Our fieldwork through the 1990s documenting amateur ritual associations in villages on the Hebei plain bore fruit in my book Plucking the winds (2004), a diachronic ethnography of the village of Gaoluo in Laishui county, on which you can find many posts here. The book comes with an audio CD—but its taken me all this time (Like, Hello?) to realise that from my video footage I could create a beautiful film devoted entirely to the 1995 New Year’s rituals around 1st moon 15th—my first extended stay in the village.
So I’m admiring the creative editing skills of the splendid Andrea Cavazzuti 老安, himself a fine film-maker. Long resident in Beijing (for his photos from the early 80s, click here), and an old friend of the Li family Daoists in Shanxi, he’s currently spending time in Milan, so I’ve just spent a few intensive days with him there crafting a rough cut.
It’s been inspiring to revisit the footage, nostalgic to recall the kindness and good humour of the villagers, and fascinating to collaborate in editing.
Alongside the “heat and bustle” (cf. Chau, Religion in China, pp.67–8) of the village’s four ritual associations exchanging New Year’s greetings as they parade to their respective “lantern tents” adorned with exquisite god images, are the shengguan wind ensemble, the “civil altar” (wentan 文壇) singing hymns (as well as the Houtu precious scroll)—and in particular the moving, exhilarating percussion suite, led by the great Cai An. It’s also moving to see senior masters like He Yi, Li Shutong, and Yan Wenyu, who maintained the village’s ritual life through the tribulations of Maoism. But ritual activities in Gaoluo already belong to another era…
So watch this space: we’re hoping to make the film available online later this year! It should make a worthy companion to my portrait film on the Li family Daoists.
While this site has become a labyrinthine miscellany encompassing a variety of themes in world music (including Indian raga, jazz, Western Art Music, and so on), as well as film, fiction, and jokes, at its core is my fieldwork from 1986 to 2018 on ritual life in rural north China. So as a navigational aid I may as well remind you of a few main themes:
The amateur ritual associations of Gaoluo village, Laishui county, Hebei: many articles are rounded up here, based on my 2004 book Plucking the winds—a diachronic ethnography setting forth from my early exposure to
Beijing temple ritual and amateur ritual associations on the Hebei plain just south: click herefor an introduction, with a roundup of posts.
The Li family Daoists in Yanggao county, north Shanxi:
The famine, and glimpses of the early 1960s’ cultural revival in response to desperation (for more on the national famine, and Ukraine, see here, and under the famine tag)
Enduring social issues: the films of Jiang Nengjie—with a note on mining elsewhere (now with a link to Hu Jie’s bleak film set in the mountains of Qinghai).
Uyghur anthropologist Rahilä Dawut, “disappeared” since 2017.
But we also need to pay constant attention to the plight of the Tibetans and Uyghurs (both within the PRC and in exile), as well as the perspective from the independent island of Taiwan—a trio for which I’ve just alighted on the handy acronym TUT, sounding like an absurdly genteel and futile English rebuke to CCP excesses.
Roundups—part of my attempts to educate myself:
Uyghur culture: over a dozen posts on shrine festivals, Sufi groups, muqam, and so on, featuring the research of Rahilä Dawut, Rachel Harris, Mukaddas Mijit, Musapir, Darren Byler and others
Tibet—for Amdo, Kham, TAR, and Dharamsala: over thirty posts on the ravages of Maoism, biography, expressive culture, ritual, opera, and so on, reviewing the work of Jamyang Norbu, Robbie Barnett, Tsering Woeser, Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy and others.
Talking with Chinese people, when one doesn’t understand a bit of dialect or an obscure term, they sometimes adopt a device that supposedly solves the problem, as the wise Victor Mair describes in his recent post on Language Log:
Countless are the times I’ve seen people writing Chinese characters in the air to tell which of dozens of homophones they might be referring to. They say, “You know, it’s this one”, and then their index finger goes flailing through the air. It never works, because there are no points of reference from one stroke to the next or between one component and the next, plus they are writing backward with regard to the person to whom they are trying to describe the character.
It works a bit better writing sinoglyphs in the air if the drawer and the viewer stand facing the same direction—but not much.
Writing characters with your finger works a lot better if you do it on a surface—your palm, a table, a car hood, whatever, but it’s still far from ideal, because the movements are ephemeral.
I would add that while the palm is indeed a surface (and I can usually just about work it out when someone “writes” the character in my palm), more often they write it in their own palm, which is facing them, not you, so you can’t even see it properly… As a foreigner one feels a certain obligation to pretend one has understood, perhaps to avoid losing face, or to reassure them that you are literate and “have culture”. So while gratified to learn that it can be a challenge even for such a master as Prof. Mair, when I’m perplexed in such a situation I still find it a tad embarrassing, since Chinese people together seem to find it a perfectly satisfactory solution.
For simpler cases, one is accustomed to widely-understood verbal descriptions of a character—whether by depicting its component parts, such as for the surnames Wu (koutian wu 口天吴 “wu with mouth and heaven”) and Li (muzi li 木子李 “li with wood and son”), or by stating its use as part of an unambiguous binome, like my own Chinese surname (zhongbiaode zhong 钟表的钟 “zhong as in clock”, a bit like “cat as in catastrophe”). * This can get pleasantly silly, like when I tell rural ritual specialists (or other friends who share my abstruse predilections) which character for kou I’m referring to: “Yuqie yankoude kou 瑜伽焰口的口” (“kou as in the Yogacara Flaming Mouth ritual“), establishing a niche complicity…
Left, Yankou shishi ritual manual, 1922 (see here, under Gaoqiao). Right, former monks performing a funerary yankou ritual, Beijing suburbs 1993.
Talking of which, in the early 1990s I used to visit the elderly former monk Benxing in his bare room at the Zhihua temple, listening as he told me about the ritual life of old Beijing, and his own story. As I was taking notes, sometimes I had to query how to write a character that came up in conversation—not so much Buddhist terms as the names of people, streets, or villages. This was long before the days of mobile and internet, and he didn’t even have a little dictionary—but what he did have was a copy of the voluminous Flaming Mouth ritual manual, which he now used for the same purpose. Having learned thoroughly to recite it in his youth before Liberation (and still sometimes performing the ritual for patrons in the suburbs), Benxing was able to fast-forward mentally through the entire text until he came across the character in question, and then deftly flick through the manual to show me!
Back to oral descriptions: one evening in Shaanbei in 2001 with my two fieldwork colleagues at a grotty hostel in Jiaxian county-town, I was telling them how I’d been reading up on the origins of the county Jinju opera troupe in the nearby village of Mutouyu (木头峪, “Wood Gulch”) which had made important innovations before Liberation, performing for Chairman Mao at the Baiyunshan temple fair in 1947. ** I had great fun trying (with studied ineptitude) to explain how to identify the characters for the village:
木头的木，嗯，木头的头。。。嗯，木头峪的峪！ mu as in mutou [wood]—um—tou as in mutou [wood]… um [finding it a challenge to evoke the final character, and then triumphantly:]—yu as in “Mutouyu”!
* * *
So much for mundane communication—an altogether more cosmic air-writing device is that of the Daoist priest at the altar during rituals, depicting complex fu 符 talismans that can only be understood by the gods. Brilliantly (if perhaps controversially?!), in his 2005 film Han Xin’s revenge, on Daoist ritual in Hunan, Patrice Fava renders the characters visible on screen as the priest depicts them!
Screenshots from Han Xin’s revenge: Left, Zou Qishan writes the secret names of the deity Wang Lingguan 王灵官 Right, Chen Demei inaugurates the puppet-statue of Han Xin.
In this clip Chen Demei depicts the taboo characters for the astral deity Ziwei 紫微讳:
* A distant English variant of this (though far more boring, rigid, and infuriating) is the NATO phonetic alphabet (F for Freddie, U for Uniform, C for Charlie…)—making a further gruelling ordeal when you finally get through to an institution on the phone, charmingly satirised by Bridget Christie. “Cat as in catastrophe, dog as in dogmatic” is part of a joke about trying to buy broccoli, which I’ll save up for another time…
** See e.g. the Shaanxi volume of the Monograph on opera in the great Anthology: Zhongguo xiqu zhi, Shaanxi juan 中国戏曲志, 陕西卷, p.536 (above), and latterly online articles such as this. As ever (for Baiyunshan, see e.g. here), such an outline invites us to “read between the lines” to recreate the socio-political picture of the day.
Among the “underground historians” highlighted by Ian Johnson in his latest book Sparks is the documentarian Hu Jie 胡杰. I mentioned his 2016 film The songs of Maidichong village (Maidichongde gesheng 麦地冲的歌声) in my introduction to the China Unofficial Archives site, but it deserves a separate post (for more, see this review by Max Berwald, cited below).
Here’s the film:
Opening strikingly with an elderly village woman singing the hymn Amazing grace to camera, the story is told without apparent rancour by stoic, quietly determined peasants and church elders; by an itinerant rural dentist—and in several thoughtful reflections, a veteran cadre, former secretary on the Yunnan Party Committee, who often visited the village on government business during the high tide of Maoist campaigns:
People’s hearts began to change. At first they were close to the Communist Party, because you brought them practical benefits—land reform. But then came the People’s Communes that actually deprived the peasants of what they were given. Moreover, the famine that followed was what they remembered most. I remember the embarrassment going down to the countryside to implement the minorities policy. We asked them to start by pouring out their past woes [suku 诉苦]. When they did that, they all began with the famine during the Great Leap Forward, all about the commune canteen that made people starve.
Screenshot
Screenshot
Maidichong, a Miao (Hmong) village just north of Kunming, was evangelized in 1903 by the English Methodist pastor Samuel Pollard.
Under Maoism, serious repression intensified with the 1958 Great Leap Forward. We learn of the life, works, and martyrdom of Reverend Wang Zhiming, brutally executed late in the Cultural Revolution:
His death marked a moment of violent confrontation between two competing modernization programmes: Christian missionary modernization, itself part of a colonial project, and nationalist, communist modernization. Both were interested in bringing literacy and modern healthcare to Maidichong—both regarded as key social indicators of development to this day—and both claimed the authority to name the sacred.
Both movements, as Berwald comments, promised “modernity in exchange for loyalty to a political project”. He asks, “How can memories of Christian missionary work ever be mobilized on behalf of a history of resistance by oppressed peoples?”
As one Reverend explains to Hu Jie, Christianity appealed particularly to the Hua Miao subgroup, whom he describes as among the most exploited and impoverished of Miao peoples in the region in the late imperial era.
1980, when the central Party leadership finally implemented a more open religious policy.
A theme common among devotional communities: younger generations since the reform era, lured by material prosperity, modern pop and media culture, are losing commitment to the faith; “development”, which once led people to Christianity, is now drawing them away from it. Still, the Yunnan authorities remains wary of such groups, mounting periodic campaigns.
As Berwald observes, the film doesn’t come across as a portrait of a community in crisis; Hu Jie’s questions don’t force a reckoning with a traumatic past (I suppose this is a similar approach that dawned on me in my studies of Gaoluo village and the Li family Daoists). Berwald concludes:
The faith of this community appears starkly contingent, with the film offering neither an indictment of the imperialism of British missionaries or of any state formation. Rather, what we have is a Christian community freely practicing its faith and remembering particular histories. Songs From Maidichong does not stoop to preach, insisting only “this too”, and forsaking polemical fury as it does so. How radical such an approach appears depends on the audience.
Ian Johnson lists many of Hu Jie’s other documentaries in Sparks. I’ve also just been watching Remote mountain, an utterly bleak film set in the barren northwest, cited in n.1 of Social issues in rural Henan.
* * *
The many rural Christian communities in Yunnan have attracted considerable research, not least from ethnomusicologists. Alongside his studies of Daoist and Buddhist ritual music there, Yang Minkang 杨民康 has published extensively on the topic, e.g. Bentuhua yu xiandaixing: Yunnan shaoshu minzu Jidujiao yishi yinyue yanjiu 本土化与现代性: 云南少数民族基督教仪式音乐研究 (2008).
For the story of a determined community of underground Catholics in north China, click here. Of course, indigenous religious groups too, and indeed the whole of Chinese society, have been subjected to severe traumas, both under Maoism and since the 1980s’ reforms: see e.g. Cultural Revolutions, China: commemorating trauma, and Memory, music, society.
Taipei: Daoist priests working for the Hsien-miao altar 顯妙壇, led by master Chu K’un-ts’an 朱堃燦, “open the eyes” of a god statue damaged in a temple fire. All images courtesy of Yves Menheere. [1]
Yves Menheere, The Way and its powers: an ethnographic account of Taoist practice and religious authority in northern Taiwan (2020),
a lucid study which helps further my education on a topic that I previously found somewhat indigestible.
The Introduction sets the tone for Menheere’s enquiry:
Why do people put their faith in religious specialists? Why are some people considered to be more adept at communicating with deities, explaining scriptures, blessing objects, or solving problems with ghosts and other malevolent forces?
Contrasting rituals that are “supposed to work” with those that are meant to be carried out “in the correct way”, Menheere finds that “neither efficacy nor proper performance can explain why people put more faith in one particular priest and not another”. In exploring authority and charisma he considers the work of Max Weber, Stephan Feuchtwang and Wang Mingming, Vincent Goossaert, and Pierre Bourdieu.
His useful summary of previous research starts with J.J.M. De Groot in late-19th-century Xiamen (in mainland Fujian); and for Taiwan under Japanese rule (1895–1945), studies by Japanese scholars and colonial administrators, notably a 1919 report under the supervision of Marui Keijirō. After World War Two, the pioneering work of Kristofer Schipper (on south Taiwan) and Michael Saso (for Hsinchu in the north) was continued by John Lagerwey for both north and south. Taiwanese scholars have also been industrious, from Liu Chi-wan and Lee Fong-mao to Lü Ch’ui-k’uan, followed by Lin Chen-yuan and others. As Menheere notes, the main focus of such studies has been the description of rituals and the search for the origins of particular practices and traditions; however, scholars adopting more anthropological approaches include Stephan Feuchtwang, David Jordan, John McCreery, Robert Weller, and Chang Hsun.
For ritual studies, I’ve outlined how by the early 1980s, as the PRC opened up after three decades of Maoist repression, the scope of fieldwork at last expanded to mainland China—fanning out from south Fujian (ancestral home of the Taiwanese Daoist altars) in a succession of major projects, mostly led by scholars with experience of the religious scene in Taiwan. So whereas previously the island was almost the only accessible site where scholars could study the riches of Daoist ritual, a wealth of local traditions now beckoned all over the vast expanses of the PRC, “if not eclipsing the reputation of Taiwan’s heritage, then at least putting it into perspective”, as I wrote (cf. The resilience of tradition).
However, it’s always worth paying attention to the ritual life of Taiwan, subject to fewer disruptions than in the PRC—with research now enriched by access to traditions shared with the southeastern mainland. And since scholarship on both sides of the strait, though based on fieldwork, has stressed the early origins of rituals rather than social ethnography (cf. Debunking “living fossils”—combining these approaches for Fujian, though, is Ken Dean), Menheere offers a fresh perspective.
* * *
The distinction between Redhead (ang-thau 紅頭) and Blackhead (o-͘thau 烏頭) ritual specialists is particular to Taiwan and Fujian; while much discussed, it remains complex. In north Taiwan, Blackhead priests specialise in performing mortuary rituals, and are either Sek-kau 釋教 Buddhists, or Daoists sometimes described by the name Numinous Treasure (Leng-po / Lingbao 靈寶). Redhead Daoists—Menheere’s focus, whom he describes as “the Northern Priests”—refrain from performing funerals. While belonging to the Cheng-it / Zhengyi 正一 branch (like Daoists further south in Taiwan), they
carried out rites in ways that were broadly similar, and they were able to work together in ritual performances, which frequently occurred. Their way of working set them apart from priests from central or southern Taiwan, who performed rituals in different ways and were generally unable to work in concert with priests from northern Taiwan. These priests agreed that they belong to the same phai 派 or “branch” of Taoism and that priests from central and southern Taiwan belonged to a different branch. [2]
As Menheere observes, authority is relational: “it depends on the position of the individual priest in a wider network of priests, and it is always socially constructed and cannot be reduced to a particular priest’s personality or individual qualities”.
Between the Introduction and Conclusion, the book is arranged in six unnumbered chapters, to which I will award numbers here.
Chapter 1 (“Gods, ghosts and ancestors”) opens with a description of an exorcistic ritual intended to deter malignant forces of the road (lo-͘soah 路煞) from causing traffic accidents and other misfortunes besetting the community. Menheere goes on to give an overview of the religious environment in which the Northern Priests operate. Apart from large-scale temple ceremonies like the Chio / Jiao 醮 Offering, brief “minor rites” (sio-hoat 小法, or “little things” sio-su-a 小事) are also a regular part of the priests’ duties, often requiring only a single officiant. (I was glad to learn that priests in Taiwan describe the performance of ceremonies as “doing things” (cho-su 做事), cf. banshi 办事 in north China).
Always favouring practical grassroots perspectives above historical theory, Menheere unpacks the meaning of Cheng-it (Zhengyi)—”a term used by priests who shared their particular way of working, which presumed knowledge of two particular sets of rites; and did not perform funerary rites”.
By contrast with Schipper’s account for south Taiwan (e.g. his influential 1985 article), where “classical” and “vernacular” rites are carried out by different specialists, the Northern Priests practise a hybrid tradition, with two categories of rites, the “Way” (Tō / Dao 道) and “Methods” (Hoat / Fa 法): “two separate systems of rites, different in their performance, but referred to by the priests as complementary and sometimes even overlapping”. So Menheere ponders Schipper’s classical / vernacular dichotomy in the northern context, under the headings of language, pantheon, transmission, and the “mental states” of meditation and trance. Again working from the practical standpoint of the priests themselves, he confounds any simple distinction between the two types. Valuably, he notes contingency and modern change:
When we consider the meaning of Tō and Hoat and their associated ritual traditions, we must account for how the terms take shape in local practice and acquire different meanings, rather than ascribe them meaning devoid of social and historical context.
Still, “whether a rite was Tō or Hoat did not, for the priests at least, depend on its historical origins, but on the type of ceremony with which it was associated and on the way it was performed”. Noting that priests freely made use of the two categories during both exorcisms and offerings, Menheere illustrates this with Tō and Hoat versions of the “Worshipping the Lord of Heaven” ritual segment (pai Thin-kong 拜天公).
Chapter 2, a history of the Northern Priests from the Qing dynasty through the Japanese era to modern times, is full of detail on modern developments in their practice, showing that it is not immune to change. For the period since the 1980s, Menheere notes a shift away from healing rituals towards large-scale Offerings—which was attributed to perceived modernisation, notably in medical care. Thus “knowledge of the Tō rites for multiple-day Chio […] was slowly acquired by priests who initially performed mostly Hoat rites”. Moreover,
The expanding ritual market of the 1980s enabled several altars that at the time had only recently been established to rise to prominence. Indeed, some of the most successful and notable altars I observed doing fieldwork only began conducting offerings on a regular basis in the 1980s.
He also suggests a rather recent shift in the way the priests referred to themselves, with the autonym Cheng-it becoming more common.
Chapter 3, “Work and training”, looks at how ceremonies are performed and how the required knowledge to do so is transmitted. Menheere provides a good discussion of the role of “altars” (toan / tan 壇, an important term in south China that is seldom applied to household Daoists in the north), the physical and conceptual locus of a Daoist family tradition; and he gives a useful account of hierarchy and roles within the ritual group. As to personnel,
composition of groups varied from altar to altar and depended on the position of the priest in the field. Priests with more successful altars usually limited hires to their apprentices and a small group of priests that worked almost exclusively for them. Priests with fewer apprentices or fewer opportunities to organise ceremonies, however, had to look outside their immediate ties.
Menheere notes that “family was the principal source of knowledge for a small majority of the priests I observed”, but “recognising a master” from an unrelated family was also rather common. As to training in practice, he again finds variety, followed by a section on how priests assess competency:
A priest’s skills were described with the word kang-hu [gongfu] 功夫, and priests who lacked the physical attributes of the ideal priests—priests that were too short, for instance—could compensate for such perceived shortcomings with their kang-hu.
