certain dramatic characteristics whose main content is the traditional education of the people in their migration history. It was still preserved in weddings before the 1950s, but because of social change and the shortening of the wedding period, this form of expression no longer exists, and only some elderly people still remember it.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
The Salar wedding is the most important ceremonial activity in the life rituals of the Salar people. Traditional Salar wedding ceremonies are all held in the depth of winter each year. From betrothal to the holding of the wedding ceremony, one must pass through several procedures — matchmaking, sending off the matchmaker, delivering the betrothal tea, delivering the betrothal gifts, reciting the marriage scripture, seeing the bride off, and returning to the bride's family — taking somewhat more than half a year in all. Ancient Turkic wedding customs such as the presentation of the "sheep's back" are still preserved in Salar weddings to this day.
Sending the matchmaker and the betrothal tea
The first two steps: dispatching the matchmaker and delivering the betrothal tea.
Reciting the marriage-matching text
A sung text used at the moment of agreement, its wording closely fitted to the scene.
Offering the sheep on the platter
An old Turkic custom of presenting a whole sheep on the ceremonial table.
Duiwei Aoyina, the migration dance
A dance-drama about the migration history that survives only in the memory of the elderly.
The winter wedding and the bridal send-off
The main rites are held in deep winter, closing with the send-off and the return visit.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Salar weddings are concentrated in the plain-plateau belt of Xunhua Salar Autonomous County. Although the ritual procedure varies slightly in timing between villages, the basic order is largely the same: matchmaking, sending off the matchmaker, delivering betrothal tea, delivering betrothal gifts, reciting the marriage scripture, seeing the bride off, and returning to the bride's family — each step linked to the next, the whole process taking more than half a year. Winter is the season for the main ceremony, because farming is idle, livestock are fat, and the roads are easy to travel; several families' affairs are squeezed into the same period, and the matchmakers' back-and-forth trips become the measure of the season. The congratulatory speeches and song contests at weddings each have their own modes in the Lintan and Xunhua areas; the articulation of the lyrics and the weight of the held notes differ from village to village, while the ritual skeleton remains unchanged. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, this whole set of procedures was transmitted household by household by village elders and folk artists; by the time compilers such as Han Zhanxiang had put the wedding congratulatory speeches and sung lyrics in their original form into the collections Salar Folk Stories, Salar Ballads, and Salar Proverbs, the wording that had only been in use within villages became known to outsiders.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
These customs have disappeared from the life of the descendants of the Turkic peoples, yet have been preserved among the Salar, who are far removed from the Turkic cultural sphere in both time and space; they are therefore a living fossil for the study of ancient Turkic culture. Salar wedding ceremonies are recorded in considerable detail in the Xunhua Gazetteer compiled during the Qianlong reign of the Qing dynasty; for more than two hundred years the whole wedding procedure has not changed greatly, and the transmission system is relatively complete, which is of important value for the study of Salar cultural history. Han Zhanxiang (record of the associated inheritor's official file): Male, Salar ethnicity, born in July 1942, from Xunhua Salar Autonomous County, Qinghai Province. For many years he has devoted himself to collecting, excavating, compiling, and assembling Salar folk culture; through extensive investigation and research he has mastered much folkloric knowledge, and has become a folk artist and folklore expert beloved by the Salar people. In the 1980s he participated in editing the three collections Salar Folk Stories, Salar Ballads, and Salar Proverbs, together with four books of strongly documentary original literary materials; his main aims were to recite wedding congratulatory speeches and to perform hua'er songs. He is skilled at improvised singing and composition, and has created many Salar literary and artistic works beloved of the people. In the project to organize and protect traditional Salar wedding culture, he laid emphasis on presenting the wedding congratulatory speeches and each ritual sequence in their original form, and on the fit between the sung lyrics and the wedding scenes. He is a representative inheritor of the Salar wedding, a national-level intangible cultural heritage item of the fourth batch.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Han Zhanxiang 04-1969
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
This static English edition is rendered at the edge for search engines, AI crawlers and readers without JavaScript; it mirrors the bilingual dossier. 阅读中文版，或返回 英文名录。