Tanka Boat Songs

01 · Historical Records

Hainan dan songs, also called "saltwater songs", originate in the seafaring life and fishing customs of the Tanka people. Since the 1980s, with social development and changes in ways of life, cases of people spontaneously gathering to sing dan songs have steadily diminished.

02 · Core Techniques & Process

Dan songs are folk songs sung by the Tanka people, sung in the Tanka dialect of Cantonese and handed down from generation to generation in Tanka settlements. Hainan dan songs are rich in content, with a regular verse form, a tightly knit structure and strong artistic quality. They have varied musical notation, a free rather than regular formal structure, changeable rhythms, and rather distinctive methods of mode modulation within the same gong system and of modulating to near or distant keys. The artistic devices of dan songs are ingenious, and the style is bold and unrestrained as well as mellow and far-carrying. Their melodies are bound up with the rise and fall of ocean waves and the ebb and flow of the tide. The expansiveness and restraint of the singers' voices and the heaving swell of their emotion accord with the marine environment, expressing the combination of firmness and gentleness in the character of the Hainan Tanka people, their open and magnificent humanistic character, and their artistic pursuit of following the way of nature and attaining unity between heaven and humanity. Their lyrical subjects are wide-ranging and their content rich, including songs on current affairs, labour songs, ritual songs, love songs, songs of daily life and so on. The lyric structure is one stanza per song or several stanzas per song, each stanza consisting mainly of four lines, with seven-character lines prevailing, paired lines rhyming, rhymes changing between stanzas, and padding syllables such as "lo" and "a" and padding words such as "lo-ai" and "lo-lie" appearing both inside lines and at line endings. Enrichment (fu), comparison (bi) and evocation (xing) are the rhetorical devices commonly used in dan songs. Their formal structure is a single section of four phrases, mainly in the zhi mode, with melodies mainly on the six-tone scale, small and large leaps both common, and with varied rhythms and complex mixed metres. Representative pieces include "Gulimei", "Narcissus", "Babaihong" and "Twelfth-Month Rowing Song". Dan songs record historical events, currents of affairs and conditions of life in Tanka settlements, reflect rich folk custom, and transmit a great deal of social knowledge concerning human relations and ethics, making them an effective form of family education and social education.

03 · Regional Records & Related Items

The Tanka are a distinctive group who in traditional society made their homes on boats and lived off the water, distributed mainly in the southeastern coastal provinces of Guangdong, Fujian, Guangxi and Hainan as well as along some rivers. In the Sanya area the Tanka are concentrated in three port fishing villages - the Nanhai and Yugang communities of Tianya District and the Tenghai community of Haitang District in Sanya City, Hainan Province - with about 15,000 people in all. Dan songs are divided into the bailao tune, jiajie tune, Gulimei tune and muyi poem tune: they open high and resonant, then gradually enter a slow, far-carrying mood, and forms of performance include solo, antiphonal singing, lead singing and unison singing.

04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding

Through the creativity of generation after generation of folk artists, dan songs have acquired a distinctive and strong flavour of seafaring fishing song, and have been sung from generation to generation without decline through family and social transmission. With the advance of intangible cultural heritage protection work, the transmission situation of this item has improved. At present representative inheritors are actively taking apprentices and passing on the skill, and advancing the transmission and dissemination of the item by going into schools, organising competitions, publicising it in the media and carrying out academic research. Its subjects, content and artistic characteristics offer important models for artistic creation, and it has positive practical significance for advancing the study of the history of Hainan folk song and of Chinese folk music, and for transmitting and promoting maritime civilisation.

06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography

1. Tanka Boat Songs (Sanya, Hainan) · China ICH Official Project Archive

Sources

China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)

Read the official ihchina.cn record ↗