He continues with a most salient reminder:
It is perhaps worth noting that being familiar with the intricacies of Taoist doctrine as found in its classical texts did not play a role in the training of the priests or judgment of their competency.
The following two sections discuss the major ceremonies associated with the two ritual traditions. Chapter 4 explores the links between authority and the correct performance of rituals through a discussion of changes in the programme of the Chio Offering over the past century (with rich material in Appendix A listing sequences for ten such rituals).
After introducing the old “orthopraxy” trope and considering factors inhibiting change, Menheere argues “that despite the importance attached to correct performance, priests did occasionally—at least to a certain degree—have the ability to change the contents of rites and ceremonies and that such changes would not necessarily affect a priest’s authority”.
While the structure of three-day Chio seems quite constant over the century for which we have evidence, five-day Chio (an expanded version of the three-day programme) have also become increasingly common. The main addition here was the fast chanting of various [nationally standard] jing 經 scriptures—which household Daoists in north China have tended to omit in modern times, even though they comprise a major part of their ritual manuals (e.g. Daoist priests of the Li family, pp.211–13, 375–8).
Menheere continues with a detailed account of versions of the recently-elaborated ritual segment Ascending the Platform (teng-tai pai-pio 登台拜表) as interpreted by three different priests (cf. my account of Li Qing’s Pardon ritual):
All priests who performed the versions of the rite had access to Zhang Enpu’s text, yet none chose to follow his text to the letter. Even Master Tiong, who adhered to it most strictly, chose to add elements, attempting to, as he indicated in our discussions, make the rite more “correct”. It is possible that the priests in the other two cases chose to perform a much shorter rite because it was more convenient, not only for themselves, but also for all lay participants, who had to stand and watch the rite throughout.
He concludes the chapter thus:
The example of “Ascending the Platform” demonstrates that priests did have flexibility in revising rites in ways that did not transform them altogether. They were the experts, and as long as the performance of particular rites fulfilled expectations, the patrons neither grasped minor changes nor challenged a priest’s authority.
Scene from the Great Improvement of Luck ritual: the patron blows out a flame to send away the im 陰 fire.
Chapter 5 focuses on the links between authority and efficacy in the exorcistic Toa-po-͘un 大補運 Great Improvement of Luck, the major healing ceremony of the Northern Priests, when the patron often suffers from a serious medical condition. While careful not to add further layers of anthropological abstraction to the complexities of the ritual system itself, Menheere again begins with theoretical perspectives; [3] then, setting forth from the research of Hsu Li-ling, he moves on to elements in the adaptable programme for the Great Improvement of Luck ritual, and five vivid case studies from his own fieldwork (note the lists of ritual segments in Appendix C).
If patrons were not familiar with the logic of the Toa-po-͘un, they were generally free to interpret the ceremonies in ways not directly derived from the meanings enacted in the rites. For patrons, the “effective meaning” was found, not so much in the symbolism of the rite, but in the fact that a priest, possessing a body of specialised knowledge to which they had no access, was involved and employed his knowledge to interact with and implore deities to intercede. Such an attitude, combined with the spectacle of the ceremony and the impressions it left on the spectators, predisposed observers to connect the performance to any event during or after the ritual proceedings.
Menheere ends the chapter by considering efficacy (ling 靈)—the core of Chinese popular religion, according to Valerie Hansen and Adam Yuet Chau:
Patrons did not hire priests to conduct Toa-po-͘un because they knew the rituals would work. They hired priests because they believed in the potential of the ritual and that it was the right course of action. These beliefs were bolstered by, not so much prior successes in Toa-po-un performances, but by a priest’s connections with institutions and trusted individuals.
He argues that
efficacy was the product of authority, rather than the other way around. A priest did not become a great priest because he cured his patients, he came in the position to cure his patients—or not—because he had become a great priest.
The Wei Yuan Altar 威遠壇 in suburban Taipei, with Lin Ch’ang-tung 林昌桐 (1947–2019) presiding.
In Chapter 6 Menheere further ponders the way the organisation of ceremonies is distributed and how this relates to the idea of a field of priests. Recurring occasions include
ceremonies organised in honour of a deity’s anniversary; Worshipping the Dipper ceremonies, which many temples organised once or twice a year; ceremonies conducted for the construction of a new temple, the restoration of an old one, or the consecration of a new statue; and ceremonies held to feed the hungry ghosts during the seventh lunar month. Priests also commonly performed exorcisms […] as well as temple ceremonies held for the benefit of the ancestors of the faithful. On some of these occasions, temples could also choose to organise a Chio, but this was less common.
While he notes some exceptions,
more common, recurring ceremonies were typically conducted by the same priest; that is, the priest responsible for a ceremony on one occasion returned to perform the ritual again.[…] In some cases, relationships between temples and altars spanned multiple generations.
He finds that “patrons unconnected to either a priest or a temple resorted to other ways to find a priest”, mainly through local or personal networks.
Priests occasionally recounted how territorial claims were violently enforced in the past, but during my fieldwork, I was not aware of any violent incidents. Still, priests could be visibly displeased when they felt other priests were infringing on their perceived territory and would try to use their own local connections to displace the infringing priests if they felt that this was indeed happening.
Menheere details various procedures in organising the Chio Offering—“the most elaborate and important ceremonies in the Northern Priests’ repertoire”, which (nonetheless) few of them had a chance to organise during their career. There was considerable competition between priests for the task of presiding over this ritual. Temples might appoint a chief priest directly, solicit bids, or appoint through divination.
Knowledge of particular forms of ritual was a prerequisite to conduct ceremonies, but knowledge in itself did not guarantee success. The most knowledgeable priests were not necessarily those conducting the most ceremonies.
Still, “priests who inherited a successful altar had the best chances at claiming a dominant position in the field”. He ends the chapter thoughtfully by suggesting further factors that may need including:
It would probably be easier to develop new contacts and lead a flourishing altar in areas where fewer priests operated than in an area with many active priests. We must also consider historical conditions and change. The situation was quite different in the 1980s, when the market for religious services, including the ceremonies of the priests, was quickly expanding and a priest’s method of entering the field may have been less important.
In his Conclusion, Menheere reminds us that
terms like Tō, Hoat, Chio, and Cheng-it (and their Mandarin equivalents) have specific meanings that are locally and historically embedded, can change over time, and should not be taken for granted. […] Ritual practices can change, even if they are part of a tradition that highly values correct practices and sees immutability as a defining feature of what actually constitutes correct practice. While such changes can be triggered by external factors, specialists themselves do play an important role in shaping changes.
* * *
Time for my inevitable spiel: after silent, immobile text, nothing can compare to experiencing the “heat and bustle” (cf. Chau, Religion in China, pp.67–8) of Daoist ritual for real—here, for instance, is a “Great Improvement of Luck” ritual in 2022, just one of many online videos uploaded by the Wei Yuan Altar:
And to sample the more “classical” Tō tradition, click here for a 1977 introduction to a temple inauguration, filmed by Patrice Fava (another scholar whose grounding in Taiwanese ritual bore fruit on the mainland)—see his Un taoïste n’a pas d’ombre: mémoires d’un ethnologue en Chine (2023), pp.30–31, 53.
* * *
While I’m in awe of their erudition, some scholars of Daoist ritual seem so committed to the Wisdom of the Ancient Sages that their accounts may seem more prescriptive than descriptive, almost evangelical; in both Chinese and English, they can speak only to a highly limited audience. Instead Menheere, with his clear style, refrains from unduly mystifying either the priests or their rituals.
The Way and its powers is valuable for incorporating ethnography, modern change, and ritual theory—all largely absent from the field as it took shape—into the established concerns of scholarship on Daoist ritual, which (first for Taiwan, later for the PRC) has come to be dominated by the salvage of medieval ritual structures and texts. The study of ritual traditions in mainland China might look quite different if the ethnographic approach had found more of a voice in Taiwan.
[1] Sadly, Menheere’s original PhD thesis (2017) contains a mere three images (the published version has none!), so I’m grateful to him for helping me illustrate this post with some of his splendid fieldwork photos. Images by Patrice Fava are found in John Lagerwey’s attractively-illustrated book Le continent des esprits (1991); though the captions don’t give locations, I’m told that they show rituals and priests from both north and south Taiwan.
For transliterations of terms and names I have followed Menheere’s practice, based (for Taiwanese) on the “Church” romanization and (for Mandarin) on Wade-Giles, with some pinyin equivalents added for terms with wider significance (such as Cheng-it / Zhengyi 正一).
[2] Menheere comments further: “Taoist Blackhead priests were active in different areas in northern Taiwan, but only in locations such as Hsinchu and Tamsui would they regularly carry out other ceremonies in addition to funerals. In both areas, however, they had to compete with the Northern Priests”. Michael Saso gave an early taxonomy of the ritual life of Hsinchu in “The Taoist tradition in Taiwan” (1970).
Similar distinctions are commonly found in mainland south China, e.g. in Hunan; in the north I don’t recall hearing of household Daoists who refrain from performing funerals—if there are any areas where they do so (also for regions such as south Jiangsu), then I’m keen to learn. In north Shanxi the Li family Daoists used to perform rituals for both the living and the dead, but mortuary rituals now comprise the great majority of their business (see Ritual change in north Shanxi, and my film). Note also my major rethink of the Zhengyi–Quanzhen dichotomy.
[3] Here, besides the sources that he cites, it’s worth consulting Catherine Bell’s surveys of the field of ritual studies.
Last week on the eve of Nowruz, just back from Istanbul, I was happy toattend a concert of shashmaqom in the Brunei Gallery at SOAS, featuring two fine musicians from the Academy of Maqam in Dushanbe, Tajikistan: Sirojiddin Juraev on long-necked lutes and Khurshed Ibrohimzoda on vocals and tanbur plucked lute.
As I seek a rudimentary education on this suite repertoire of refined Sufi poetry accompanied by instrumental ensemble, in my explorations below (typically) I merely “gaze at flowers from horseback” 走马观花.
Shashmaqom originated from the numinous cultural metropolis of Bukhara, with related traditions evolving in centres such as Tashkent and Ferghana. For the greater region, Theodore Levin has adopted the term Transoxania, favoured by his fieldwork colleague Otanazar Matyabukov (“OM”)—stressing its “underlying geographic and social coherence rather than its more recent ethnic and political divisiveness”.
From The hundred thousand fools of God.
Basic sources on shashmaqom include an essay by Alexander Djumaev, the Musics of Central Asia site; Will Sumits’ chapter 15 in Michael Church, The other classical musics (cf. Musics lost andfound, chapter 17); “Central Asian Republics” in The Rough Guide to world music: Europe, Asia, and Pacific; and sections in the New Grove Dictionary of music and musicians and TheGarland Encyclopedia of world music.
Rather than attempting to define “classical” (cf. What is serious music?!, Joining the elite musical club, and in the introduction to my series on the Beatles) or to regard shashmaqom as a “living fossil” of courtly art music from a bygone society, it surely makes sense to understand such a tradition as part of the widespread, shifting maqam family of repertoires crossing national and class boundaries, albeit subject to canonisation (“maqām-isation”) even before the interventions of modern state regimes (see Rachel Harris, The making of a musical canon in Chinese Central Asia, pp.9–10, 97–9, 107–8).
Under the Soviet era, while shashmaqom was the object of official posturings about its “national”, “elite”, or “popular” status, it “found itself at the centre of a nationalistic tug-of-war” (in Sumits’ phrase), with competing Tajik and Uzbek versions.
So it’s high time for me to revisit Theodore Levin‘s “pioneering cultural odyssey” The hundred thousand fools of God: musical travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York) (1996, with CD). Despite its brilliant title, I suppose I was somewhat resistant to the book at first: reading it just at a time when I was deep in Chinese traditions of village ritual that were (then) remarkably unmediated by conservatoire-style remoulding, I found it unfortunate that so many of Levin’s interlocutors were representatives of state ensembles. Whereas Veronica Doubleday and John Baily, living in Herat on the eve of the Soviet invasion, had been able to immerse themselves in the grassroots world of social musicking, Tashkent was different; when Levin arrived there in 1977 his institutional base was doubtless inevitable. On that initial stay he can have had little access to the social milieu that OM later described to him (pp.33–4):
The entire unofficial cultural network and economic system that supported the central events in Uzbek social life—the toy (wedding), âsh (literally, “food”—an early morning quasi-religious gathering of men given separately by the fathers of both bride and groom before every Uzbek marriage), and ziyâfat, gap, gurung, or majlis, as intimate evening gatherings of friends for conversation, food, and music are variously called—had existed all along in the shadow of the official cultural life played out in concert halls and theatres, at public ceremonies and on radio and television.
Source: The other classical musics.
The tradition of gap is related to the Uyghur mäshräp, now the object of a new wave of repression in Xinjiang.
But if Levin too was perhaps frustrated that his initial clues to this elusive world were largely based on second-hand accounts rather than direct observation, he writes most insightfully about his encounters, with revealing stories of senior musicians’ lives. On his later visits to Tashkent with OM from 1990, he was able to attend gap and âsh ceremonies, meeting latter-day abdâl Sufi dervish “fools of God” (cf. Uyghur ashiq).
Back in 1977 Levin regarded the shashmaqom as stagnating—”a musical system propped up from above by the policies of Uzbekistan’s culture apparat” (“Frozen music”, pp.47–51):
Though I couldn’t put my finger on it, something had seemed not right about the performances of Shash maqâm I heard when I first came to Tashkent. Put simply, they lacked life. As taught at the Tashkent Conservatory, the Shash maqâm could have been compared to a dying person being kept clinically alive on a respirator. The respirator was controlled by the Ministry of Culture. It was the Ministry that had approved of the resuscitation of the moribund Shash maqâm in the late 1950s and had stage-managed its ideological repositioning as a leading exemplar of Uzbekistan’s “national” music (this after a near-death experience in the early 1950s in which the Ministry had decreed that the Shash maqâm had been too close to the feudal culture of the emirs, too distant from “the people”, too infused with undercurrents of Sufism, and thus had to be suppressed).
Still, as I learned of the troubled maintenance of folk ritual activity in China through the Maoist decades (see e.g. Gaoluo), I doubted if the turgid state ensembles could really have monopolised the musical market before 1990. Indeed, Levin continues with a vivid section on Turgun Alimatov (1922–2008), whom he met between 1990 and 1994. As Alimatov recalled, after his radio ensemble was disbanded in 1952,
I played at weddings with two brothers named Bâbâ Khan and Akmal Khan Sofixânov. Their father, Sofi Khan, was a famous hafiz [classical singer]. In those years, there were several musical dynasties which had a high calling […]. In contrast to other singers, the Sofixânovs performed exclusively songs with a religious content. They were religious people themselves, even during the time when religion was strictly forbidden. People who rejected religion simply didn’t associate with them, and for their part, the Sofixânovs stayed away from atheists. They were invited to the houses of believers.
Alimatov told Levin how he used to take part in many Sufi zikr-samâ rituals at which the Sofixânovs would perform (cf. Turkey). And he contrasted such devout behaviour with that of a lowly class of musician known as attarchi—with whom he also used to associate (cf. the underworld of old Lhasa). On this CD (Ocora, 1995), recorded by Levin, Alimatov moves from long-necked bowed lute sato to the plucked tanbur:
The ghijak spike fiddle is common to Transoxania and Xinjiang. But whereas in Xinjiang the soulful satar had long been at the heart of the Uyghur muqam, in Transoxania the sato had long been dormant when Alimatov revived it in the 1950s, followed by his pupil Abduvali Abdurashidov in Dushanbe (see below). And here is Alimatov on tanbur in 2001, recorded by Jean During, leading scholar of Central Asian maqam:
Levin continues with a revealing account of Arif Xatamov, another “unrepentant traditionalist who bemoaned the spiritual superficiality of contemporary music”—here’s a 2013 CD from Alchemy (as playlist):
And in the following chapter on Bukhara (note Levin’s CD Bukhara: musical crossroads of Asia [Smithsonian Folkways, 1991] and Shashmaqam: the tradition of Bukhara [New Samarkand Records, 1999]), while learning of the depth of Sufi and Jewish traditions he pursues shashmaqom in greater depth, finding more “frozen music”:
The worker’s state whose goal had been to eliminate class barriers in art had vilified the Shash maqâm as an elite art and tried to expunge it from cultural life. When that had failed, it had then tried to transform the Shash maqâminto a popular art. But Soviet cultural stategists had gotten everything reversed. In Bukhara, the Shash maqâm and other “heavy” music had been a popular art. And when they had tried to turn this music into a “national” folk art, they had inadvertently created an elite art: elite, that is, because it had all but lost its audience. No-one wanted to listen to a music whose soul had been usurped by the state.
The ponderous ideology of the state troupes still persisted in the early years after independence from Soviet rule. But since then, as the concert market has liberalised, shashmaqom has found a niche in the “Heritage” and “world music” industries, affording a home for some fine, creative musicians.
The hundred thousand fools of Godcontinues with chapters on musical life in the south of Uzbekistan, Khorezm, the Upper Zarafshan and Yagnâb, and Shahristan, where Levin encounters a range of musical activity in social contexts—Sufi rituals, weddings, epic singers, healers. The book is another accessible classic of ethnomusicology, valuable both as an account of the nuanced views of musicians striving to emerge from the Soviet-style cultural yoke, and in paving the way for detailed ethnographies of traditional musicking in Transoxania.
* * *
Anyway, if I find a radical gulf (or might I say gap) between folk and conservatoire in Han-Chinese musicking, it seems I should be rather more broad-minded on the journey further west. In 1950s’ China, when “old artists” were recruited to the new state song-and-dance ensembles and arts-work troupes, they often found themselves busy accompanying a bland, politicized repertoire quite divorced from their former folk practice, which they now abandoned. [1] Conversely, prestigious musicians in the Uyghur homeland and in Central Asia, rather separately from their duties in the state ensembles, often seem to have quietly maintained more traditional styles and contexts.
While I’m keen to learn more about shashmaqom-related grassroots social life(however attenuated by modernization), this kind of music is always easier to find online in commodified versions on stage—including this short UNESCO presentation. Here’s a film from the Aga Khan Music Programme, which has played a major role in enhancing the global profile of Central Asian musics, and in sponsoring centres such as the Academy of Maqam:
Invisible face of the beloved: classical music of the Tajiks and Uzbeks. Music of Central Asia, vol. 2 (2006):
Vol. 7, In the shrine of the heart: popular classics from Bukhara and beyond (2010), introduces other regional traditions worth pursuing.
Abduvali Abdurashidov, the main guide in Invisible face of the beloved, leads this fine Tajik chamber ensemble on sato at a 2010 Paris concert, with singer Ozoda Ashurova, [2] Pasha Hanjani on ney—and a young Sirojiddin Juraev, whose visit to SOAS inspired this little survey:
Abdurashidov appears on the CD Tadjikistan: chants et musiques classiques (Ocora, 2013):
I’m enthralled by the CD Shashmaqom: Dugoh maqomi (Inédit, 2002), again recorded by Jean During:
For more, see again here, under Audio and video recordings, §8.
Again (cf. Taiwan), I note that one consequence of a superficial survey like mine is an undue attention to the “star” performers, rather than the unsung participants who are at the heart of grassroots musicking (cf. China).
The hundred thousand fools of Godconcludes in Queens, New York, where a notable Bukharan Jewish tradition of shashmuqom has taken root. The Ensemble Shashmaqam there is comprised of emigrés from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan (heard on Levin’s 1991 Smithsonian Folkways CD Central Asia in Forest Hills); in this concert they celebrate the artistry of three leading women performers who have performed with the ensemble over the years. In 2014 Evan Rapport supplemented Levin’s account in Greeted with smiles: Bukharian Jewish music and musicians in New York.
So much for homework. Since China opened my eyes and ears to musicking as a vital part of social gatherings (life-cycle and calendrical ceremonies, and so on; cf. Society and soundscape), I’ve had conflicting feelings about “concerts”—events that we so easily take for granted. Of course I grew up with Western Art Music in concert (see e.g. here), and I’ve been complicit in presenting Chinese ritual traditions on stage (e.g. here, and on tour with the Li family Daoists—contrast my film); just that I’m sometimes struck by how such reification can skew our impression of the vitality of expressive culture in local society.
