She Double Third Festival
01 · Historical Records
Legend has it that a She insurgent army during the Tang dynasty was once defeated and retreated into the deep mountains. Short of provisions, its soldiers gathered and ate a dark-colored wild fruit called wuren to stave off hunger. Their fighting spirit was greatly restored, and on the third day of the third lunar month they broke through the encirclement.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
The third day of the third lunar month is a traditional festival of the She people, whose importance to the She is comparable to that of the Spring Festival. The custom of the She Third Day of the Third Month is practiced in Jingning County, Zhejiang Province, the only She autonomous county in China. On every Third Day of the Third Month, She households slaughter livestock and offer sacrifices to their ancestors. In addition, She people often choose this day as the occasion for young men and women to pledge their love and arrange marriage. Thereafter, on every Third Day of the Third Month the She gather wuren leaves and boil them to extract a juice, which is mixed into rice and cooked as a memorial. Making black rice and eating black rice have thus become an important activity of the festival. After nightfall the She also hold bonfire singing parties, at which they sing antiphonal songs to one another, perform traditional songs and dances including dragon-lantern, lion, fish-lantern, and torch dances, and conduct traditional She athletic competitions. The She Third Day of the Third Month is an important bond for maintaining unity among the She people, and it also plays a significant role in strengthening unity between the She and Han peoples.
Cooking and sharing black rice
The festival's staple is rice cooked with the green juice of a wild plant; each household shares it with relatives and passing visitors, turning an offering into a way of meeting.
Ancestor rites and the choosing of a marriage day
Families offer slaughtered livestock to their ancestors on the same day many young people fix a courtship or marriage, making the festival both a memorial and an opening.
The bonfire song gathering
After dark the villagers light bonfires and answer each other's songs, interspersed with dragon, lion, fish-lantern and torch dances and physical contests.
The Tang-period uprising and the legend of the dark berry
Local legend holds that Tang-period rebels ate the dark wild fruit to regain strength and broke out on the third of the third month, which is why both date and fruit are remembered.
The She-language song ground in Jingning
With no script of their own, the She keep their language alive mainly at festival song contests where songs are sung in She rather than translated.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Jingning is the most concentrated center of transmission for the Third Day of the Third Month. The festival customs are divided into several sub-regions along the county's streams and mountain paths, with each village organizing celebrations according to lineage and clan relations; in important years the sub-regions come together in the county seat for a general gathering, celebrating alongside the surrounding Han villages. The venues usually fall on the open ground before ancestral halls and incense halls and on the slopes outside the stockades: the ancestor-worship segment must be completed in rooms housing ancestral tablets and incense tables; the making of black rice and boiling of wuren juice mostly borrow the village's communal kitchens; the slaughtering of animals and entertaining of guests turn individual houses into banquet halls; and the bonfire singing parties move to the night-time drying grounds or the flat banks of streams, the circle around the fire marking the very distance for antiphonal singing. Black rice is prepared by each household gathering its own leaves, and once made it is not enjoyed alone but distributed to neighbors, relatives, and passing Han people; a single seasonal food thus carries three functions at once: ancestor worship, hospitality, and social exchange. Mountain-song antiphony is usually started by middle-aged and elderly singers, with young men and women taking up the refrain in alternation, singing as they walk from door to door along the road, so the song field spreads from a circle in one place into a ribbon along the stream. The market fairs held around this time are often folded into the festival period, so that the exchange of goods and social intercourse are both accomplished through the festival. What makes Jingning distinctive is that the She language has a living arena of use here: songs are sung in the She language without translation, attracting neighboring Han people to watch and join in the singing, and the festival has thus become one of the few remaining She cultural spaces still sustained by the spoken language.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
The She people have no written script of their own; requiring songs to be sung in the She language at the Third Day of the Third Month objectively serves to protect the She language. During the festival, She men and women, old and young, all put on their finest ethnic dress, which objectively also favors the protection and transmission of ethnic costume.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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