Taige

Ⅹ-87Folk CustomsLongde, NingxiaBatch 2 (2008)Newly Added Item

01 · Historical Records

Taige (raised pavilion platforms) originated in god-welcoming procession and temple-fair activities in the Central Plains region. It later spread gradually to the southeastern coast and the northwest, flourished for a time during the Qing dynasty, and in the course of transmission combined with local conditions in each place, giving rise to distinct local characteristics.

02 · Core Techniques & Process

Taige is also known as 'taijiao,' 'taige,' 'gaotai,' 'naoge,' 'naoge,' and 'gaozhuang,' and is a form of folk parade performance in traditional festival celebrations. In a taige performance, several children dressed as characters from classical opera form striking tableaux based on dramatic plots. These are fixed to iron posts and supports on a square pavilion frame and carried along by bearers. Traditional taige tableaux are mostly taken from plays such as The Butterfly Lovers, The Marriage of the Heavenly Fairy (Tianxian Pei), The Legend of the White Snake, Journey to the West, Zhaojun Goes Beyond the Great Wall, The Blue Bridge Tryst, The Yellow Crane Tower, and The Fisherman's Revenge. The tableaux stand about 3 to 5 meters high; the pavilions vary from three to five tiers, generally with one performer per tier, though some have four performers on the bottom tier, five or six in the middle tier, and one on the top tier. When a taige procession moves, four pavilions are generally used, and on a large scale there may be six or even eight; each pavilion is borne along by four or eight carriers. Taige fuses painting, opera, colorful paper-and-bamboo craft, and paper modeling into a single art. Its figures are elegant and its tableaux spectacular, making it much loved by the general public and long popular in folk life without decline. The gaotai (raised platform) of Longde County is a form of shehuo (village festive performance) that evolved from god-worship activities, with performances held on a fixed date each year on the ninth day of the first lunar month. In the townships of Wenbao, Fengtai, Shanhe, and Shatang within Longde County, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, gaotai horse shehuo is almost universally popular. Longde County's folk culture has a long history, and its shehuo types are numerous and complete in variety: gaotai horse shehuo, lion dances, stilt walking, tuituiche (cart-pushing acts), driving the donkey, flower boats, yangge troupes, bamboo horses, decorated floats, waist-drum troupes, and 'xiren' (comic performers), among other folk shehuo performance forms. These encompass performance, modeling, language, painted decoration, and handcraft production, and have become living fossils of the folk art of the Liupan Mountain region. With the development of the times, the construction of Longde gaotai has grown ever more exquisite and refined, placing greater emphasis on portraying character personality and unfolding story content, while decoration, technique, and height have all improved considerably. Designers have applied principles of mechanics to fit gaotai frames with ball bearings and gears, adding raising, lowering, and rotating functions, and have finished them with high-tech materials, bringing gaotai performance to a higher artistic level. With the rapid advance of modernization, Longde gaotai is increasingly neglected and its room for development continues to shrink.

The platform social fire on the ninth

Evolved from god-worship, it is performed on a fixed date, the ninth of the first month.

Bearings, gears and rising motion

Bearings and gears add rising and turning motions, finished with modern materials.

Steel frames on motor vehicles

Motor vehicles now provide the motive power and carry steel frames replacing the wooden core.

The Investiture of the Gods and the Fairy Scattering Flowers

His platforms for the Investiture of the Gods and other tales are ingeniously conceived and vividly characterised.

A whole family of social fires

Dozens of forms, from platform horses to drums and yangge, make the region a living museum of folk art.

03 · Regional Records & Related Items

Gaotai horse shehuo is popular in nearly all the townships within Longde County, including Wenbao, Fengtai, Shanhe, and Shatang, where it competes alongside lion dances, stilt walking, tuituiche (cart-pushing acts), driving the donkey, flower boats, and yangge troupes. The representative inheritor Liang Erdun was born into a peasant family and is the fourth generation in the Liang family's lineage of Qinqiang opera and shehuo art. By using steel pipes in place of wooden cores and motor vehicles in place of human bearers, he carried this shehuo from the Liupan Mountain region out onto larger performance stages.

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04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding

As modernization accelerates, taige activities are gradually declining, and in rural areas the craft of making taige has found no successors to carry it on, making related rescue and preservation work a matter of urgency. Longde gaotai is a precious traditional art handed down by the people of Longde from generation to generation, and holds considerable value for research in folklore studies and folk art. At present, many veteran artists are advanced in years and successors are scarce; Longde gaotai is on the verge of extinction and urgently needs protection. Liang Erdun (from the official archive record of the associated inheritor): Male, Han ethnicity, born in November 1946, a native of Longde County, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. He has fully mastered the planning of themes and plots for gaotai shehuo, the making of gaotai cores and props, the costuming of performers, god-welcoming sacrificial rites, and live performance. While carrying on the traditional gaotai shehuo borne by bearers on wooden cores, he introduced modern motor vehicles as a source of power and as carriers, used steel pipes in place of wooden cores for the gaotai frames, and incorporated a wide range of folk handcrafts such as calligraphy, painting, and paper cutting, enhancing the art's expressive power and turning gaotai shehuo into a 'dance in the air.' The gaotai shehuo works he has designed and created, including Investiture of the Gods, The Fairy Scattering Flowers, Zhu Bajie Carrying His Wife, and Eight Barbarians Presenting Treasures, are ingeniously conceived and novel in subject matter, with vividly individualized and lively character portrayals, and bold, exaggerated, thrillingly wonderful scene designs of great magnificence. A representative inheritor, in the fifth national-level batch, of the national-level intangible cultural heritage item 'Taige (Xinzi, Tiezhi, Piaose)' — Longde County Gaotai. He comes from a peasant family and is a fourth-generation inheritor in the Liang family's lineage of Qinqiang opera and shehuo art.

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)

Read the official ihchina.cn record ↗

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