As Djumaev observes, while the new academies seek to adapt the traditional master-apprentice (ustod-shogird) system, a range of strategies for transmission has emerged in response to changing times. Still, however sensitively accomplished musicians may devise classroom teaching, I still find it an alien, stultifying environment for such a culture (cf. Training Daoists in Shanghai).
At SOAS last week, the concert and the preceding workshop were engagingly introduced by Saeid Kordmafi, new lecturer in the Music Department. In duet Sirojiddin Juraev (YouTube playlist) and Khurshed Ibrohimzodahave a wonderful understanding, their musicking at once natural and intense, never showy. Ibrohimzoda’s vocal items (some incorporating a vertiginously high tessitura—apparently his personal taste rather than a feature of the tradition) alternated with instrumental solos on plucked lutes and an intimate meditation on bowed sato. For all my concerns about the academy, their spiritual focus would surely have impressed venerable senior masters like Turgun Alimatov and Arif Xatamov. The dancer Madina Sabirova adorned two items, the singing in the lively finale revealing a more popular folk style.
Across the muqam world, as Levin (pp.55–6) notes, “rigidly structured, closed repertoires like the Shash maqâm had given way to autonomous pieces performed in a relatively personalised style”. The innovations of Turgun Alimatov remind him of Jean During’s remarks on modern change in Persian art music, characterising the shift as a “transformation from classical formalism to Romanticism”,
in which music is cleansed of its status as a sacred object in order to become recentred in the interiority of the individual. […] The values of inspiration, creativity, originality, and personality of style and improvisation have become exalted to the detriment of conformity to standards, fidelity to repertoire, and fixed composition.
While I might suspect that this downplays the creative individuality of the master musicians of Yore, it looks like an inexhaustible topic for debate.
In its latest reinvention of tradition for the concert platform, shashmaqom is most beguiling—I just wonder whether it might be creating a new kind of “frozen music”. As always, I’d like to learn about its prospects for a viable social life beyond the concert hall.
[1] See e.g. A Daoist serves a state troupe. Though the opera and narrative-singing troupes were also the objects of intense remoulding (see e.g. my post on Gansu, and sequel), their musicians were often better able to preserve a more traditional style. Re my aversion to the conservatoire, I’m reminded of the Chinese text on the SOAS T-shirt, magnificently misread by one of my Daoist mentors as “anti-academy”…
[2] For the modern admission of female singers into maqam ensembles, see again Djumaev. For the Ferghana tradition, a female star of maqom is Munojot Yoʻlchiyeva (b.1960), also introduced by Levin (pp.77–80). In Europe, CDs have been issued by Ocora (1994, 1998) and World Network (1997). Here she is in concert:
It’s always worth consulting the Taiwan series Minsu quyi (Journal of Chinese Ritual, Theatre, and Folklore”, introduced here). I look forward to reading the two volumes (2023, vols. 221 and 222) of
“Special issue on popular beliefs, religious texts, and local communities in the sinophone world: in memory of Professor Daniel L. Overmyer” 民間信仰、宗教經典與地方社會：紀念歐大年教授專輯.
Indeed, Overmyer would have been much pleased by these studies.
Part One, with an Introduction by Chao Shin-yi and Wang Chien-chuan, has articles on spirit writing and sects in Taiwan, south Jiangsu, and Yunnan. Part Two comprises articles by
John Lagerwey on the history and customs of an Anhui village, focused on its chief temples, ancestor halls, and festivals—in particular, fengshui
Wu Xiaojie and Liu Yun, exploring Pu’an beliefs in anlong xietu (Retaining the Dragons and Thanking Earth) rituals
Chen Minghua on the Luo sect and the Green Gang (Qingbang)
Nikolas Broy on the Taiwanese longhuapai initiation festival and zhaijiao vegetarian sects
Xu Tianji and Luo Dan on the sectarian scriptures of ritual experts in southeast Hebei
Wang Yao on the pantheon emerging from the cult of the General of the Five Paths (Wudao jiangjun 五道將軍) in Hongtong, Shanxi
Ma Zhujun on gender, intimacy, and deity-human relationships in “precious scrolls” about the Lady of Mount Tai in north China, with a focus on gender.
For a survey of ritual and musical traditions in Taiwan, and some background on how their modern histories vary from those of the mainland, click here. Many of my own field reports on local ritual in rural north China are collected here.
I still find it worth reminding you of my page on Rethinking Zhengyi and Quanzhen, for its fundamental rethink of Daoist ritual practice.
In my book In search of the folk Daoists of north China (2011) I began exploring the false dichotomy between Orthodox Unity (Zhengyi 正一) and Complete Perfection (Quanzhen 全真) branches(note especially pp.17–18). The page on my blog augmented the material there in the light of further fieldwork.
Whereas the household Daoist groups of south China have dominated previous research, numerous groups of household Daoists are also active throughout the north—and they may nominally belong to either Orthodox Unity or Complete Perfection branches. But such simplistic pigeonholing may distract us from the details of their ritual practice; in both their rituals and ritual manuals I can rarely discern any significant distinction between them. When the Complete Perfection branch evolved in the 12th century, its priests (both temple and household) inherited a long tradition of Orthodox Unity ritual practice: as John Lagerwey once observed to me, “that was the only show in town”. And while a distinct Complete Perfection literature did evolve (see my book, pp.203–207), their ritual practice never developed into a separate corpus of Complete Perfection ritual texts.
That explains why such an august Complete Perfection temple priest as Min Zhiting was constantly citing Orthodox Unity ritual manuals from the Daoist Canon; and why the best mainstream source for the ritual texts of the Li family (Orthodox Unity) household priests in Yanggao is the repertoire of modern “Complete Perfection” temple practice like the Quanzhen zhengyun and Xuanmen risong.
Household Zhengyi Daoists of the Li family, Shanxi.
In some places now—since around 2000—the picture is further confused by a certain “centripetal” tendency. With wider access (such as the internet), some groups that have always been Orthodox Unity may be exploring ways of “legitimising” themselves by seeking manuals from prestigious central sites like the White Cloud Temple in Beijing, and having costumes and hats made which make them appear to be Complete Perfection Daoists. They may even reform their “local” ritual practice by adopting elements from the “national” White Cloud Temple.
The local ritual scene is further obfuscated by a tendency among some scholars (both local and central) to assume that if a group is household-based, then they must be Orthodox Unity—a problem I have already queried. We really must debunk this assumption. Among my articles on Local ritual, the household Daoists of Changwu in Shaanxi turn out to belong to the Huashan branch of Complete Perfection, and the household Daoists of Guangling in Shanxi appear to come from a Longmen tradition. Actually, this is not so clear-cut—even non-Quanzhen priests might adopt Longmen titles (note sources by Vincent Goossaert cited in my In search of the folk Daoists, p.18 n.34).
So while both the ritual texts and ritual sequences of the two notional branches are rather similar, what always makes local traditions distinctive is the way in which the texts are performed. Even here there’s another erroneous cliché that needs debunking. Generations of scholars of Daoist music have parroted the notion that in style the “music” of Orthodox Unity (conceived narrowly as “household” or folk) Daoists is more popular and lively, whereas that of Complete Perfection (again, conceived narrowly as austere monastic) Daoists is solemn, slow and restrained. This derives entirely from an unfounded theory about household and temple practice. We only need to watch my film about the Li family band to realise this simply won’t do. The basic style of Orthodox Unity Daoists (exemplified by the zantan hymns that permeate all their rituals) is extremely slow and solemn—but as you can hear, it is indeed punctuated by exhilarating moments. The idiom of (household!) Complete Perfection Daoists is certainly no more “solemn”. Both branches may use melodic shengguan instrumental ensemble—and if anything, that of the Orthodox Unity groups tends to be more slow and solemn.
Indeed, when I showed Li Manshan my videos of funeral segments by the Complete Perfection household Daoists in Shuozhou just south of Yanggao, he found their performance “chaotic” (luan). Orthodox Unity groups in Yanggao like that of Li Manshan pride themselves on the “order” (guiju) of their performance. My only ongoing note on this is that several household Complete Perfection groups (such as in Shuozhou and Guangling) may have preserved the element of fast tutti a cappella recitation of the jing scriptures better than in some Orthodox Unity traditions like those of Yanggao. But that doesn’t bear on the false stylistic dichotomy. Like Life, It’s Complicated… We always need to expand our database and use our critical faculties, rather than parroting outdated clichés.
Do refer to my original page, with its greater detail! More essays on conceptual issues in Chinese ritual under Themes in the top menu—besides many fieldnotes on Local ritual…
While Daoism and Zen have long become glib buzzwords in the West, some such as R.H. Blyth and Alan Watts have given informed treatments, and some like Gary Snyder embody the ethos. In another post I alluded to Daoist wuwei while feeling sad that we can’t attribute the expression “Don’t just do something, stand there!” to Miles Davis.
Helen De Cruz contributes a thoughtful study from her background as performer and scholar of baroque lute and archlute. In studying a Zamboni prelude with her teacher, she elaborates on his advice “Be more Zen”:
to give shape to the extemporising, improvisatory nature of a prelude one should achieve more with less, giving an air of effortlessness to quick runs using difficult and sometimes awkward grips. The composition of a prelude embodies the aesthetic of studied effortlessness: at first, the notes sound spontaneous, searching, reaching, as if the player is merely tuning her instrument and improvising. But then, as the harmonies are given increasingly definite shape through blossoming arpeggios, the ear inclines to expect the next note with increasing confidence, and finally it all comes together: the earlier hesitant notes get their meaning, and the mind discerns the cohesive whole—it turns out not a single note was coincidental.
The term sprezzatura * (akin to “effortless grace” or “studied carelessness”) was introduced by the Italian Renaissance philosopher and diplomat Baldassare Castiglione in his etiquette manual Il Cortegiano (1528), written for the “small but chic” court at Urbino. Essential skills for the courtier included dancing, wrestling, fencing, horse riding, sports (such as tennis), and playing a musical instrument. The goal was “to steer away from affectation at all costs, […] to practice in everything a certain nonchalance [sprezzatura] that shall conceal design and show that what is done and said is done without effort and almost without thought”.
While the concealment of art can be affected, the aesthetic is still prized today—for instance, in men’s fashion,
where one aims for an appearance of effortless grace in what is in reality a carefully curated wardrobe. It is part of how athletes are judged. […] The aesthetician Tom Cochrane equates sprezzatura with the aesthetic of cool, which he describes as containing “elements of aesthetic power or sublimity, specifically an elevation above the passions and indifference to danger.” The graceful courtier is (seemingly) unconcerned with the effect he has on the audience. Ultimately, he is unconcerned with himself, he has lost all self-consciousness in the intrinsic beauty of his actions.
De Cruz notes that early discussions often focused on the practice of ritual. “To achieve true mastery, you must lose yourself in a skilled task that harmonises you with your physical and mental environment, and you will achieve mental quietude as a result.” Inevitably, I think of my great household Daoist mentors Li Qing and his son Li Manshan, both lowly peasants; this is also a question of charisma, not always a major theme of studies of Daoist ritual…
The early Daoist classic Zhuangzi evinces the art of the bell-stand maker, wheelwright—and butcher: as de Cruz explains a much-discussed passage,
Lord Wenhui watches in silent admiration as his butcher (who is also his cook) is cutting up an ox: “every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee—zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Jingshou music [ancient ritual items, the former part of rain ceremonies].
“Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wenhui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!”
Cook Ding laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way [dao], which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now – now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes.”
“Perception and understanding have come to a stop, and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.”
Zhuangzi also tells the story of a man swimming in fast-running currents, who tells Confucius:
I have no way [無道wu dao]. I began with what I was used to, grew up with my nature, and let things come to completion with fate. I go under with the swirls and come out with the eddies, following along the way the water goes and never thinking about myself. That’s how I can stay afloat.
De Cruz comments astutely:
Note the details in this story: the man has long hair that streams down, rather than being tied up in a knot, indicating he is of lower class. He sings not in a ritual context, as the Confucians would require, but out of sheer, unadulterated joy. Confucius is the main Confucian sage but (in Zhuangzian fashion) cannot fathom how someone is able to make such a dive and come out alive. Rather than a specific affectation, the swimmer has “no way.” He exhibits the essence of sprezzatura in his graceful movements and his indifference to danger.
For both folk and art music in the time of Vermeer, click here.
She cites the 17th-century English lutenist Mary Burwell:
One must then sit upright in playing to show no constraint or pains, to have a smiling countenance, that the company may not think you play unwillingly, and [to] show that you animate the lute as well as the lute does animate you. Yet you must not stir your body nor your head, nor show any extreme satisfaction in your playing. You must make no mouths, nor bite your lips, nor cast your hands in a flourishing manner that relishes of a fiddler [!]. In one word, you must not less please the eyes than the ears.
the aptitudes for which [playing the harpsichord] calls are natural to everyone—much like in walking, or, if you like, running.
She cites the flow theory of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:
Self-forgetting opens the mind to the intrinsic beauty of skills we exhibit in the flow state,
explaining
In Zhuangzi’s butcher and swimmer and in Mary Burwell’s lutenist, the practitioner refuses to be identified with their performance, thus overcoming the self-centredness that often accompanies achievement.
This may be one reason why I became so resistant to Beethoven, for whom struggle—audible struggle—was central, becoming dominant in the romantic aesthetic of the virtuoso concerto soloist, striving to overcome.
De Cruz concludes:
We achieve an overall pleasing effect when we are in harmony with our physical constraints. When we achieve wuwei in skilled performance, we deliberately submit ourselves to our environment and to the limitations of our bodies—we place our actions rather than ourselves centre stage. We can say that sprezzatura presents a philosophy of life, an approach to our environment and our surroundings that acknowledges our bodily imperfections and our situatedness, and that yet enables us to achieve through non-action and mental stillness a kind of perfection that our audience can delight in and enjoy. Sometimes the beauty and wonder we bring into the world has more to do with our non-action than with our action.
Making a valuable corrective to Party propaganda, it’s a repository of alternative sources on the history of modern China,
dedicated to making accessible the key documents, films, blogs, and publications of a movement of Chinese people seeking to reclaim their country’s history. Unlike official government or university archives, the China Unofficial Archives is open, free, and accessible to anyone from any walk of life. The site is fully bilingual in Chinese and English.
The site is still growing, with new sources in the pipeline. The sidebar lists useful rubrics:
Era
Format
Theme
Creator.
Themes—covered by Western academics (see e.g. Cultural Revolutions, and under my Maoism tag), but whose Chinese sources are less easily accessed—include
Land reform before and after 1949
Covid-19
Famine
Farmers’ rights and rural issues
Non-Han ethnic minority groups
Women and feminism,
and (still in progress),
Faith-based persecution and crackdown—including yet another moving film by Hu Jie on the tribulations of a Christian Miao community in Yunnan, Maidichongde gesheng 麦地冲的歌声 (The songs of Maidichong village, 2016), subject of a separate post.
I will doubtless be posting on some topics that particularly interest me—for instance, I’m keen to get to grips with
Fujianprovince in southeast China is one of the most vibrant areas to explore folk and ritual expressive cultures, which its local scholars have been particularly avid in documenting. Its traditions—always rooted in life-cycle and calendrical ceremonies—are known to outsiders largely through the Minnan region in the south of the province, particularly the treasury of nanyin ballads [1]—not least because much of the culture of the island of Taiwan across the strait derives from its Hokkien migrants (click here).
The visits of my early fieldwork years were inevitably superficial, “gazing at flowers from horseback” 走马观花. For background, Li Quanmin’s 1961 field report—during a lull between Maoist campaigns—was already based on collections by local cultural workers. After the hiatus of the Cultural Revolution, Fujian minjian yinyue jianlun福建民间音乐简论 (1986) by Liu Chunshu 刘春曙 and Wang Yaohua 王耀华 made a worthy survey for the early reform era, including both vocal and instrumental genres.
Meanwhile the compilation of the monumental Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples was under way; and it’s taken me all this time to get round to browsing the 2,775 pages (!) of the two instrumental music volumes for Fujian,
Zhongguo minjian qiyuequ jicheng, Fujian juan中国民间器乐曲集成, 福建卷 (2001), again with the experienced Wang Yaohua as editor-in-chief.
Ritual pervades all genres of folk expressive culture: in the Anthology, it is a major theme of the volumes for folk-song, narrative-singing, opera, and dance. In the instrumental music volumes, even genres that lack explicit liturgical content are also invariably performed for ceremonial occasions—but a further reason to consult them is that the specific rubric of “religious music” has been consigned there. I’ve described the flaws of the Anthology project in my
“Reading between the lines: reflections on the massive Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples”, Ethnomusicology 47.3 (2003), pp.287–337.
Conceptually the Anthology‘s treatment of genres is rudimentary, but it opens up a world of local cultures. Apart from the valuable Monographs for opera and narrative-singing, its volumes consist mainly of transcriptions, of limited value without available recordings. For Fujian, whereas nanyin is amply documented on CD and film, most other genres are unique to the province and hardly known outside their own locale. So I find these volumes a revelation, opening up many perspectives (particularly for the late imperial and Republican eras) and making one of the most impressive introductions to the riches of expressive culture in China. It confirms my observations about the resilience of tradition in the PRC—for all the cultural riches of Taiwan, they are dwarfed even by the single province of Fujian, despite the traumas of three decades of Maoism there.
* * *
The main rubrics adopted for the instrumental volumes of the Anthology (a rough-and-ready national framework, based on the classification developed since the 1950s and later elaborated by Yuan Jingfang) are:
“compound” (zonghexing综合性, referring mainly to a substantial vocal component)
“silk-and-bamboo” sizhu 丝竹
“drumming and blowing” guchui 鼓吹
“blowing and beating” chuida 吹打, with a more diverse instrumentation than guchui
percussion bands luogu 锣鼓
“sacrificial music” jisi yinyue 祭祀音乐 and “religious music” zongjiao yinyue 宗教音乐(Buddhist, Daoist, both temple and household—the latter covered far more comprehensively in separate projects by Chinese and foreign scholars).
Besides all the articles introducing particular local traditions, brief yet instructive sections are appended with histories of some notable groups (pp.2687–99) and biographies of performers (pp.2700–19), sampled below.
As throughout China, social performance is dominated by ensembles (see e.g. Liaoning), some occupational, others amateur. By contrast with the “conservatoire style”, instrumental solos play a very minor role in folk practice—here represented only by pieces for the zheng zither around Zhao’an and Yunxiao (pp.1683–1754), just east of Chaozhou in east Guangdong—another enclave for zheng solo repertoires.
* * *
Even for the Quanzhou region of south Fujian, while nanyin 南音 is a main focus, it is only part of a diverse scene. Nanyin has become a significant cultural element in the rapprochement between Fujian and Hokkien communities overseas. With so much research elsewhere, the Anthology section (pp.31–46, transcriptions pp.37–354) may not detain us long, though we should also consult other volumes, notably those for narrative-singing—both “music” (Zhongguo quyi yinyue jicheng, Fujian juan 中国曲艺音乐集成, 福建卷, pp.45–1102!) and the monograph (Zhongguo quyi zhi, Fujian juan 中国曲艺志, 福建卷).
Beiguan 北管 isa major genre in Taiwan (see again here), but in Fujian (where it is particular to Hui’an county near Quanzhou) it has a far less extensive repertoire (pp.355–60, transcriptions pp.361–97; biographies 2716–18).
Local traditions under “silk-and-bamboo” (a rubric as unwieldy as the others) include
shiyin 十音of the Pu–Xian region (Putian and Xianyou) (aka shiyinbayue 十音八乐, with the added format of shawms and percussion: for video clip, see under Walking shrill)
“guyue” 古乐 of Zhao’an in the southern Zhangzhou region, related to Chaozhou ensemble music and the zheng zither repertoire
shiban 十班 groups around west Fujian.
“Greater guchui” procession in Anxi.
Shawm-and-percussion bands, again serving life-cycle and calendrical observances, are ubiquitous throughout China, including all regions of Fujian—though they are hardly known outside local communities. Under the heading of “guchui” are introductions to
Ningde in northeast Fujian (for a shawm band in Xiapu, see also pp.2696–8).
around Fuzhou, Annan chi 安南伬 (and introduction to a renowned band in Linpu village, pp.2691–2)
in Fuqing south of Fuzhou, jin guchui 金鼓吹
“lesser guchui” of Xianyou and “greater guchui” of the Pu–Xian region.
