Wu Songs
01 · Historical Records
Wu songs originated in the south-eastern part of Jiangsu and are a folk literature and art with strong national and regional character, with a history of more than three thousand two hundred years. From the Ming and Qing and through the Republican period the singing of Wu songs flourished most in the Dongting, Chaqiao and Anzhen areas of Wuxi county, where antiphonal mountain-song gatherings were frequent.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
The folk songs and ballads of the Wu region are collectively called Wu songs, an important part of Wu culture. Wu songs include the two parts song and ballad; in content they include love songs as well as labour songs and songs on current affairs; distinguished by musical form, Wu songs have six kinds of music such as mingxiao and wusheng. The field mountain song, a form of folk song with distinctive features in the south of the Yangzi, is also a kind of Wu song, concentrated mainly in the four suburban counties of Liantang, Zhaoxiang, Jinze and Shangta in Qingpu, Shanghai, and in the neighbouring areas of Wujiang and Wu county in Jiangsu and Jiashan and Jiaxing in Zhejiang. The Shanghai field mountain song is sung by peasants when weeding and hoeing rice; its form is one man leading and the crowd answering in turn, and it is also called the hawking mountain song, the seedling-falling song and the big-headed mountain song. The Shanghai field mountain song has a high and ringing tone and a freely rising melody, with many long-drawn cadences and polyphonic forms. Among them are Little Qingqing, Xue Liulang, Chen Wupan and Jin Buhuan, and especially the long narrative song Brother Shen Qi, which caused a strong response at home and abroad after publication. Wu songs vividly record the life history of the lower classes of the south of the Yangzi and are extremely precious folk cultural heritage.
Fifth Girl
A representative Wu song work sung by Wang Xiyu and others.
The Twelve Flowers as the Ancients
One of the representative field mountain song works sung by Zhang Yonglian.
The Maodian Mountain Song (Seedling-Falling Song)
A field mountain song current in the Qingpu area, sung by five or six people.
The Zhaoxiang Field-Song Troupe
The field-song troupe that was invited to sing in Beijing in 1953 and was received.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
The content of the lyrics comes mainly from the real life of the local people, mostly expressing their labour, life, thought and love, and it is important material for observing the social life and customs of Shanghai and the surrounding rice-growing areas. The Dongmeili area of Wuxi and its surroundings are also one of the main areas of the circulation of Wu songs.
Other submitting regions for the same item: Wu Songs · Wu Songs.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
After reform and opening up the workers and enthusiasts of Wu songs in Xishan district, through general survey, collected, collated and published a large number of medium and short Wu songs and more than ten long narrative Wu songs. Today, with the leap in the productive forces and the transformation of the relations of production, the singers—the vehicle of the transmission of Wu songs—have sharply decreased in number, and protecting Wu songs is now an urgent matter.
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。