Wu Songs
01 · Historical Records
Wu songs are the oral literary creation of the broad masses in the Wu dialect area, originating in the south-eastern part of Jiangsu, with the Suzhou region as the centre of their emergence and development. When Guo Maoqian compiled the Collection of Yuefu Poetry in the Song he placed Wu songs among the Wu Sound Songs of the Qing Shang lyrics. In the Ming Feng Menglong collected and recorded a great many Wu songs circulating among the people from the Song and Yuan to the mid-Ming, compiling them into Mountain Songs and Hanging Twigs. Around the May Fourth Movement Peking University launched the ballad movement, the Morning Post Supplement began serialising Wu songs in 1920, and thereafter First Collection of Wu Songs by Gu Jiegang, Second Collection of Wu Songs by Wang Yizhi, Third Collection of Wu Songs by Wang Jungang and A Short History of Wu Songs by Gu Jiegang were edited and published one after another.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
Wu songs have a long origin; the Elegies of Chu, Summoning the Soul, already records Wu and Cai singing and the playing of the great pitch-pipes. The Qing was the period when the long narrative Wu songs matured and flourished, and through the block-printing of booksellers, the transcription of men of letters and the oral transmission of folk artists a great many long narrative Wu songs were preserved. Wu songs are performed in the manner of folk oral singing, and colloquial singing is the basic mode of their artistic expression. Wu songs are unaccompanied songs, chanted without the accompaniment of any instrument. Their types are roughly the opening songs, commonly called song heads, the long narrative songs called the bustling head; labour songs, love songs, life and custom and ritual songs, children's songs and long narrative songs. Liu Bannong, in his preface to Gu Jiegang's First Collection of Wu Songs, said that the interest of Wu songs lies in no more than language, local conditions and art, and that these three things, put plainly, are the soul of a nation.
Fifth Girl
A long narrative Wu song current in the Suzhou region.
Brother Shen Qi
A long narrative Wu song that caused a strong response at home and abroad after publication.
The Twelve Months of Flowers
A widely current mountain-song title among Wu songs.
First Collection of Wu Songs
The Wu song collection edited by Gu Jiegang, an important result of the ballad movement.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Wu songs are passed on by word of mouth and handed down from generation to generation, with strong local characteristics.
Other submitting regions for the same item: Wu Songs · Wu Songs.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
Since the 1980s the Fourth Collection of Wu Songs, edited by Gu Jiegang and collated by Wang Xuhua, the Fifth Collection of Wu Songs, edited by Wang Xuhua, and the Sixth Collection of Wu Songs, edited by Lin Zongli and Qian Zuoyuan, have been compiled, and a great many Wu songs have been collected, collated and studied. Especially the discovery and excavation of long narrative Wu songs and the compilation and publication of the ballad volume of the three great collections of Chinese folk literature have enabled a great many Wu songs to be salvaged, collected and preserved. Entering the twenty-first century the departments concerned have edited and published several million characters of oral and research materials of Wu songs, such as The Collection of Baimao Mountain Songs of China, The Collection of Luxu Mountain Songs of China, The Essence of the Wu Song Heritage and The Forum on Wu Songs of China. Wu songs are not only an oral literary form still living among the people of the Wu dialect area, with a certain cognitive value for society, history, local conditions and world-view and an aesthetic value for art, but also precious material for the study of dialect.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Lu Ruiying 01-0016
- Yang Wenying 01-0017
- Wang Xiyu 03-0785
- Zhang Haosheng 03-0786
- Zhang Yonglian 04-1491
- Tang Jianqin
- Yang Xiaofeng
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。