Biographies of Pingtan paizhi master Wang Shanglong and Chen Renzhen.
Since imperial times, shawm bands were often transmitted through regional military garrisons, such as
longchui 龙吹 around Quanzhou (text pp.784–5, transcriptions pp.786–96), introduced in my Folk music of China pp.312–18, CD #12 (in the sidebar on this blog, audio gallery #15, with commentary here), and another instance is
paizhi of Pingtan island平潭排只 (text pp.663–4, transcriptions pp.665–708; biographies of Wang Shanglong 王尚龙 [1846–1917] and Chen Renzhen 陈人祯 [1911–88] p.2707, with a brief introduction to the latter’s band on p.2695).
The Qinghe guan society in Changtai.
For south Fujian, further sections document
shiyin十音 around Quanzhou (Folk music of China, pp.318–20)
naoting 闹厅 of Yongchun (cf. film footage of Yongchun migrants to Malaysia, here)
shawm bands in Anxi and Xiamen
for Changtai near Zhangzhou, greater guchui and lesser bayin—introducing the Qinghe guan 清和馆 society, whose masters trained over fifty groups in the vicinity.
Transmission of Raoping chui in rural Longyan, p.931.
Around west Fujian:
Raoping chui饶平吹 of Longyan (and introduction to a village band pp.2695–6)
shifandiao 十番调 of Yongding
wuyin 五音 of Shanghang
and genres in Wuping, Liancheng, and Changting.
In central Fujian, bands in counties of Sanming municipality.
In the north, shawm bands in counties of Nanping municipality
In the east (opening vol.2), shawm bands of the She minority 畲族 around Xiapu, Fu’an, Ningde, and Yong’an.
“Blowing and beating” Under the rubric of chuida (a more diverse instrumentation than the “guchui” shawm bands):
around the provincial capital Fuzhou, shifan 十番 (for various groups in the region, see also pp.2692–4)
shijin 拾锦 of Fuding, and genres in Fu’an and Gutian
in the Zhangzhou region, Siping luogu 四平锣鼓 of Nanjing 南靖 county (see also p.2696).
in north Fujian, Shifan luogu 十番锣鼓 [2] of Wuyishan, and groups in Pucheng.
Percussion ensembles include
taiping gu太平鼓 around Fuzhou, and
goutou 沟头 of Fuqing
jin guluo 金鼓锣 of Zhouning further north
genres in the south and west of the province.
Ritual As we saw, while all genres of expressive culture are pervaded by ritual, in the Anthology the major rubric of “religious music” has been allotted to the instrumental music volumes. Though the articles of the lengthy section for Fujian (pp.1757—2683) fall far short of detailed monographs elsewhere (e.g. the Daojiao yishi congshu series for household Daoists), they constitute subsidiary references that may yet offer further clues (for early film footage, see Religious life in 1930s’ Fujian).
In the constant struggle with taxonomy (note the thoughtful studies of Catherine Bell), the editors’ ritual categories are unsatisfactory—in folk practice, even the terms “Buddhist” and “Daoist” are porous, as is clear from several volumes of the Daojiao yishi congshu. Before the listings of temple and household Buddhist and Daoist genres under “religious music”, they have inserted a section on “sacrificial music”, comprising
“Three in One” (Sanyi jiao 三一教) groups in the Pu–Xian region (see also biography of Liu Maoyuan 刘茂源, b.1916, pp.2710–11)—note Kenneth Dean, The Lord of the Three in One: the spread of a cult in southeast China (1998)
for the She minority around Ningde and Fu’an, a rather detailed article with the misleading title “music of mediumistic rituals” wushu daochang yinyue 巫术道场音乐 (pp.1837–42, liturgical texts with scores 1843–93; also biography of sixth-generation master Zhong Fuxing 钟福星 [b.1930], p.2718). Known here as wangshi 尫师 (an interesting character, wang), such ritual specialists are Daoist exorcists in the Lüshan or Maoshan tradition, presiding over the complex liturgical sequences of jiao Offering and mortuary rituals (cf. this 2017 article), just like their Han Chinese counterparts elsewhere in the province (below under “religious music” > Daoist > household)—as distinct from the self-mortifying spirit mediums who also play a significant role in Fujian rituals (see e.g. Dean’s splendid film Bored in heaven).
Chanhe ritual, Fuzhou.
For both simplicity and clarity, these sections might rather have been subsumed under the single rubric of “religious music”—which includes
Buddhist:
liturgy of temple monks: Guanghua si temple in Putian, Kaiyuan si in Quanzhou, and Nan Putuo si in Xiamen
household ritual specialists:
chanhe 禅和 amateur ritual societies in Fuzhou (introduced en passant in my Folk music of China, pp.295–6)—another substantial section (see also biography of Xie Guiming 谢桂铭, b.1913, p.2709)
xianghua 香花 household priests in Putian (cf. Meixian in east Guangdong).
Household Daoist rituals, Putian.
Daoist:
liturgy of temple priests: Xiamen and Zhangzhou
household ritual groups in Putian, Xianyou, and Nan’an (for the latter, see also biography of Daoist Li Shi 李湿 [b.1932], pp.2712–13)—the scores useful, at least, for liturgical texts. Again, these sections will merely supplement detailed studies by scholars of religion.
Segments of mortuary rituals, Nan’an (again, cf. Ken Dean).
* * *
Even limiting our scope to instrumental music, it takes considerable conceptual adjustment to broaden our view of the musical culture of Fujian from nanyin to a multiplicity of groups such as shawm bands and ritual specialists. Unsatisfactory as the Anthology may be, beyond merely documenting “pieces” it reminds us that the lifeblood of all these traditions is social—and ritual—practice. Many individual genres are doubtless the subject of articles in Chinese journals since the publication of the Anthology, and one could make a base in any one county, indeed any one village, combining a wealth of material by observing life-cycle and calendrical activities. Meanwhile, even before consulting several thousand further pages of the Anthology for vocal and dance genres, these volumes provide valuable clues to the local ceremonial cultures of Fujian, the life stories of its transmitters, and social change, making a gateway to our studies of ritual life.
[1] This is a common reductive view. In surveying Chinese expressive culture, we must always beware merely regarding south Jiangsu as silk-and-bamboo, Hebei as songs-for-winds, Shanxi as “eight great suites”, and ethnic minorities as “good at singing and dancing”—just as we may reduce Spain to flamenco, Indonesia to gamelan, and so on.
If you appreciate our film Li Manshan: portrait of a folk Daoist (*watch here*), then the book is an essential companion—further augmented on this site by a series of vignettes and updates, rounded up here.
Introduction, and reviews from Ian Johnson, Stephan Feuchtwang, and Vincent Goossaert:
In vocal traditions of Chinese expressive culture (as I keep harping, or drumming, on), the neat pigeon-holes of folk-song, narrative-singing, and opera disguise a continuum from solo singing though to fully-staged genres with larger forces, all oscillating between a range of points along the ceremonial–entertainment continuum—see my
“Reading between the lines: reflections on the massive Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples”, Ethnomusicology 47.3 (2003), pp.287–337, e.g. §4.4.
Within the Anthology, one often needs to consult all three rubrics: folk-song, narrative-singing, and opera—and indeed dance. Along with my focus on ritual traditions and instrumental ensembles, narrative-singing (aka “story-telling”) is often relevant to my studies. So I’ve recently added a tag in the sidebar for shuoshu说书 (aka shuochang说唱, or in official parlance quyi曲艺)—I’ll try and keep updating this roundup.
Another issue of taxonomy in the Anthology: whereas “religious music” is largely consigned to the instrumental music volumes, some ritual groups accompanying their vocal liturgy only with percussion are found within the narrative-singing volumes, such as the household Daoists of Changwu in Shaanxi. Also classified somewhat uncomfortably under “narrative-singing” is the substantial theme of
“precious scrolls” (baojuan)—surveyed here, with links to Hebei, Gansu, and south Jiangsu.
Of course, rather than being constrained by narrow categories, we need to place the variety of expressive cultures in social context. Studies of “narrative-singing” often highlight the refined urban entertainment of urban stages and teahouses, with a largely sinological, literary approach to late imperial history—itself a worthy topic—tending to reify performances that are in fact animated by a strong element of improvisation. And as with folk-singing, opera, and indeed instrumental music, this may distract us somewhat from the ethnography of changing modern society. In rural China, ritual contexts are strong; much story-telling takes place in the context of temple fairs and domestic blessings. The rural perspective is significant across all genres, but I find it particularly salient in coverage of narrative-singing. It may also remind us of the importance of poverty. Itinerant blind performers are prominent.
Salutary instances include these two posts on Shanxi:
Here I introduce Liu Hongqing’s harrowing exposé of the lives of poor peasant families in the Taihangshan mountains, based on a blindmens’ “propaganda troupe”.
Other regions featured on this site, in more or less depth, include
Based on a 2019 presentation made for Tibetan artists and bureaucrats in Dharamsala for the 60th anniversary of the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA) there, the article deserves a wide readership: many of Isabelle’s findings are applicable to genres both among the Han Chinese and elsewhere around the world, making a valuable addition to the extensive literature on “Heritage” (for a roundup of posts on this site, click here—with my own first rant on the topic here).
She discusses in detail the evolving debate around the system worldwide, as well as the Tibetan notion of “culture”. As she explains, the ICH terminology has been ubiquitously used in the cultural policies of the PRC since 2006—towards Han Chinese communities, but most critically among the so-called “ethnic minorities” (including the Tibetan regions of TAR, Amdo, and Kham), and it has given rise to “a massive output of lavishly funded state programmes, festivals, museums, academic conferences, books, DVDs and commercial by-products for tourism”—a veritable “heritage fever”.
The article sums up the genealogy, aims, language, and logic of UNESCO’s categorisations of culture, contextualising the UNESCO heritage nominations in a comparative worldwide survey. It then explores the political, linguistic and cultural reasons explaining the relative blind spot for the ICH among Tibetan communities, before moving to the specific challenges faced by ICH-nominated traditions and artists in Tibet. Unpacking the notions of “heritage” versus “cultural heritage”, Isabelle notes:
The very idea of “heritage” in the West came up as a sort of nostalgic look at the past, when it was already “too late”, that is, when the cultures supporting these objects were in a great part defunct. Moreover, this nostalgia is imbued with a nationalistic flavour, in the sense that these traditions on the verge of being lost are deemed essential in the shaping of a national bond and belonging. It may be the case that Tibetans feel that their traditions are lively enough that they do not need an objectifying label such as “heritage”. But the very idea of the creation of (what would later be called) the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts in 1959 draws exactly from that same double logic of nostalgia and nationalism.
While ICH policies are “aimed at preserving songs, dances, dramas and cultural practices—not unlike what TIPA has been attempting to do for six decades”,
this politicised “catalogue” view of culture is also remote from how anthropologists understand culture: as ever adaptive and organically articulated in the multiple layers of the lives of people.
Thus “the recurrent effect of ICH proclamations is that they, in effect, isolate the practice from its context, and lead to its further endangerment”.
Yet
The phrase ICH remains obscure for nearly all Tibetans in exile—actually, as we will see, for most Tibetans in Tibet as well […] The idiom remains obstinately abstract for the great majority of Tibetans, even for those who are involved in ICH… and sometimes even for the local Chinese administrators in charge of the programmes. *
Isabelle goes on:
Cultural reluctance to the concept of ICH can be seen in two ways. On one hand, despite strong assaults on Tibetan culture that some authors have termed “cultural genocide” or “assimilation”, aspects of Tibetan of culture are still felt by Tibetans as being very strong and alive. Tibetans do not easily identify with a nostalgic contemplation of “culture” in terms of the ways in which it is embedded in ICH and UNESCO objectified conceptions. For most Tibetans, culture is not (yet) something distant, staged, or at least it is not only that. On the other hand, another cultural reluctance may concern the very notion of “culture”. ICH presupposes a democratic, or rather a “people’s view” of culture, where “culture” is that everyday life content which is shared by most people. This differs from an elevated and exclusive conception of “culture” (rig gnas) by Tibetans, that carries connotations of virtuous knowledge transmitted by role models. The idea of honouring “simple” singers, dancers or ache lhamo performers as cultural heroes of the community seems odd to most conservative Tibetans. Prestigious seats at official functions are meant for “cultural heroes” that inspire devotion and respect, such as lamas, politicians, and more recently (in exile) resistance fighters who bravely confronted the enemy. In a deeply religious and perhaps exclusive diasporic society, where the very survival of the community rests upon keeping the culture homogenised and extolling role models, the idea to give money, titles, and public acknowledgement to “simple” TIPA artists (if we consider Tibetan exiles) seems at best out of place, if not outright unacceptable. Finally, the third possible reluctance I see of Tibetans with the ICH concept is political. For those who are informed, they know that UNESCO is a cenacle of recognised independent States, and that Tibetans, not having this legitimacy, do not stand much of a chance to be heard, so why bother?
So I might consider this “blind spot” of the Tibetans not so much “unfortunate” as wise, suggesting a reluctance to play the Chinese game or pander to commodification.
Calling ICH “yet another tool to milk the government”, observers have voiced that ICH boils down to a competition between bureaucrats for their personal benefit, rather than a meaningful way to safeguard traditions for the benefit of the local people.
Still, along with other scholars of ICH, Isabelle recognises that “astute stakeholders” are sometimes able to use the ICH for “manoeuvring and promoting Tibetan culture”—a ploy also adopted among the Han Chinese and communities further afield.
Most rural performers, who are generally not educated (in formal schools), do not understand the underpinnings of the concept of “intangible cultural heritages but retain a rather positive attitude towards ICH, which they construe as bringing them material benefits (money, costumes, equipment, occasions to perform, status and value in the eyes of the State, etc.). They also recognize that ICH garners more visibility of Tibetan traditions that are disappearing fast from rapidly modernising rural areas, after decades of marginalisation and hardships. The ICH program has indeed allowed the revitalisation of derelict traditions in remote parts of the countryside and has brought more awareness about “tradition” among the youth.
On one hand “ICH does enhance visibility, give opportunities to perform (for example at State-run festivals) and sustain, to some degree, the continuous practice of art traditions”. However,
troupes are often limited to performing a short vignette of their style (20 minutes or less). When preparing their troupes for such snippets, troupe directors confess a frustration at not being able to pass down a full tradition to the next generation. A majority of these rarefied translocal art traditions require an immersion into a whole system of knowledge and cultural references to be understood and appreciated, but only a series of “postcard-like” excerpts are allowed to be “displayed” for public consumption and entertainment (and approval).
As she notes, “ICH programmes came about in a situation where performing arts traditions had already been heavily reworked through State-run programmes during the previous six decades.”
Local community traditions versus reified state propaganda: left: Ngagmo female ritual group, Rebkong (Amdo); right: TAR song-and-dance ensemble. Source.
Within the borders of China, for traditions nominated for the ICH, three were promoted simultaneously in 2009: the Gesar epic, Tibetan opera (ache lhamo), and what UNESCO dubs “Regong arts” (a thangka painting tradition in Rebgong, Qinghai). The article goes on to list the later profusion of ICH inscriptions at national, regional, and county levels.
It’s always important to unpack state agendas in promoting culture; I admire much scholarship on ICH, but while the programme has cast an ever larger shadow over local traditions, it seems sad that such authors have to invest so much energy in bureaucratic theory and practice which they might otherwise be able to spend on studying the changing communities themselves.
In her fine Conclusion, Isabelle sums up:
On the global stage, ICH is an exercise in public relations. International identity politics are now done through “spectacle”, and the representation of one’s nation through simplistic reified images. The crucial aspect of UNESCO’s conception of culture is that these cultural expressions are a “property”, an entity that is owned and managed by a State presenting itself as the legitimate custodian of that heritage.
At the level of the PRC, ICH is a crucial notion in understanding the current predicament of Tibetan culture. While definitely allowing for more visibility of folk traditions in the public and media spaces, generating more income, and offering some possibilities to safeguard and sustain cultural traditions, its actual implementation is typically fraught with complications. ICH programmes have reinforced both ancient and new hierarchies of knowledge, power and money and fostered an ever-pervasive State interventionism into the management of folk culture. The staggering budget poured into traditional culture brings about radical transformations in the name of preservation, and economic marginalisation in the name of empowering local communities. But many artists and observers in the performing arts try to stake their claim to these choreographed cultural forms and, at the same time, manoeuvre within the system to try and salvage their traditions in between the dotted lines defined by their duties. I will leave the last word to one of these Tibetan cultural custodians, who perceptively remarked:
The government wears the clothes of “culture” to do politics. We Tibetans wear the clothes of “politics” (obedience, loyalty) to do culture.
* Echoing Musapir‘s findings for Uyghur traditions—on which, note also the work of Rachel Harris, exposing the Chinese state’s sinister agenda in co-opting culture as part of its war on the Uyghur heritage—recently, this article.
Through the Maoist decades after the 1949 Communist takeover, while the society of mainland China was constantly beset by a succession of iconoclastic traumas, the Republic of China on the island of Taiwan was considered a bastion for the maintenance of traditional Chinese culture.
What I suspect hasn’t always been clarified is that Taiwan cannot embody that culture as a whole: naturally, its heritage largely reflects the traditions of the particular regions from which they were descended on the southeastern mainland—and it was that, until the 1980s, which was the only peep-hole through which we could view the enormity of Chinese culture. *
But then, as “reform and opening” swept the PRC, ritual and other folk performance activity—that outsiders could only assume to have been extinguished there after the Communist takeover of 1949—began reviving on a vast scale, along with an array of central and regional scholars keen to resume fieldwork and research. And at the forefront of discoveries was the region of south Fujian, just across the strait from Taiwan (see e.g. C.K. Wang, Kristofer Schipper, Ken Dean, John Lagerwey). As fieldwork expanded to other parts of the southeast (see Daoist ritual in south China), it soon became clear that there was a vast repository of local traditions of ritual and expressive culture to document all over China (see The resilience of tradition)—if not eclipsing the reputation of Taiwan’s heritage, then at least putting it into perspective. The research of Taiwanese scholars was now able to inspire fieldwork on the mainland.
Still, the main genres of Taiwan have rather little bearing on the kind of ritual traditions that were coming to light in the north Chinese countryside, or even in east-central China; indeed, they only represent a small selection from the diverse range of genres around Fujian, as becomes clear by consulting the volumes of the monumental Anthology (for now, see here, with a further post to follow).
I also think of the transformation of Tibetan studies. After 1950, exile communities (led by TIPA in Dharamsala—see e.g. Zlos-gar, 1986) had been considered as the sole heirs to the culture of Tibet; but by the 1990s scholars began shifting towards the mature ethnographic assessment of its vicissitudes under the Chinese yoke (under Recent posts on Tibet, see e.g. Labrang 1). In her wise article “Easier in exile?, Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy ponders the different challenges of doing fieldwork among Tibetans in Lhasa and Dharamsala (see The enchanting world of Tibetan opera).
* * *
Taiwan Besides the small minority of aboriginal groups (c2%), the main populations of Taiwan are Hoklo (Holo, c70%), Hokkien speakers originating from the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou regions of south Fujian; and Hakka (c15%), descended from the mainland regions of east Guangdong and west Fujian (click here and here for the expressive cultures of both groups). Refugees from elsewhere in China fleeing to Taiwan in the 1940s also brought some staged vocal genres with them.
With Taiwanese society subject to far fewer traumatic social upheavals than on the mainland, cultural forms were certainly better maintained there. But as in any modern society, there are no “living fossils”: besides the island’s complex colonial legacy, performers and patrons have to negotiate the incursions of modernity and popular media (see Society and soundscape, notably the work of Bruno Nettl).
Since the clampdown in the PRC under Xi Jinping, perspectives regarding the mainland and Taiwan are modifying (see The Queen Mother of the West); having myself been busy studying the maintenance of local ritual cultures in the PRC, it’s high time for me to re-assess my approach. So as sometimes happens on this blog (e.g. Precious scrolls, and even A jazz medley), this basic overview of music–ritual traditions is as much for my benefit as yours…
Surveys In English, starting points include articles in The New Grove Dictionary of music and musicians, TheGarland encyclopedia of world music (Wang Ying-fenpp.423–9, Hsu Tsang-houei pp.523–9), Wang Ying-fen in The Rough Guide to world music, Europe, Asia & Pacific (3rd edition, 2009), and even wiki.
