Gengcun Folk Tales
01 · Historical Records
In the 1940s Geng village had only some four hundred people but more than a hundred shops and workshops large and small, hence its reputation as a small village with a great market and the saying Beijing first, Weihai second, Geng village third. Since 1987 the departments concerned have organised eleven general surveys of the state of story transmission in Geng village.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
Geng village belongs to Chang'an town of Gaocheng, Hebei, twelve kilometres west of Gaocheng, and belonged in antiquity to the state of Zhongshan. After Geng Zaichen, the adoptive father of Zhu Yuanzhang, the founding emperor of the Ming, died he was enfeoffed as a prince and buried here. The Geng Prince temple fair held from the first to the fourth day of the fourth lunar month in his memory attracts the devout men and women and the merchants of a hundred li around. At the fair are rich and varied folk performances such as grand opera, storytelling, the carrying-scripture dance and fan-drumming. The people of Geng village who went out to trade, travel or serve as soldiers brought back stories and legends from every corner of the land when they returned home. Over the years this gradually became a distributing centre of goods and a place of folk-literature transmission, laying down a rich deposit of folk culture, and especially the villagers' tradition of telling and hearing stories is still very prevalent today. Because of its rich story resources and concentrated tellers Geng village has been named a story village. The phenomenon of Geng village folk stories has drawn scholarly attention at home and abroad; scholars from Japan and other countries have made special trips to Geng village to investigate, and international academic symposia have been held.
The Geng Prince Temple Fair
The temple fair from the first to the fourth day of the fourth lunar month in memory of Geng Zaichen, an important occasion for story-telling.
The Flower-Lantern Mystery
The Geng village story collection of the teller Jin Jingxiang.
The Origin of Gaocheng Palace Noodles
One of Jin Jingxiang's representative works.
One Hundred Stories by Jin Zhengxin
The story collection of the teller Jin Zhengxin, whose representative works include The Clay Pot and The Legend of Yu Xiaohu.
Transmission Patterns such as Story Families
Such transmission patterns as story families, story couples, story brothers, story mothers and sons and story fathers and sons.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Storytelling in Geng village takes the family and neighbourhood as its main field of transmission, told among husbands and wives, fathers and sons, mothers and sons and brothers, forming such distinctive transmission patterns as story families, story couples and story brothers, so that stories continually arise and spread in daily life and at markets and temple fairs.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
At present Geng village has more than two hundred and thirty story-tellers, of whom sixty-seven have been confirmed as folk story-tellers. There have also appeared such transmission patterns as story families, story couples, story brothers, story mothers and sons and story fathers and sons. The stories transmitted in the village touch sociology, ethics, history, religious studies, philosophy and literature, and have relatively high academic value. The aesthetic view, values and the functions of scientific understanding, moral education and entertainment shown by Geng village stories have a positive practical significance for building socialist spiritual civilisation, enriching the cultural life of the people, raising their quality and building a harmonious society. To date more than sixty million characters of Geng village folk stories have been recorded and collated; five volumes of the internal research Geng Village Folk Story Collection have been printed, and ten collections by individual story-tellers and research works, totalling nine million five hundred and fifty thousand characters, have been publicly published. In recent years the existing story-tellers have all grown old and the new generation is ever more indifferent to stories, so that the Geng village folk stories face the danger of a broken transmission and urgently need salvaging and protection.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Jin Jingxiang 01-0011
- Jin Zhengxin 01-0012
- Zhang Caicai 04-1490
- Wang Fali
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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