At the forefront of studies of traditional music in Taiwan was Hsu Tsang-houei許常惠 (1929–2001), who gravitated from WAM-style composition to fieldwork on folk traditions. ** Among his surveys are Taiwan yinyue shi chugao台灣音樂史初稿 (1991, I think) and (with Cheng Shui-cheng) Musique de Taiwan (1992). See also Lü Ch’ui-k’uan 呂錘寬, Taiwan chuantong yinyue gailun台灣傳統音樂概論 (2005, 2007), in two volumes on vocal and instrumental music.
Genres Among the most popular topics are nanguan and Daoist ritual—both, since the 1980s, informed by fieldwork on either side of the strait. Amateur nanguan 南管 music societies, performing exquisite chamber ballads for calendrical and life-cycle ceremonies, have long been deeply embedded in community life (see this post). Nanguan is the subject of much research, both in Fujian and Taiwan. Wang Ying-fen has published extensively on the Taiwan scene in both Chinese and English—I particularly admire her articles on the risks inherent in state promotion of nanguan (such as this), worthy contributions to studies of the thorny issue of heritage.
Temple fairs, with vibrant processions, remain a major part of life in Taiwan. Regional traditions of Daoist ritual (for the north, click here) are the focus of generations of Taiwanese and foreign scholars. For the former, alongside many distinguished scholars, Lü Ch’ui-k’uan 呂錘寬 has paid notable attention to ritual soundscape (e.g. Daojiao yishi yu yinyue道教儀式與音樂, 1994). Another major theme in ritual studies is the worship of the female deity Mazu, widespread both in Taiwan and around the southeastern coast of the mainland.
The composite genre of beiguan 北管 (good wiki page here, with links) is again performed mainly for calendrical and life-cycle ceremonies, largely by occupational groups; while closely related to vocal drama, it’s best known for its loud outdoor shawm-and-percussion bands. Here’s a short documentary about the master Qiu Huorong 邱火榮 (b.1937):
Most flexible of popular operatic forms is gua-a-hi (gezai xi歌仔戲). And more popular in Taiwan than shadow puppets and marionettes, glove-puppetry (budai xi 布袋戲) has adapted to changing times; the former tradition was transmitted by masters such as Li Tianlu 李天祿 (1910–98), whose early life is evoked in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1993 film The puppetmaster.
Narrative-singing is best known through Chen Da陳達 (1905–81) on the Hengchun peninsula. He was “discovered” in 1967 by Hsu Tsang-houei and Shih Wei-liang 史惟亮 as part of their fieldwork for the Folk-song Collection movement, forerunner of several state-sponsored organs in Taiwan. Here’s Shih Wei-liang’s recording from 1971:
In the north of the island, the blind female singer Yang Xiuqing楊秀卿 (b.1934) is also renowned.
(As in the PRC, please excuse me if I fall into the old Songlines trap of giving undue attention to “star performers”—whereas in-depth ethnography soon uncovers the myriad unsung bearers of tradition, such as Vincent Goossaert’s “ordinary Daoists”, or rank-and-file members of festive groups.)
Like beiguan, the Hakka bayin 八音 ensemble is dominated by shawms and percussion. Here’s the CD Taiwan: mountain songs and bayin instrumental music (Inedit, 2006; as playlist):
As in mainland China, the vocal polyphony of minority peoples (notably Amis, Bunun, Tsou, Paiwan, Rukai—around 2% of Taiwan’s population) has attracted much attention, with many recordings issued of aboriginal singing, such as Polyphonies vocales des Aborigènes de Taiwan (Inedit, 1989):
and Taiwan: music of the Aboriginal tribes (Jecklin, 1991) (playlist):
As in mainland China, while such traditions struggle to remain relevant in a modernising society, national cultural bodies have adopted particular genres as symbols of identity. Expressive culture has made a major component in the rapprochement between the PRC and overseas Chinese communities. Wind Records in Taipei issued a succession of CDs of mainland genres in conjunction with the Music Research Institute in Beijing, notably an important series of archive recordings (folk-song, narrative-singing, opera, and instrumental music, as well as minority polyphony), and of the qin zither. The journal Minsu quyi, with its detailed studies (mostly in Chinese) on ritual, theatre, and folklore, also expanded its scope from Taiwan to the mainland.
* * *
Growing political tensions encourage us to pay renewed attention to Taiwan, and to support beleaguered democracy. While it’s fruitful to study the genres introduced above on both sides of the strait, the island remains a conducive environment for both performance and research. Now I’m keen to see someone with fieldwork experience in both societies, such as C.K. Wang, Wang Ying-fen, Ken Dean, or Adam Yuet Chau, expounding the different trajectories of the diverse traditions there, and the challenges that they face.
* Now, none of these comparisons quite work, but… While it’d be far too parochial to imagine the Isle of Wight as a refuge from a radical government in mainland UK, perhaps we might visualise Cuba becoming a liberal sanctuary from a Gilead-style fundamentalist north America (see The handmaid’s tale)—or even Sicily as the sole isolated outpost for tradition while mainland Europe languishes in the grip of authoritarian regimes.
In chapter 10 of In search of the folk Daoists of north China I made a similarly rash comparison, seeking to incorporate north China into our overview of Daoist ritual (cf. this post, again):
It is rather as if our knowledge of Christianity in the whole of Europe were based almost entirely on Sicily and Puglia, with the odd footnote on the Vatican and Westminster Abbey. We may like what we find in those places, perhaps considering it more exalted, mystical, and ancient—but that is another issue.
Without at all playing into the greasy hands of PRC propaganda, one might consider Taiwan (culturally, not politically, since it is clearly an independent nation! Cf. China has always been part of…) as just one among over thirty provinces of China, all of whose forms of expressive culture are dominated by long-established local folk traditions while also featuring some “national” genres and styles from other regions.
** If Yang Yinliu wasn’t the Chinese Bartók, then Hsu Tsang-houei wasn’t the Taiwanese Yang Yinliu (whereas Bill Evanswas the Bill Evans of jazz).
*Part of my education in the travails of modern Tibet*
Bendi Tso, Marnyi Gyatso, Naljor Tsering, Mark Turin, and members of the Choné Tibetan community, Shépa: The Tibetan oral tradition in Choné(2023) (free access here).
Shépa (bshad pa) * is an encyclopaedic repertoire of antiphonal songs performed by ritual specialists and prestigious elders of the Choné people (Co ne pa), a Tibetan subgroup in the Luchu river valley of Kenlho (Kan lho; in Chinese, Gannan 甘南) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Gansu province in northwest China. The region straddles both the Tibetan regions of Amdo and Kham and the Chinese provinces of Sichuan and Gansu, bordering territory managed by the great monastery of Labrang (cf. this post, including further readings on Amdo, and sequel).
Shépa “encapsulates the evolution of Tibetan civilisation through time and serves as a repository of the cultural, religious, and historical knowledge of the Choné people”. As the authors explain, Choné history is profoundly shaped both by intricate interactions with close neighbours (Han, Hui, and Monguor) and by distant political and religious centres. From creation myths to Bon and Buddhist cosmologies and wedding songs, shépa engages with and draws on elements of religious traditions, historical legacies, and deep-seated cultural memories.
“A collaboration with and between members of the local community, including narrators, monks, and scholars”, with its trilingual format (in English, Tibetan, and Chinese) the book’s 778 pages become less daunting.
Bendi Tso’s preface opens with a promising vignette, in what has become a classic juxtaposition (for Chinese instances, see e.g. my film Li Manshan, from 30.32 and 1.07.34):
Leaning against the living room window the night before Sangye Men’s wedding, I felt as if I was straddling two worlds, separated by a thin pane of glass. In the yard, Sangye Men’s friends formed a circle and took it in turns to sing and dance, accompanied by a giant stereo speaker and a rotating rainbow globe light. Their playlist ranged from Tibetan ballads to Chinese songs, and from the traditional Tibetan lute (sgra snyan) to nightclub music. When Arabian Night started, a popular dance song appreciated by younger generations, the guests turned up the volume as high as it would go, swaying their bodies to the music and showing their enjoyment.
Right across the window and inside a living room, four elders were sitting on tsatap (tsha thab / rdza rdo), a raised clay platform where people eat and sleep, drinking Tibetan spirits (bod rag). The flickering rays of the rainbow globe danced on their faces. Occasionally looking out of the window, the elders continued intermittent conversations while singing Shépa. I wondered whether they were able to catch each other’s words on account of the loud noise emanating from the speaker next door.
The co-authored Introduction (pp.1–64 in the English version) gives a nuanced definition of shépa, which has been considered as “poetic recitals”, “speeches”, “oral literature” or “oral tradition”—a combination of verse and prose in recitation and song. In their broad understanding, it is “an umbrella category including all local oral performances that have survived to the present”, on a spectrum from religious to secular. They discuss the relation of shépa to other oral traditions both in Choné and in the wider Tibetan and Himalayan cultural spheres.
Almost every Choné village had an anyé bonpo (a myes bon po) household belonging to a lay Bon priest or an anyé gompa (a myes sgom pa) household of a lay Nyingma practitioner, who would be in charge of performing rituals for individuals and community before the 1950s. Nowadays, ever fewer villages have these priests.
As they surely know, this leap in time begs some basic questions. Again:
Leu (le’u / lhe’u), who appear in Shépa, are a type of anyé bonpo. In Choné, Leu are crucial figures who conduct the protection ritual (srung) during the marriage ceremony. Over the past decades, ever fewer households of anyé bonpo have been in a position to transmit their heritage and duties to the next generation. Based on our current research, there remain only a handful of anyé bonpo, and no leu, in Choné.
The emblem of the anyé bonpo’s ritual expertise is the anyé zhidak (a myes gzhi bdag), “a built-in wooden cabinet designed for storing arrows (mda’) that represent lineage, fortune, and fertility, located beside the main pillar in the living room”.
Among the main performance contexts are wedding ceremonies, as well as horse racing and arrow shooting over New Year (cf. Bhutan). Weddings have “changed significantly over recent decades”, but we are not offered details on the process. Other material on change also begs questions:
These days, almost all of the critical moments in the lives of Choné people now involve Geluk monks and lamas, from naming newborn children to blessing newlyweds to performing funeral rituals. Since the 18th century, the majority of Choné people have become Geluk followers. Major festivals, fairs, and pilgrimage dates in the local calendar are arranged according to the religious schedule of Choné Monastery and its branches. In recent years, with village ritual specialists ageing and passing away, villagers offer their non-Buddhist ritual texts to Geluk monks and ask them to perform rituals that were once conducted solely by anyé bonpo and anyé gompa. Monks usually conduct these rituals with some Buddhist modifications.
I applaud the intent of this study. Salvage projects can be valuable to document a kind of maximum repertoire, and the authors’ diligence in recording the community elders is commendable. But after that promising opening vignette, we are never told if shépa has taken on a new life, perhaps modified in new popular forms, beyond the reified stagings of the Intangible Cultural Heritage—whose many problems they recognise:
In recent years, “traditional” ways to learn and perform Shépa have undergone rapid transformation in the Choné Tibetan community. The transmission of Shépa is increasingly privatised and its performance is becoming standardised in response to the inscription of this oral tradition into the Kenlho Prefectural-level register of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2016. The performative setting and standards for what constitutes a “good” performer are fast changing, and this process has also been accompanied by a reconceptualisation of what Shépa was, is, and will be.
The remaining seven sections of the Introduction document texts—myths, ** and wedding songs—without any further social-political analysis of changes in wedding customs and New Year’s observances over the previous decades. The book has no index.
Such research hardly features among the Shépa authors’ references. The book provides useful material on early history (migration, the Choné kings, Bon, Buddhist sects, warfare), but is entirely silent about social and political change since the 1950 Chinese occupation. So this is the last episode in their historical overview:
From the mid-19th century, the Luchu valley suffered several regional wars. The Choné people were at that point the largest Tibetan group ruled by the Choné kings. Time and again, they were either conscripted into the king’s militia to suppress insurgents for the Qing and the Republic of China (1912–49) or slaughtered by insurgents. Throughout this period, the Choné people suffered serious depopulation. Most Tibetan villages on the northern bank of the Luchu River were destroyed in warfare. To collect tax and recruit militiamen, the kings leased destroyed, bankrupted or empty [sic] households to Chinese migrants who had narrowly escaped with their lives from social unrest and natural catastrophes in neighbouring areas. This resulted in a steady inflow of Chinese migrants into Choné. By 1949, the Choné people had already become a minority within an ever-growing Chinese population.
The authors state their goal:
We hope that this book may serve as an entry point for the Choné Tibetan community in support of their goal of Shépa revitalisation and at the same time uplift their linguistic heritage and cultural dignity.
This is laudable, yet while they are well aware of “the socio-cultural dilemma facing all Choné people over the past several decades”, political constraints hamper their analysis. Cultural impoverishment in communities like these is not simply a function of some generalised modernisation; it is also indivisible from political history since the 1950s.
Of course we always have to read between the lines of PRC publications (see e.g. under Cultural Revolutions, and my two recent posts on opera and narrative-singing among Han Chinese communities in Gansu during the famine). The book’s four named authors are all based outside the PRC, and (like Amdo dwellers) doubtless have insights on the radical changes in society following the Chinese invasion in 1950, the devastation of communities as political campaigns escalated from 1956, and the new transformations since the 1980s. Even within the PRC, perspectives on the traumatic history of Tibetans (indeed, particularly Amdowa) under Maoism—and since—have not always been entirely off-limits.
But the period since 2015, when the authors were carrying out their own fieldwork, has been marked by intensified state surveillance amidst a severe deterioration in Tibetan–Chinese relations, with serious conflicts which they also pass over in silence, such as the 2008 unrest (e.g. here, under 15th June) and 2015 self-immolations (cf. Eat the Buddha). Their reluctance to broach such issues doubtless follows in part from their noble decision to involve as co-authors “the members of the Choné Tibetan community”; and the authors themselves, even while based outside the PRC, may not feel secure enough to avoid self-censorship. So my caveats are critical not of them, but of the extent of the climate of fear beyond the PRC.
Given that the book’s whole subject is cultural transmission, for which the era of Maoist extremism was a crucial period, I find it disturbing that discretion has obliged the authors to exclude all but the vaguest of allusions to it. Other topics left unexplored include migration, state education, and the vast influence of pop and mass media. Thus their account of “history” comes to an abrupt halt in 1950. While one must respect their decision, it limits the book’s value. I still wonder if there might be a way of giving some tactful clues to the painful maintenance of shépa; otherwise there’s a glaring lacuna, risking the kind of reified, timeless, rosy portrayals that are de rigueur in the Intangible Cultural Heritage mission.
Since the authors quite rightly esteem the elders of the community such as Grandfathers Meng Tusktor and Zhang Gyatso, * one wants to know more about the vicissitudes of their lives—through the late 1950s’ uprisings, the famine, the Cultural Revolution; did they manage to continue singing shépa in the early 1950s, the late 50s, even the 60s? Were any of them recruited to the new song-and-dance troupes funded by the Chinese state—and what was happening to the traditional contexts for shépa in local communities? Have performers and audiences expressed any opinions about all this?
And of course, apart from silent, immobile texts, we also need accessible audio/video recordings (see e.g. Amdo rituals: early and recent films)—something eminently realisable with online publishing.
Despite such lacunae, there is substantial material here for historians of (pre-1950) Amdo; with its trilingual format, it is designed to serve the Choné community, under the conditions in which they find themselves.
* On the minefield of Tibetan and Amdo transliteration, see Robbie Barnett’s introduction to Conflicting Memories.
** Including the bird-like deity Khyung, and Rübel (Cosmic Tortoise, a name just begging to be taken up by a Choné rock band—cf. the Croatian metal combo Teddy Bear Autopsy).
The going was tough for the members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the years following the regime of William Glock. A rigorous, ear-scouring diet of avant-garde music was leavened only occasionally by returns to the core symphonic repertoire, as well as dutiful lip service to the “cowpat” school of early-20th-century English composers—although I recall being impressed by Arnold Bax’s Tintagel.
The first cycle of Five songs from the Chinese poets (score) set English texts by Bantock’s friend the euphoniously-named Launcelot Cranmer Byng, after Tang poems by Zhang Zhihe, Du Fu, Li Bai, Tong Hanqing, and Sikong Tu. All but one appear in A lute of jade (1909)—one of the first collections of Chinese poetry that I bought (probably from Watkins) while still at school. The cycle was arranged for string quartet in 1933 as In a Chinese mirror. According to this post, some of the lyrics of Songs of China were written by Bantock’s wife Helen.
From the second set (score), here’s John McCormack singing a version of a text by the Tang poet Cen Shen in 1927:
* * *
Bantock also composed Chinese-inspired works on a larger canvas. Besides Choral suite from the Chinese (1914, again to texts by Cranmer Byng), I note the orchestral Four Chinese landscapes (1936)—the latter mostly directed by Walter Collins in 1946:
To the modern ear, such sketches are no more enticing than the works of Chinese composers trained in the WAM idiom such as Xian Xinghai, Nie Er and He Luting (a focus for much ideological wrangling in China over the following decades). But “it is what it is“: Bantock and others were part of a lasting European fascination with the Mystic East (see e.g. More East–West gurus), as yet largely uninformed by later fieldwork in the folk cultures of a vast region.
For later Eastern-inspired works, see e.g. Messiaen, and the ambivalent reaction of Toru Takemitsu to Japanese tradition. For the great Bruno Nettl‘s taxonomy of responses to the growing hegemony of Western musics in developing societies, click here. For Tang poetry, see under A Tang mélange.
I may seem like a fully-paid-up member of the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati, but the Guardian‘s end-of-year cultural lists can be mystifying, serving largely to enhance my sense of becoming an Old Fogey (cf. Staving off old age).
As to “new music” (an article with the peak Guardian comment “it’s been an incredible year for Brazilian baile funk”), WTAF?! For me, still catching up on the stile nuovo (n.1 here), even an end-of-year playlist for 1707 (Bach, Handel) would be rather modern—and how about the New Music of the Tang dynasty, eh, with Sogdian dance grooves All the Rage through the reign of Xuanzong. Take THAT, Guardian!
Precious scrolls of village ritual associations near Houshan, Hebei: left, “Demon-queller scroll”, Lijiafen; right, “Ten Kings scroll”, Jijiagou.
My sideline in “precious scrolls” (baojuan寶卷) [1] goes back to our 1990s’ field project on the central Hebei plain, when we were impressed to find a substantial treasure-trove of early editions in villages of Yixian and Laishui counties—and particularly to witness them still being performed by the liturgists of amateur ritual associations there (see under The Houshan Daoists and The Houtu precious scroll).
While the central Hebei plain, and the living performance of its early sectarian scriptures, remain my main focus in baojuan studies, after this recent note on the traditions of Gansu my wider interest has been further piqued by the latest in a succession of anthologies:
whose 50 volumes contain 150 precious scrolls, each with an introductory synopsis. They belong mainly to sectarian groups such as Wuwei 無為, Huangtian dao 黄天道, Xi Dacheng jiao 西大乘教, and Hongyang jiao 弘阳教 / Hunyuan jiao 混元教, many of which feature in our fieldnotes on Local ritual in Hebei (see e.g. Ritual groups of Jinghai).
As instances of texts that we found in rural Hebei, vols. 24 and 25 comprise six editions of the “Demon-queller scroll” Huguo youmin Fumo baojuan護國佑民伏魔寶卷, performed until recently for mortuary rituals in villages around Houshan. Of early printed scrolls that we found in Gaoluo village, the “White Clothes scroll” Xiaoshi Baiyi Guanyin pusa song ying’er xiasheng baojuan銷釋白衣觀音菩薩送嬰兒下生寶卷 is in vol.29, and the Fuguo zhenzhai lingying Zaowang baojuan 富國鎮宅靈應竈王寶卷 in vol.38 (cf. the Gaoluo editions, from 1745 and 1720 respectively). The compendium also includes the “Dizang scroll” 地藏王菩薩執掌幽冥寶卷 (vol.29) and “Ten Kings scroll” 泰山東嶽十王寶卷 (vol.30), preserved by nearby village ritual associations in early editions. In this region at least, the most commonly performed scrolls address the major preoccupations of Chinese villagers: birth (to Guanyin and Houtu), and death (to Demon-queller, Dizang, and the Ten Kings).
* * *
I can’t keep up with the “baojuan fever” that has grown since the 1990s. These notes serve as much for my benefit than yours—rather, perhaps, we constantly seek to refine and clarify our earlier studies.
Baojuan is an umbrella term for a range of texts. Many scholars have considered baojuan more as “folk literature”, or as a textual window onto early sectarian religion, than as a living performance tradition. Pu Wenqi’s own long-term research set forth from studying sectarian (if not always “secret”) folk religion in north China—under the aegis of the great Li Shiyu 李世瑜 (1922–2010); and it was Li Shiyu who blazed a trail in unpacking structural elements of baojuan in ritual performance, which are among the many themes discussed by later specialists.
The research paths of scholars have depended largely on which among the diverse types of baojuan were prevalent in their own region and to which they had access (cf. “blind people groping at the elephant“). As a broad outline, the early “religious” style has mainly been found near Beijing, while later “folk” texts are common in east-central China and the northwest.
Actually, in my earlier posts (based on Plucking the winds, and Appendix 3 of In search of the folk Daoists of north China) I appear to have had a basic grasp of the place of the Hebei scrolls in baojuan studies. As I noted, “while scholarship on the precious scrolls has tended to be more historical and sinological than contemporary and ethnographic”, “the whole point of these precious scrolls is that they are performed for rituals—they’re not musty tomes to be read silently in libraries.” What struck me about the Hebei scrolls was that they belonged very much to the early “religious” type of baojuan, but were still part of a living tradition—most performers we met were liturgists within ascriptive village-wide ritual associations, which had sectarian connections within living memory. And we found the classic structure of early religious baojuan to which Li Shiyu drew attention in 1957: 24 chapters (pin品 or fen分), each incorporating ten-word form, qupai labeled melodies, and so on (see under The Houtu precious scroll).
Of course, just as baojuan only constitute only one small sub-head among the vast mass of Daoist and Buddhist scriptures, they were just one component of the manuals performed by the liturgists whom we visited (see A tribute to two vocal liturgists, Gaoluo: vocal liturgists, Funerals in Hebei). (And zooming out still further, as Adam Yuet Chau reminds us, we need to overcome the hegemony of discursive/scriptural texts, when so much of the meaning of religious activity in society is relational and non-literate!)
Background Early advocates for the study of baojuan were Gu Jiegang from 1924, and Zheng Zhenduo 郑振铎, inspiring a succession of articles in the 1930s and 40s. In the first catalogue, published in 1951, Fu Xihua 傅惜华 listed 246 scrolls in Baojuan zonglu宝卷总录—the same title that Li Shiyu used for his 1960 catalogue, listing 618 scrolls in 1,487 editions.
Since the 1980s, as baojuan came out into the open both in performance and research, scholars have reflected further on origins and classification. Two authoritative figures in baojuan studies are Pu Wenqi濮文起and Che Xilun 车锡伦. Following Che Xilun’s useful 2001 retrospective, his major book Zhongguo baojuan yanjiu中国宝卷研究 (2009) contains both an overview and case studies. Similarly, alongside chapters on specific themes, Pu Wenqi and Li Yongping 李永平 eds., Baojuan yanjiu 宝卷研究 (2019), includes surveys by Pu Wenqi himself and by Wang Mingbo 王明博 and Li Guisheng 李贵生. In English, the detailed studies of Rostislav Berezkin on traditions of baojuan performance in south Jiangsu include useful introductions to the wider topic (cf. my Appendix under Ningxia).
Che Xilun has distinguished “religious baojuan” before the Kangxi reign (1662–1722) from later “folk baojuan”—with subdivisions: [2]
A) Before the Kangxi reign: “religious baojuan” 明正德 (1505–21) 以前“佛教世俗化宝卷”: “演释佛经” “讲唱因缘” 正德后“民间宗教宝卷”: “宣讲教义” “讲唱故事”
B) After the Kangxi reign: “folk baojuan” “劝世文” “祝祷仪式” “讲唱故事”: “神道故事” “妇女修行故事” “民间传说故事<” “俗文学传统故事” “时事故事” “小卷”
Catalogues and anthologies By the 1990s, catalogues were expanding significantly, such as
Che Xilun, Zhongguo baojuan zongmu中国宝卷总目 (2000, after a 1998 Taiwan edition), listing 1,585 scrolls in over 5,000 editions.
Wide-ranging anthologies of the texts themselves were also published, such as
Wang Jianchuan 王见川 and Lin Wanchuan 林万传 (eds), Ming-Qing minjian zongjiao jingjuan wenxian 明清民间宗教经卷文献 (1991) (12 vols, 207 texts) and the 2006 sequel edited by Wang Jianchuan, Che Xilun, et al. (12 vols, 204 texts), mostly consisting of baojuan.
Ma Xisha 马西沙, another long-term scholar of folk sectarian religion, has also addressed baojuan, including the major anthology
Zhonghua zhenben baojuan中华珍本宝卷 (2013) contains 30 vols, with 138 texts,
before Pu Wenqi’s recent collection with which I opened this survey.
Regional fieldwork and research Much of the collection work has long consisted in editing baojuan held in libraries and private collections, but fieldwork became an increasingly important source of texts—often bringing further insights from observing living performance (in another useful overview, see §3 and §5 here).
There had been a few such projects under Maoism, in a period when both performance and research were becoming increasingly risky (cf. the work of Yang Yinliu and his colleagues at the Music Research Institute in Beijing). [3] But fieldwork could only begin in earnest with the liberal reform era since the 1980s. Around Tianjin and further afield, Li Shiyu resumed his work with alacrity—now with a keen disciple in Pu Wenqi.
South Jiangsu and Zhejiang became popular sites for fieldwork, with a particular focus on ritual groups around the Suzhou region, notably Jingjiang (see here, and n.1 here). Again, many texts were published, [4] and fieldwork encouraged scholars to observe actual performance practice—often in the context of zuohui 做会 religious gatherings. In English, after a 2001 article by Mark Bender on the Jingjiang tradition, Rostislav Berezkin has expanded the field in a series of detailed articles.
Another lively site for baojuan studies was the Hexi corridor of Gansu (here I cited this recent survey by Cheng Guojun 程国君). Local cultural workers such as Duan Ping 段平 and Fang Buhe 方步和 were early collectors. [5] The numinous ancient site of Dunhuang tempted some researchers to embroider a connection with early bianwen religious narratives there—a tendency (akin to the persistent “living fossil” shtick, and further mired in romantic fantasies of the Tang and Silk Road) that Che Xilun disputed in his 1999 article “Ming-Qing minjian zongjiao yu Gansude nianjuan he baojuan” 明清民间宗教与甘肃的念卷和宝卷. Nearby, baojuan traditions were also discovered in the Mani assemblies 嘛呢会 of largely Tibetan areas of eastern Qinghai (see e.g. Liu Yonghong 刘永红, Qinghai baojuan yanjiu 青海宝卷研究, 2013); see also under Ningxia.
The baojuan of south Jiangsu and Gansu, while numerous (and again based in ritual performance), are mostly in the later “folk” style, not so early as the early 24-chapter sectarian scrolls that we found on the Hebei plain. For north China, besides Pu Wenqi, other scholars paying attention to the latter kind of baojuan include Cao Xinyu, Yin Hubin尹虎彬, and Liang Jingzhi 梁景之.
In the great Anthology of folk music of the Chinesepeoples, baojuan falls within the scope of the relevant provincial volumes for narrative-singing: Zhongguo quyi yinyue jicheng 中国曲艺音乐集成, and particularly the historical material of Zhongguo quyi zhi 中国曲艺志 (see e.g. under Famine and expressive culture). Foreign scholars of baojuan include Daniel Overmyer (for north China), Rostislav Berezkin (south Jiangsu), Victor Mair and Wilt Idema (Gansu).
As always, silent library study cries out (sic) to be enriched by documenting the soundscape and bustle of ritual in social life (cf. More films). To complement the vast corpus of published texts, and textual studies of their ritual context, even a modest collection of audio/video recordings of baojuan in folk performance is most desirable (my usual caveat: I refer to field recordings, rather than the reified, sanitised staged versions of the Intangible Cultural Heritage project!). The CD with my 2004 book Plucking the winds has a paltry two audio tracks from the Houtu scroll (one of which features on the playlist on this blog, with commentary here—and I look forward to making a new documentary on the 1995 New Year’s rituals in Gaoluo!!!). And click here for a video clip from a ritual performance by a group in Shaoxing.
[1] Though I use the term “precious scrolls”, which has attained a certain niche currency, allow me to repeat Dan Overmyer’s observation (n.3 here) that baojuan is more properly rendered as “precious volumes”.
[2] I’m not sure how useful is Che Xilun’s further distinction between “literary” and “non-literary” baojuan (按照宝卷的内容和题材，又可将宝卷分为“文学宝卷”（包括各个时期讲唱故事的宝卷及民间宝卷中的“小卷”和部分“祝祷仪式”宝卷）、“非文学宝卷”（包括宗教宝卷中“演释佛经”“宣讲教义”的宝卷和民间宝卷中的“劝世文”及部分“祝祷仪式”宝卷）两大类。)
[3] In south Jiangsu, Jiangsu nanbu minjian xiqu shuochang yinyue ji江苏南部民间戏曲说唱音乐集 (1955) was part of a project collecting material on opera and narrative-singing. And for Jiexiu in Shanxi, Zhang Han 张颔,Shanxi minjian liuchuande baojuan chaoben山西民间流传的宝卷抄本 (1957) used material collected in 1946—see also Li Yu 李豫, Shanxi Jiexiu Zhanglan diqu baojuan wenxue diaocha baogao 山西介休张兰地区宝卷文学调查报告 (2010), and the chapter by Sun Hongliang 孙鸿亮 in Baojuan yanjiu.
[4] E.g. Zhongguo Heyang baojuan ji 中国河阳宝卷集 (2007); You Hong 尤红 et al. eds, ZhongguoJingjiang baojuan 中国靖江宝卷 (2007); Lu Yongfeng 陆永峰 and Che Xilun 车锡伦 eds, Jingjiang baojuan yanjiu 靖江宝卷研究, 2008; Che Xilun ed., Zhongguo minjian baojuan wenxian jicheng, Jiangsu Wuxi juan 中国民间宝卷文献集成·江苏无锡卷 (2014, 15 vols).
[5] As in all walks of life, both performers and scholars bore the scars of Maoist campaigns. Following her tribulations around 1960 as one of the Spark protesters blowing the whistle on the famine, Tan Chanxue 谭禅雪 was based from 1982 to 1998 at the Dunhuang Research Institute, where as part of her studies of Dunhuang folklore she published articles on, and editions of, baojuan.
Bell Yung has already issued a fine series of CDs, recorded in 1975–6, that make an impressive anthology of the repertoire of the blind bard Dou Wun杜焕 (1910–79) in Hong Kong (click here). Now he has published a detailed book, in Chinese, on the topic:
Rong Hongzeng 榮鸿曾 [Bell Yung] with Wu Ruiqing 吴瑞卿 [Sonia Ng], Xiangjiang chuanqi: yidai gushi Du Huan 香江傳奇：一代瞽師杜焕 [Tales from Fragrant River: the blind master Dou Wun] (2023, with CD).
“A humble blind singer’s autobiographical song: oral creation facing a Hong Kong teahouse audience”, Ethnomusicology 67.2 (2023).
As to the book, the nine chapters of Part One introduce successive social, economic, and political changes of Hong Kong; the genre of naamyam南音 as part of a rich tradition of performed oral literature, with constant improvisation; musical and textual analysis of naamyam, as well as baan’ngaan板眼 and lungzau 龍舟. In chapters 7 and 8 Sonia Ng gives useful roundups of Dou Wun’s comments on his fluctuating experiences amidst changing Hong Kong society, illustrating another subaltern milieu.
The Fulong teahouse, 1975.
With Hong Kong constantly modernising, the tradition was virtually defunct by the 1970s, so this was already very much a salvage project. Even finding a suitably conducive ambience, venue, and audience to record Dou Wun’s performances was a challenge. After a poor childhood in Guangzhou, he had arrived in Hong Kong in 1926; from the teahouses and brothels of his early years there (despite the 1935 prohibition of the latter, he managed to sing at illegal venues until 1952), and beset by family tragedies, he had mainly “sold his singing” on the streets, besides a regular radio slot from 1955 to 1970. So by 1975, Dou had hardly performed in teahouses for over twenty years; Bell did well to arrange thrice-weekly sessions at the Fu Long teahouse in Sheung Wan district, the stories punctuated by the chirping of caged songbirds brought by its clientele (pp.34–43) (contrast the sterile, empty venues where PRC fieldworkers have mostly recorded).
Part Two (pp.184–237) provides the complete text of Du Huan’s precious six-hour sung autobiographical tale, heard on the 6-disc CD set Blind Dou Wun remembers his past: 50 years of singing naamyam in Hong Kong, and Part Three (pp.239–355) the texts of other items in his repertoire—also featured on the CDs.
Biography is an important component of anthropology and ethnomusicology (for China, see e.g. Helen Rees ed., Lives in Chinese music; cf. my own work on Gaoluo and the Li family Daoists). Yet it’s an unattainable goal to “become as one” with the people on whom we impose (see e.g. here). In personal reflections, Bell has expressed a certain regret that he couldn’t take the project further, entering more fully into Dou Wun’s life; their interaction, and Bell’s material, was largely based on the recording sessions and brief chats at the teahouse. The reader might also like more detail on Dou Wun’s use of the zheng plucked zither (cf. its use to accompany narrative-singing in Shandong).
While it works well as a self-contained project about one artist, one is curious to learn more about the whole performing culture of which Dou Wun was part, not only in Hong Kong but over in the PRC, in Guangzhou and around the Pearl River Delta. There, a starting point might be the narrative-singing volumes of the great Anthology for Guangdong province—for instance, on naamyam, see Zhongguo quyi yinyue jicheng, Guangdong juan中国曲艺音乐集成, 广东卷, pp.422–66, with brief biographies (including Dou Wun!) on pp.467–9; and under a variety of rubrics, Zhongguo quyi zhi, Guangdong juan中国曲艺志, 广东卷 (at a mere 470 pages, surely among the Anthology‘s shortest volumes!).
Pursuing the theme opened up by Hannibal Taubes’ guest post on the Chinese temple in Chico, I’ve been admiring the hefty tome
Chuimei Ho and Bennet Bronson, Chinese traditional religion and temples in North America, 1849–1920: California (2022; 523 pages, large paperback format).
An impressive work of scholarship, published under the auspices of the Chinese in Northwest America Research Committee (CINARC), the book is an elegy to the remains of popular Daoism that nearly died a century ago but was central to Chinese people’s lives in North America from the mid-19th century. Hannibal is far more able than I to identify salient themes, so below I consult his thoughtful review.
Among the wealth of illustrations on almost every page, many are reproductions of original black-and-white images, assembled from substantial local archives—perhaps a future edition might include a section of colour plates showing more recent photos. The CINARC website is a rich resource for many such images.
The topic is geographically distinctive, addressing migrants from the Pearl River Delta in the far south of China to the far west of America. As Hannibal notes,
Some counties in the Gold Rush hills had Chinese temples years before any Christian church was built, while yearly Chinese camp-meeting festivals in the mountains attracted thousands of worshippers, with Zhengyi-sect Daoist priests, great sacral processions, and deity-figures ten feet tall. By 1930 almost all of this had vanished.
Pondering reasons for the neglect of the subject, Ho and Bronson suggest:
Perhaps the main reason for a lack of scholarly interest has been an almost exclusive focus on immigration, anti-Chinese violence, economics, and racism. This has meant adopting a victims’ perspective, reciting long lists of grievances and instances of White hostility. However, we feel that a different perspective is needed, one that focuses on the sources of the courage and mental balance shown by Chinese immigrants.
They posit various provisional elements that may partially account for the rapid, severe decline in religious observances, including conversion to Christianity, white prejudice, progressivist politics, (interestingly) a lack of Chinese women—and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Anyway, the USA proved a less viable site for Chinese religion than southeast Asia.
By the late 19th century the early mining communities * servicing the gold rush gave way to agricultural centres. Both in San Francisco and the hinterland, the secret societies were major patrons.
Apart from newspaper reports (often negative in their portrayal), the study is based largely on the material evidence of the temples themselves—inscriptions, ritual objects, ledgers, and so on, “that we feel brings us closest to what interests us most: to hear, if only faintly, the voices of the pioneers who withstood astonishing hardships to build Chinese America”.
Section 1, “Spiritual and social aspects of temples”, clearly addresses the salient issues, discussing
Why temples mattered
Where they existed and who built them
Functions
Worship
Temples and communities.
Temples served as refuges, hostels, clinics, and meeting places. They were sources of ethnic pride, and centers of community life. And most importantly, the deities they housed stood at the very center of a Chinese-American identity and psychological survival. The early immigrants withstood enormous pressures from physical hardship, cultural prejudice, threatened violence, and concern for loved ones back in China. They needed those temples. For many, the temples were the central institutions of an exile’s life.
Unpacking the ambiguity of the common term joss-house (“joss” deriving from Portuguese deus), the authors identify types of affiliated temples and their parent associations: shrines associated with districts of origin associations (huiguan), charitable halls (shantang), clan associations (zongci), tradesmen’s guilds (hanghui), and secret societies (“tongs”), as well as some independent temples.
Ho and Bronson go on to discuss individual and communal worship, ritual roles (mortuary services, divination, spirit mediums), cultural reinforcement (including education, and opera), secular functions, and investment. They detail the gods invoked (temples with single and multiple deities), life-cycle and calendrical rituals, “bomb festivals” (paohui), and (of special interest to scholars of Taoist ritual) communal festivals for the jiao Offering ritual, known as tachiu (dajiao 打醮, pp.66–73). They discuss the founding, ownership, control/management, and financing of temples.
Section 2 looks at “The physical side of temples”:
Exteriors and siting
Entrances and interiors
Furnishings with fixed and variable locations
Suspended furnishings
Inscription boards
Equipment for processions
Other furnishings.
Overall, “very few Chinese religious buildings were close copies of homeland prototypes”.
Sections 3 and 4 are a detailed inventory of individual temples. Section 3 discusses San Francisco, “by far the most important Chinese religious centre outside Asia” in the late 19th century. Section 4 documents centres outside the Bay Area—mining, agricultural (farm labour), coastal, and urban (despite the great importance of railroad workers in building the West, they were too transient to sponsor temples). This section really opens our minds to the wealth of history in the hinterland, in communities such as Auburn, Marysville, Oroville, and Weaverville.
Ho and Bronson’s concluding remarks survey the spatial and temporal distribution of temples; White views (often disparaging) on the phenomenon; and Chinese American religion in Chinese eyes, making astute distinctions between the perspectives of Chinese businessmen, officials, secret societies, religious professionals, and sojourners.
As Hannibal observes,
Ho and Bronson’s tome will now be the standard reference work on this subject and should be on the shelf of everyone interested in Chinese art and religion, Asian-American studies, immigrant visual cultures in the Americas, and California generally. The authors note that they are considering a follow-up volume that will treat Chinese temples in North America outside of California. Let us hope that this work is completed and that the two volumes can be published together under the imprint of a major press, with color photographs and a few editorial tweaks, as befits this important scholarship.
* * *
My only little contribution to the study of the Chinese diaspora is this tribute to Ray Man, Cantonese music pioneer in London. For the decline of Catholic worship among south Italian migrants in New York, see The Madonna of 115th street.
One point that Hannibal makes in his fine review seems to go rather against the grain of recent scholarship on religious life in post-Mao China. This isn’t the place to assess the vast religious revival that took place there after the demise of the Maoist commune system, but, making a somewhat ambitious comparison between the decline of temples in China and America, Hannibal opens with the statement “Sometime between 1850 and the present, almost all the temples in China vanished.” On the revival since the 1980s, he comments (n.9): “Even areas that appear to have rebuilt their temples en masse still experienced massive losses compared to pre-Communist numbers.” And
Those temples that still physically stood were bulldozed to build apartment complexes, or left to moulder and collapse in half-abandoned villages. Other areas have rebuilt their temples, sometimes in massive numbers, but from the preservationist standpoint this only compounds the destruction, since little care is taken to retain or record the original structures.
These are points worth making, but they downplay the significance of the vast revival. Though much fieldwork on recent Daoist activity (in volumes such as Daojiao yishi congshu) has a retrospective agenda, religious life has resurfaced widely, on a large scale (see e.g. Ken Dean, Adam Yuet Chau, Ian Johnson, and regions such as Fujian, Jiangxi, Hunan, Shaanbei). Moreover, temples are not the only yardstick to assess Chinese ritual life; material artefacts can only tell us so much (cf. China’s hidden century).
While the particular religious ethos that Ho and Bronson’s study reveals will be more familiar to specialists in the ritual history of the Pearl River Delta than to those focusing on other regions of south (and certainly north) China, the whole history of religious life in local communities in the PRC, with their diverse social and economic factors, is utterly different from that in the American West—and from that of the Chinese diaspora in southeast Asia, where ties with the mainland were much stronger and enduring.
* Cf. religious processions of mining communities near Beijing, n. here.
like a suburban Sisyphus doing and undoing a jigsaw, having gone to great lengths to mix up the daily sequence of my diverse topics in a stimulating fashion, it’s that time of year when I try and reassemble them into some kind of thematic order.
In order for this exercise to be worthwhile, you’ll have to click on the links! Ideally, spread the word by reposting on one of those “Social Media” Thingies They Have Nowadays… Even if you only read a dozen of these posts, then my labours will not have been in vain!
I’m going to adopt Stella Gibbons’ drôle device in Cold Comfort Farm, drawing attention with *** to passages (mostly posts, in this case—indeed, the book’s protagonist is Flora Poste) Not To Be Missed. And this list isn’t even exhaustive—the committed masochist can consult the monthly archive in the sidebar, scrolling waaay down.
I’ll begin with Nicolas Robertson, who alas joined the Heavenly Choir in November (see my tribute). His extraordinary anagram tales (introduced and listed here***), a kind of fantasy Esperanto fiction, are among the highlights of this blog, and in further tribute to his brilliant mind I have recently added two more:
So here are listings under some main themes (many, of course, belong under several themes, which is the point of giving them categories and tags, listed in the sidebar):
Seeking clues in the monumental Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples, in my first post I cited the Monograph on Opera for Gansu; here I address the Monograph on Narrative-singing (Zhongguo quyi zhi, Gansu juan 中国曲艺志，甘肃卷)—with less than satisfactory results.
In studying Chinese expressive culture, the neat categories of folk-song, narrative-singing, and opera are porous, and best understood as a continuum, from solo singing through small-scale dramatic storytelling to fully-staged drama—onto which we might also map the spectrums of ceremonial–entertainment and amateur–occupational (see also my roundup of posts on narrative-singing).
I introduced the Anthology at length in
“Reading between the lines: reflections on the massive Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples”, Ethnomusicology 47.3 (2003), pp.287–337.
As I outlined in my review (NB §4.8), whereas much of the other volumes is dominated by musical transcriptions whose value it is hard to assess in the absence of recordings, the monographs on narrative-singing and opera contain some of the richest material for the imperial and modern histories of a wide variety of folk genres.
Across all volumes of the Anthology, the abilities and enthusiasm of collectors and editors varied widely by province (see e.g. Hebei, Liaoning). Of course the general tone of PRC publications is sanitised, but whereas some volumes of the monographs afford glimpses of the social trauma that people suffered under Maoism, my high hopes of the Gansu narrative-singing volume were deflated; there’s a remarkable lack of references to the single defining period in people’s lives, the famine and political terror of the late 1950s.
To understand such variations in coverage and tone, one would have to learn about political conditions in Gansu cultural departments over the period it was compiled—the allegiances of officials and their stance towards the Maoist era. The opera monograph (which alludes only a little more frankly to political traumas of Maoism, as you see from my previous post) was published in 1995, and the volume on narrative-singing music (Zhongguo quyi yinyue jicheng, Gansu juan中国曲艺音乐集成, 甘肃卷) in 1998. However, the work for the narrative-singing monograph was fruitlessly protracted. It began in 1986; a draft was produced by 1996, but the work was interrupted from 1997 to 2003, and not until 2005 was a final version completed, its 855 pages published at last in 2008 (see Afterword, pp.827–8). Still, the text appears to contain no dates since 1985. From here I can’t assess the balance of lethargy and controversy in the long delay, but one suspects that political ghosts from the early reform era still lurked—even before the more thorough clampdown on expression under XI Jinping.
* * *
On early 1950s’ attempts to “reform” the old occupational troupes (Overview, p.15)—
one of numerous passages requiring us to read between the lines.
The Overview (pp.3–21) outlines historical periods from early imperial times right through to the 1980s’ reform era. The style of the section on the early years of the PRC is bland, falling entirely within the boundaries of acceptable CCP historiography. Upon Liberation, cultural officials made efforts to register and control the mass of locally active groups (notably “narrative-singing festive bands and itinerant artists” quyishehuodui yu liusan yiren 曲艺社火队与流散艺人).
During the campaign to Eliminate Feudal Superstition, some ancient genres and traditional items ceased to be performed. In the struggle against Anti-Rightists, some artists and narrative-singing workers were classified as Anti-Rightist elements and suffered politically. These abnormal phenomena were not corrected until 1962. (p.18)
As elsewhere (e.g. Gaoluo in Hebei, such as here, under “The 1961–64 restoration”) there was indeed a brief lull in the early 60s between extreme leftist campaigns, but any “correction” was highly precarious. Most glaringly, this section avoids any mention of the famine.
Official sources have long been more able to make limited acknowledgement of the casualties of the Cultural Revolution than of the preceding fifteen years of Maoist campaigns. Still in standard terms, the Overview goes on to describe the assault on traditional culture and its representatives from 1966—the closure of teahouses, the banishing of cultural workers to the countryside, the destruction of a wealth of material collected since Liberation, and some cases of victimisation and murder.
In particular regions, the phenomenon appeared of people being paraded, sentenced, and even persecuted to death for secretly performing, secretly watching, secretly narrating, or secretly listening to traditional narrative-singing.
At least this suggests that there were plenty of people indulging in such illicit activities—indeed, they must have been commonly taking such risks ever since the mid-1950s. An instance, again from the Cultural Revolution: like errentai performer Guo Youshan in Inner Mongolia (see Xu Tong‘s film Cut out the eyes), in the section on Liangzhou xianxiao (p.73, see below) we learn that the blind performer Zhang Tianmao 张天茂 (b.1935) was struggled for “singing in secret” (touchang 偷唱). (Zhang survived to become a celebrity of the genre in his 80s, lauded for the reified Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) project (see e.g. here), performing on stage and issuing many CDs. Such reversals of fortune were commonplace throughout the society).
Rather than documenting the escalating desperation throughout society as collectivisation and the commune system were enforced, CCP historiographers have always found it far more comfortable to toe the line by latching onto the firm dates of prestigious official events. As in the opera monograph, the “Major events” section (pp.25–52) documents the grand official festivals, with new troupes performing new items throughout the whole period—when the only major events that could have mattered to people were constant hunger and threat of arrest. By contrast with the revealing material in the Appendices of the Hunan (and Henan, n.1 there) volumes, I learn little from the few documents between 1956 and 1962 from the Gansu Bureau of Culture (pp.815–20).
Dai Xingwei, transmitter of the Hexi baojuan tradition, copying a scroll. Source.
A major context for rural narrative-singing, obscured by the propaganda of state modernisation, is ritual. Gansu is among the main regions where “precious scrolls” (baojuan 宝卷) are still performed (see e.g. recent studies by Li Guisheng 李贵生 and Wang Mingbo 王明博, Cheng Guojun 程国君, and Liu Yonghong 刘永红; see also under Ningxia; cf. Hebei). Known in Gansu as “reciting scrolls” nianjuan 念卷 (pp.67–70, 625–6) or “morality tales” shanshu 善书, since 2006 these genres have been reified for the ICH project, resulting in the publication of many early manuscripts (see e.g. this survey by Cheng Guojun 程国君; for largely literary perspectives in English, see the work of Victor Mair and Wilt Idema)—while avoiding references to the traumas of their senior transmitters.
Similarly religious in content and context are the “virtuous and filial” xianxiao 贤孝 genres, notably “Hezhou xianxiao” (pp.95–7) around Linxia, and “Liangzhou xianxiao” (pp.71–3) around Wuwei (such official names, coined since the 1950s, are generally misleading—e.g. Xi’an guyue, Jiangnan sizhu, Hebei chuige). Meanwhile “religious music” was cannily redefined as instrumental ensemble music for performance on stage.
The Monograph proclaims the CCP cultural authorities’ attempts to reform and “develop” the ritual genres of Gansu, but as fieldwork in Shaanbei shows, such efforts were sporadic, and traditional contexts obstinate. Many such genres were dominated by blind performers. In 1984 a national musical contest for blind artists was held in Beijing (p.73).
A passage on “singing fengshui” (chang fengshui 唱风水) around Qingyang in east Gansu (pp.83–5) provides a tiny clue to the surreptitious survival of ritual:
After the founding of the PRC, since large-scale activities like jiao Offerings, rain prayers, and temple rituals came under suspicion for their colouring of feudal superstitious activities, they went underground (xiaosheng yinji 消声隐迹). But small-scale activities organised by household heads, like mortuary rituals (祭祀亡灵), pacifying the dwelling and house-building (anzhai jianfang 安宅建房), still persisted. Whoever suffered a death in the family, whether rich or poor, they would invite a fengshui master to sing a few sections of scripture. […] The reward was agreed in advance by both sides.
(“Rewards” were always a matter of negotation; at such horrific times, performers would have been desperate for any kind of remuneration. Peasant families in Tianzhen, north Shanxi, still managed to invite Daoists in the “years of difficulty”—but even the village cadres came to lift the coffin just so they could get some free gao paste to eat.)
One even wonders how a solo genre like “telling of spring” (shuo chun 说春) (pp.122–4), auspicious New Year’s songs apparently sung byitinerant beggars, could have fared during times of extreme adversity. In these monographs, other useful sections bearing on traditional activity include “Performing customs” (yanchu xisu) (pp.622–34) and “Anecdotes and legends” (Tiewen chuanshuo) (pp.641–61).
Even the Biographies (pp.777–807) contain slim pickings. We can only imagine the tribulations of performers like Zhang Huixian (1892–1970, above), one of few female baojuan performers, based in a village in Jingchuan county (p.790).
But no-one was safe—neither poor itinerant peasant performers nor the officially-recognised representatives of the state troupes; neither obstinate traditionalists nor enthusiastic Party reformers. Wen Bingheng 文炳恒 (1913–58, p.801), organiser of folk performing groups in Heshui county, took part keenly in CCP cultural projects before and after the 1949 “Liberation”. But during the Three Antis (sanfan) campaign of 1951, in blowing the whistle on the corruption of “a certain cadre” he was erroneously classed as a counter-revolutionary element; in 1958 he was sentenced to death.
A different kind of danger: Yang Wensheng 杨文生 (1933–58, pp.806–7), performer of xiangsheng skits with the PLA, was “martyred” in the south Gansu region during a campaign against “bandits”—presumably referring to Tibetan insurgents (among my posts on Tibet, see e.g. here) (we’re not told about Tibetans who perished under the Chinese onslaught).
Of course the biographies can only be selective, featuring just some of those whom the collectors and editors identified as leading bearers of tradition; the mass of lowly performers in the countryside remain largely unsung. Despite the vast loss of life around 1960, death dates at the time are not prominent in the biographies—though one feels almost as bad for those who survived the horrors of Maoism.
* * *
I still regard the Anthology as an essential basic source to open doors onto the depth of folk expressive culture in China. Besides the wealth of data on early history in the monographs, I suppose it’s stating the obvious to observe that for more rewarding material on the Maoist era we would have to seek out unofficial memoirs (see Ian Johnson’s excellent recent book Sparks), which are in short supply.
Alas, it’s already getting late to rectify the glaring omissions of official sources by doing fieldwork. One might decide to write a biography of one folk performer, or document one genre over a defined period; documenting the transformations of the scene since the 1980s’ reforms would make a valuable project in itself. We might even find a senior artist, perhaps born in the 1940s, to offer clear recollections of the late 1950s. Even as the Maoist era recedes, the famine and the whole political climate of the time will always be the elephant in the room.
In the sidebar, the images near the top (14 at present) show POSTS I LIKE, and I recommend them! Much further down the page is a rather vast gallery of thumbnails that you can click on as a useful window onto other early posts. It was already extensive when I updated them in 2020, but I haven’t continued to do so, and I’m unlikely to add more now—not least because it’d make the sidebar even more unwieldy. So from here on, I guess you’ll have to find other ways in, like the Search box, the monthly Archives below the images, and a series of roundups…
And to complement my film and book on the Li family Daoists, as well as this roundup of related posts, this page in the top menu introduces a wealth of images.
My extensive series on Local ritual (listed here) is full of photos from our fieldwork through the 1990s and beyond, mostly in Hebei and Shanxi.
Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s hat: the seventeenth century and the dawn of the global world(2009).
The author, a specialist in Ming China, sets out to write a “global history of the intercultural transformations of 17th-century life”, using Vermeer’s paintings to “open doors” onto the social history of the day (cf.Music in the time of Vermeer). Such an approach has evidently become a tradition in art history—from my very limited experience, it somewhat recalls the style of Michael Baxandall and Michael Jacobs (see On visual culture), on the far broader canvas of the whole globe.
while most of the figures in the paintings of the Dutch golden age look as if they have never strayed more than a day or two from Delft, the material world through which they move is stuffed with hats, pots, wine, slaves and carpets that have been gusted around the world by the twin demands of trade and war. […]
Behind the serene chinaware and glinting silver coinage that furnish Vermeer’s burnished interiors lay real-life narratives of roiling seas, summary justice, and years of involuntary exile. […]
What Brook wants us to understand is that these domains, the local and the transnational, were intimately connected centuries before anyone came up with the world wide web.
First encounters were becoming sustained engagements; fortuitous exchanges were being systematised into regular trade; the language of gesture was being supplanted by pidgin dialects and genuine communication.
Things, and people, were moving around on a global scale.
Chapter 1, “View of Delft”, introduces the Dutch East India Company (VOC); the narrative soon expands from Delft and Amsterdam, with Spain and Portugal also trading in southeast Asia.
Chapter 2, “Vermeer’s hat”, sets forth from Officer and laughing girl, with a fine discourse on hats in the artist’s time, leading seamlessly to Samuel Champlain’s encounter with the Mohawks at the Great Lakes in 1609, the crucial role of the new technology of weaponry, and the beaver hat. Brook always makes connections:
I spend my summers on Christian Island, which is now an Ojibwa reserve, and I cannot walk the dappled path that angles past the place where the children are buried without thinking back to the starvation winter of 1649–50, marvelling at the vast web of history that ties this hidden spot to the vast networks of trade and conquest that came into being in the 17th century. The children are lost links in that history, forgotten victims of the desperate European desire to find a way to China and a way to pay for it, tiny actors in the drama that placed Vermeer’s hat on the officers’ head.
Indeed, “the lure of China’s wealth haunted the 17th-century world“—and the lure of china, theme of Chapter 3, “A dish of fruit”, based on Vermeer’s Young woman reading a letter at an open window. The British East India Company enters the fray, with their battles in St Helena. We learn of the spread of blue-and-white, in Persia, India, Mexico; exploits in the South China Sea, Macao, and Zhengzhou and Quanzhou in Fujian; and in Suzhou, Wen Zhenheng’s A treatise on superfluousthings (cf. another inspired book by Craig Clunas). Brook addresses class and aesthetics. He contrasts European taste for foreign objects (“stirring no contempt or anxiety”) with Chinese mistrust of the wider world, “a source of threat, not of promise or wealth, and still less of delight or inspiration”.
In Chapter 4, “Geography lessons” based on Vermeer’s The geographer, Brook addresses the way that “the great minds of Vermeer’s generation were learning to see the world in fresh ways”. By way of the Delft draper, surveyor, and polymath Antonie van Leeuwenhoek we are taken again to the South China Sea—Manila and Macau, and coastal China, where besides Red Hairs (Dutch), Dwarf Pirates (Japanese), and Macanese Foreigners, African slaves (servants of the Portuguese) as well as Muslim merchants, were also seen. Jesuits such as Paolo Xu and Matteo Ricci play a significant role.
Chapter 5, “School for smoking”, is another fascinating exploration, covering the diffusion of the new habit around the world; “every culture learns to smoke in a slightly different way”. From images in Dutch painting and porcelain, Brook moves again to China, exploring the three routes by which tobacco entered the country. Writing in 1643, Yang Shicong noted the new taste in Beijing, whither it had spread rapidly from the southeast coast. In 1639 the Chongzhen emperor decreed that anyone caught selling tobacco in the capital would be decapitated. The colloquial term “eat smoke” (chiyan), still heard in rural China, was already in use. In the New World (documented from 1505), tobacco was used to “move between the natural and supernatural worlds and to communicate with the spirits”—a function which it still serves in Chinese ritual today. It was thought to have both spiritual and medicinal properties. Moreover,
In daily life, tobacco was an important medium of sociability that, like healing, was something that benefitted from the spirits’ kind support. Managing social relations on a personal or communal level required thoughtfulness and care, and could best be accomplished when the spirits were on one’s side. Burning or smoking tobacco was a way of propitiating the spirits if they were in an ugly mood—as they so often were—and inducing them to bless your enterprise.Sharing a smoke at a tabagie was done in the presence of the spirits, and it helped the smokers find consensus when differences arose.
In China this is another important aspect of social and ritual life that tends to get neglected in our focus on ritual texts. In 1924 Berthold Laufer praised smoking in an egregious misapprehension with grains of insight:
Of all the gifts of nature, tobacco has been the most potent social factor, the most efficient peacemaker and benefactor to mankind. It has made the whole world akin and united it into a common bond. Of all luxuries it is the most democratic and the most universal; it has contributed a large share towards democratising the world.
Brook offers perceptive asides on witchcraft in Europe, class, gender, a tobacco ballet in 1650 Turin—and slavery. And he notes how the habit of smoking morphed into opium dependency in the 19th century—another tragic story of the ravages of trade.
Chapter 6 departs from Vermeer’sWoman holding a balance todiscuss the role of silver, crucial to the world economy of the day, travelling from Potosi in the Andes to Europe and Asia—with erudite discussions of coinage and morality.
Chapter 7, “Journeys”, interrogates a painting by Hendrik van Der Burch showing an African servant boy (cf. Jessie Burton’s novel The miniaturist, evoking the changing world of 17th century Amsterdam). Brook goes on to describe five journeys to distant shores: Natal, Java, a Korean island, Fujian, and Madagascar. He ponders pictorial representations of Biblical scenes (cf. Balthasar).
In the final Chapter 8, “Endings: no man is an island”, Brook ties the themes together, with discussions of translators, the role of the state, and the concept of a common humanity.
If we can see that the history of any one place links us to all places, and ultimately to the history of the whole world, then there is no part of the past—no holocaust and no achievement—that is not our collective heritage.
Yet as Brook shows throughout, all this came at vast human cost: warfare, shipwrecks, ruined lives. He appends a useful list of Recommended reading and sources.
Vermeer’s hat is a virtuosic, stimulating piece of writing.
I don’t know how often sinologists, or other bibliophiles, overhaul their groaning shelves, but it’s been a delight to reorganise my Chinese library over the last year—part of a thorough decluttering of all my Worldly Goods as the entire house is renovated.
First, I resolved to slim down the collection, radically—a process which itself took several months. This, of course, involves deciding which books and recordings I am actually likely to refer to ever again, and which I might possibly seek one day for a reference…
Then I found Good Homes for many of the volumes and recordings with which I could bear to part—one main recipient being the CHIME library in Heidelberg.
Then, along with all the other aforementioned Worldly Goods, I put everything into storage for six months.
Next, with a brilliant team, devising a loft (now a generous space) that would take the remaining material (China books in English, including religion, anthropology, and literature, mostly belonging on the ground floor).
Then—at last!—unpacking all the heavy boxes and adorning the loft.
So what for forty years had steadily grown into a random, grimy accumulation of books, journals, * offprints, fieldnotes and fieldtapes, instruments, CDs and DVDs, spread over various rooms, has now become a compact shrine that reflects the enchantment of doing fieldwork in China since 1986, including precious volumes from the Maoist era, along with a modest selection of meaningful artefacts. Far more than a dry repository of arcane academic material, it’s become a tribute to generations of Chinese peasants and scholars, along with the whole history of fieldwork in the PRC.
Although I have no illusions of doing further fieldwork in China (both out of decrepitude and as a futile moral stance against worsening repression), my three decades studying there make an enduring perspective on my whole worldview, and I will continue to reflect on their significance, in both Chinese and global contexts.
With many books double-parked yet still accessible (and a multitude of loose documents neatly stored in brightly-coloured box-files on another wall!), the classification goes something like this:
My fetish for taxonomy is reflected in several posts (starting here, with links to the joys of indexing and the Sachs-Hornbostel system…). The loft is just one locus for taxonomy—where do table mats and salad bowls belong, for instance (or, more ambitiously, All Things Bright and Beautiful)?!
Renovating the whole decrepit little house has been a gruelling but hugely rewarding project. The result is just exhilarating. As to the loft, it’s far from a mere cosmetic exercise: sure, I’ve managed amidst chaos for forty years, but a conducive environment creates headspace—heartspace—for focused thought. So the new Chinese studio is now a tranquil haven that I, and perhaps visitors too, can relish—to sit, browse, study, relax, play violin or even erhu…
京西微玄觀內碧雲罐庵 Priory of Azure Cloud Bottle within Belvedere of Tenuous Obscurity
* I had a substantial collection of the major PRC musicology journals for c1980 to 2000, largely superfluous as they became available online—at least until CNKI toed the Party line of closing China off to the world again. Anyway, by now personal libraries should be increasingly manageable, with many books also available as pdfs. Still, without rigorous self-control, collections tend to expand…
The province of Gansu was chronically poor even before the horrifying abuses its people suffered under Maoism, culminating in (but not limited to) the Great Famine from 1959 to 1961. Nor should we forget the non-Chinese ethnic inhabitants of the region, who were targeted just as brutally through the period—see under Recent posts on Tibet, notably for Amdo (e.g. Labrang, here and here).
Many documents on Gansu are to be found in Yang Jisheng’s definitive exposé Tombstone, as well as the China famine 1959–1961 site. Before the studies of Frank Dikötter (Mao’s great famine) and Xun Zhou, Jasper Becker already gave a useful introduction to the disaster in Gansu in his 1996 book Hungry ghosts.
The Hexi corridor, leading deeper into the oasis towns of Central Asia, is perhaps most widely known by the early Buddhist cave complex of Dunhuang, projecting a proud image of the glories of ancient Chinese culture. So again Ian Johnson does well to remind us of the memoirs of Gao Ertai, revealing bitter political turmoil there in the 1960s.
Looking again at this undated image (in the “Instrumental music” [sic] volumes of the Anthology) from the Qingshui Bureau of Culture (“Welcoming Water ritual of Huashan Daoists” 清水道教华山派科仪中的“迎水”), I surmise it was taken in the 1980s.
I’ve long felt that Gansu was a major lacuna in coverage of household Daoist ritual. I’ve noted recent developments in Wuwei (Another Daoist debate), and in Jingyuan county northeast of Lanzhou (Maoist worship in Gansu). Counties where some of the most active Daoist groups are based, such as Zhangye, Jingtai, and Tongwei, are among those where the famine was particularly severe (for the famine in Tongwei, see e.g. Dikötter pp.307–9).
More images from the “instrumental music” volumes of the Anthology for Gansu:
Daoists of the Daode guan temple, Zhangye county;
Cao Jixiang’s Daoist band performing the Ten Offerings ritual, Jingtai county;
Cao Jixiang’s band seated.
However, most scholars of Daoism still gravitate to the image of imperial grandeur, focusing on manuscripts with ancient ancestry rather than documenting transmission history since the mid-20th century, or people’s lives. But whether we’re interested in Daoist ritual before 1949 or before the Song dynasty, the condition in which we find it today is permeated by the bitter experiences of its practitioners and patrons since the 1950s.
The range of expressive culture in Gansu—folk-song, narrative-singing, opera, shawm bands, and so on, embodies the sound of suffering. Vignettes on some genres include
In such extreme conditions of social disintegration, it seems most unlikely that anyone could muster any energy to perform, either for ceremonial or entertainment—but even in extremis (indeed, particularly in extremis), villagers resorted to their religious traditions, staging rituals to alleviate adversity and to resist collectivisation (note The temple of memories); and (as in Hunan and Hebei) refugee groups banded into itinerant folk performing troupes in a desperate bid to survive. Not just local archives, but some published county gazetteers (like that of Yanggao in north Shanxi), give impressively frank accounts of the famine years.
The great Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples may be flawed, but if used selectively it can yield useful material—particularly the Monographs on Opera and Narrative-singing (as I explain in my extensive review of the whole project, cited here). The Appendices of the Narrative-singing Monograph for Hunan reproduce concerned documents from regional Cultural Bureaus over the period, providing startling evidence of social disruption. I discuss the equivalent volume for Gansu in a separate post, but the Opera Monograph (Zhongguo xiqu zhi, Gansu juan 中国戏曲志, 甘肃卷 [1995]) doesn’t include such documents. The introductory Overview, under “Opera in Gansu since the founding of the PRC” (pp.25–34) has terse hints at the crisis.
Right from the 1949 “Liberation”, Gansu was part of the national drive to “rescue” the rich heritage of regional genres, led by the new cultural units set up at county, regional and provincial levels (for brief accounts of a plethora of state-funded and amateur groups, note pp.436–524) . But from 1957, Party “rectification” was infecting such institutions, and the ensuing Anti-rightist campaign was bitter and destructive. Even as society collapsed further with the 1958 Great Leap, leading to the famine, opera workers were regimented to create new dramas reflecting the agenda of high socialism.
The 1959 “celebrations” around the 10th anniversary of the founding of the PRC featured new items from eleven genres—not just qinqiang and Peking opera, but regional folk styles like shadow-puppetry of south Gansu 陇南影子腔, qingshui quzi 清水曲子, Yulei huadeng xi 玉垒花灯戏, Wuwei xianxiao 武威贤孝, and daoqing from east Gansu 陇东道情. The latter was now adapted into the staged form Longju 陇剧, with a newly-formed state troupe embarking on a prestigious national tour. But
From 1960, Gansu suffered a succession of natural disasters [sic], and opera work went into crisis; with a great increase in the proportion of sick and injured, many opera troupes were unable to maintain regular activity. Some troupes used the pretext of touring to go to Xinjiang in search of food.
Again, fleeing to the northwest was a common measure—indeed, at the time, many Uyghurs were taking refuge even further northwest in the USSR (cf. the long migration of the Dungan people).
By 1962, in a common pattern throughout China, many county-level troupes were laid off, and many artists migrated or changed trades. At the same time (cf. Hunan),
some opera troupes and informal folk opera groups used the opportunity to perform bad and forbidden operas such as Shazi bao 杀子报 and Dashangdiao 大上吊, and in some regions harmful customs (louxi 陋习) from the past like “exorcising the stage” (datai 打台, jitai 祭台, pp.594–5), and singing holy dramas (chang shenxi 唱神戏) were revived, creating an adverse social influence. After the general improvement over the whole province from 1963, this was corrected [sic].
The “chronicle of major events” for 1959 to 1964 (pp.70–75), supplemented by lists of official opera festivals for those years (pp.684–98), has a typical list of glamorous official events, giving no hint of the unfolding disaster. As ever, we have to read between the lines. With a basic awareness of the disastrous social climate, even the roster of official festivals over the period makes disturbing reading. Those chosen for the state performing troupes were in a small minority of folk artists throughout the countryside. Life in the urban troupes might provide them with a tenuous lifeline as long as they were still able to function, but institutions were becoming ever more vulnerable: with political campaigns targeting “rightists” and anyone who dared speak out, they too lived in a climate of fear. One can only imagine that even the state performers would have been severely malnourished, at the risk of being sent to labour camp, while their families back in the countryside were starving (cf. household Daoist Li Qing in north Shanxi).
Even before the imminent casualties of the early Cultural Revolution, death rates around 1960 among folk performers would have been just as high as among the general population. Although I don’t find such dates prominent among the biographies of celebrated artists in either the Opera Monograph or other volumes for Gansu, among the countless lives cut short there are doubtless tragic stories to be told—like those of (p.674, above) qinqiang performers Xin Xing’an (1930–59), who died after being “struggled” at the height of the Anti-rightist campaign, and Chen Huiying (1930–61), portrayed as working herself to death in the spirit of self-sacrifice.
* * *
Like Henan and Anhui, Gansu was an extreme case, but most of the senior performers I was meeting in other regions from 1986 to 2018 shared similar experiences that were none too simple to elicit. The adjacent region of Shaanbei, with its barren loess hills, shares a history of poverty and famine, not least under Maoism: among posts listed here, note the work of Guo Yuhua.
The famine, and the whole Maoist era, are major themes in my own work on the Gaoluo village ritual association and the Li family Daoists, and in our fieldwork in Hebei and Shanxi (see under Local ritual). There’s always a complex story to be told, as in this extraordinary 1959 image of former Buddhist monk Daguang with his young ritual disciples in North Xinzhuang village in the Beijing suburbs—at the height of the Great Leap and the famine:
Among many stimulating articles on the site of the China Books Review, two caught my attention, on the lives of Chinese women.
It’s an important topic, much studied—when socialist revolutions always promise more for women than they deliver. [1] Both reviewers point out the increasing sensitivity of broaching such issues: as Irene Zhang observes, such works are all the more notable “in a Chinese media landscape increasingly hostile to feminists, and with state organs intent on stamping out grassroots activism”.
The book gives “profiles of ten women of different generations, occupations, and social statuses” in the small town [2] of Xianshi in Sichuan—“a former brothel madam, a cotton fluffer’s wife, a hotelier, a lesbian village cadre, a struggling mother, a butcher’s daughter, a beautician, a divorced university dropout, an orphaned migrant worker, and a 17-year-old prostitute.”
Zhang observes:
Interwoven through the ten profiles are themes that define rural womanhood: discrimination, domestic violence, family duty, and resilient entrepreneurship.
As Yi Xiaohe sums up,
Life in Salt Town is a series of tiny cuts and open wounds. Women are trying to stanch the bleeding, while men are adding salt to the wounds.
Zhang’s review makes some salient [sic] critical points, concluding:
Rural Chinese women live with deep intergenerational trauma from centuries of deprivation and state violence, with few guarantees of institutional protection. They still struggle to move upward in a stubbornly discriminatory society all too happy to exploit their labor. While tackling the topic is commendable, in Salt town the big-city writer looks at the small town the same way we look at this history today—from a safe distance. What hurts Xianshi’s women is still at large.
Zhu Xiaobin 朱晓玢, Tade gongchang buzaomeng: shisanwei nügong dagong shi 她的工廠不造夢 ──十三位深圳女工的打工史 [Her factory makes no dreams:the working stories of thirteen Shenzhen female workers] (2022).
Whereas Salt town soon became a bestseller in the PRC, Zhu’s book, published in Taiwan, is banned in mainland China. It tells the stories of thirteen women—as Zheng observes, a more diverse sample than in Lesley T. Chang’s 2008 book Factory girls: from village to city in a changing China.
Her Factory Makes No Dreams tells the stories of individual rebellion by female workers: escaping from arranged marriages; choosing to live alone instead of in abusive domestic situations; going on strike against unfair working conditions; and defying patriarchal society by participating in feminist movements against sexual harassment.
The review goes on:
Reporting the stories of female factory workers inevitably touches upon sensitive topics that can provoke the ire of authorities: gender inequality; exploitation of workers; “stability maintenance” measures to crack down on protest; an unfair household registration system; and shocking wealth disparity.
In conclusion, Zheng writes:
Where once the voices of female workers were heard, now the Chinese state has dismantled these windows into their lives. This is lamentable for the Chinese people, not only because they no longer have the opportunity to hear the stories and demands of workers from different classes, but because a greater crisis lurks ahead. With declining employment rates in China, low birth rates and escalating social conflict—when stability maintenance policies can no longer quell the anger of those who face injustice—without these bridges to the public, will the people still be able to navigate their difficulties peacefully and without violence?
[1] Among many authors to read in in English are Elisabeth Croll, Gail Hershatter, Harriet Evans, and Leta Hong Fincher. For my paltry observations on the lives of women in China (mainly in the rural north) and elsewhere, click here; see also Chinese translations of Elena Ferrante and Sally Rooney.
[2] Small towns (zhen), or townships, between the county-towns and the villages, are an important nexus: see e.g. Dong Xiaoping here.
Fishing alone on cold river 寒江獨釣圖, Ma Yuan (1160–1225).
To follow A Tang couplet, the bold investigative journalism of the “underground historian” Jiang Xue 江雪 (see under Sparks) reminds me of one of the great Tang poems, by Liu Zongyuan (773–819), River Snow (much discussed, e.g. here):
Calligraphy by Feng Xuelin 冯雪林 (b.1950).
《江雪》
千山鳥飛絕 On a thousand mountains, not a bird takes flight 萬徑人蹤滅 On ten thousand paths, not a soul in sight 孤舟簑笠翁 In a solitary boat, grass-caped old man in bamboo hat 獨釣寒江雪 Fishing alone in snow of cold river
Adorning my newly-transformed house is calligraphy that my old friend Tian Qing wrote for me over thirty years ago, rather before he became an eminent cultural pundit. Among his endless stories, I’m always amused by the telegram he sent me from Beijing as we prepared for the Wutaishan monks’ UK tour in 1992, and the one about misreading a restaurant sign…
The couplet comes from a poem by the early-Tang poet Chen Zi’ang (661–702), who served as an advisor to Empress Wu Zetian, and (by an interesting coincidence) spent time in prison.
Chen composed the poem (see e.g. here and here) in 692 in praise of the illustrious Chan Buddhist master Yuanhui 圆晖. It’s generously titled
《同王员外雨后登开元寺南樓因酬晖上人獨坐山亭有贈 》
鐘梵經行罷，香床坐入禪
岩庭交雜樹，石濑瀉鳴泉 水月心方寂，雲霞思獨玄
寧知人世里，疲病苦攀缘
The couplet in question evokes Yuanhui’s meditation:
Moon in water, heart at last tranquil Clouds and haze, pondering particularly profound
The moon reflected in water is a Buddhist metaphor for the illusory nature of life (cf. the early-Qing-dynasty Shunzhi emperor’s long poem on impermanence, recited for rituals by the Li family Daoists until the 1960s). Tang poets frequently extolled their interactions with Chan Buddhist masters (see e.g. here).
Tian Qing, Beijing 1987.
I don’t know if this was at the back of Tian Qing’s mind, but apart from our proclivity for Chan (Zen), the opening character of the poem is zhong 鐘 (bell), my Chinese surname, accompanying the vocal liturgy that I was just getting to know (mainly among household rather than temple ritual specialists)… I can’t find an English translation of the complete poem by someone who actually knows about Tang poetry, so here’s my very approximate rendition (“Hey, I’m just a fiddle player”: revisions welcome!):
Finished are sounds of bell with chant, and scripture ambulation On incense platform he sits to enter meditation
Rock garden interspersed with trees Eddying of rocks, swirling round resounding spring
Moon in water, heart at last tranquil
Clouds and haze, pondering particularly profound
How could he know, among the human world, Our fatigueand disease at the bitter social climb?
Besides Tian Qing’s many reflections on the Intangible Cultural Heritage (in English, see this interview with Ian Johnson), for his calligraphy and painting, see Fayu chanfeng: Tian Qing shuhua zuopin ji 法雨禅风：田青书画作品集 (2014). For his writings on Buddhism, see e.g. his book Chan yu yue 禅与乐 [Zen and music] (2012) and Liu Hongqing 刘红庆, Foxin 佛心 (2007)—for Liu’s harrowing study of blind bards in Shanxi (whom Tian Qing also promoted), click here. And for the bond between qin zither, chess, calligraphy, and painting, see masters featured in The qin zither under Maoism.
Following The souls of China (2017), Ian’s valuable survey of the diverse manifestations of religious activity in the PRC, this is a most admirable study—thoughtful and eminently readable. Ian’s website lists the many rave reviews by people far more qualified than me, so I need hardly add to them; but I’d really like to spread the word still further. For his teaching notes, click here.
Sparks revolves around the control of history (“a battleground for the present”), and the role of memory in countering official propaganda. While “dissidents” are well documented for the Soviet bloc (for the USSR itself, Ian refers to Orlando Figes’ The whisperers; see also under Life behind the Iron Curtain), their Chinese counterparts have been less prominent in the public eye (see e.g. China: memory, music, society).
The book’s protagonists are “underground historians” (Sebastian Veg: “amateur or one might say guerrilla historians”), waging an “asymmetrical battle between a few, often beleaguered citizens opposing an overwhelmingly strong state”. While much of the material here is available in niches of academia (the work of the counter-historians has been highlighted by Western scholars such as Geremie Barmé, David Ownby, and Sebastian Veg), Ian portrays even activists who are already quite well-known with great clarity and perception. A major thread through all this is the personal missions of Ai Xiaoming and Jiang Xue.
Ai Xiaoming (left) and Jiang Xue—among the images by Sim Chi Yin that enrich the book.
As noted in a review by Han Zhang, Ian’s first book on China, Wild grass (2004), covered a not dissimilar group of activists during a relatively liberal period. Whereas after the authoritarian clampdown since 2016 his tone might seem less upbeat, nonetheless the work of those introduced in Sparks continues to inspire hope, even amidst the gruesome litany of atrocities, persecutions, and cover-ups that they document.
Ian meshes the successive eras of modern China: pre-Liberation, Maoism, the “reform and opening” of the 1980s and the early 21st century, back to the current retrenchment under Xi Jinping.
This conviction of history’s importance drives a movement of underground historians that has slowly gained momentum over the past twenty years. I call these people historians as a shorthand for a broad group of some of China’s brightest minds: university professors, independent filmmakers, underground magazine publishers, novelists, artists, and journalists. Some are outsiders and might be thought of as dissidents, but most have one foot inside the system, where they continue to hold jobs, own property, and raise families. All of them risk their careers, their futures, and prison to publish samizdat journals, banned books, and independent documentary films. They seek to correct the Party’s misrepresentation of the past and change their country’s slide toward ever-stronger authoritarian control. And they do so by using new technologies to publicize the regime’s failings, often linking current problems to debacles of the past.
It’s long been clear that not all Chinese people gullibly accept Party propaganda. As the state reverts to more draconian policies, while the growth in new technology helps the security surveillance apparatus, righteous Chinese historians also use it to find ways to evade censorship. And their mission is important for our understanding of China:
If people grow up thinking that the Chinese Communist Party played a key role in fighting the Japanese, took power thanks to popular support, and is led by a group of meritocratic patriots, then they will have a hard time understanding why China is prone to purges, corruption, and political violence.
* * *
Sparks is in three parts, The Past, The Present, and The Future. The chapters are interspersed with vignettes on Memory.
Part One opens with the labour camp of Jiabiangou in the poor northwestern province of Gansu, a series of determined investigations culminating in the long documentaries of Ai Xiaoming and Wang Bing. And this is no mere documenting a traumatic past, as Ai Xiaoming’s experience spells out:
The “hit, smash, loot” tactics of the Cultural Revolution that she and her family had experienced were not unique and are not dead; it is how the party regularly deals with people who have different views—especially when they dare touch on Communist Party history.
Still in the northwest, the memoirs of Gao Ertai (a Jiabiangou survivor) reveal the political turmoil at the Buddhist cave complex of Dunhuang in the 1960s.
Members of the Spark group, 1960:
Tan Chanxue, Sun Ziyun, Zhou Shanyou, Ding Hengwu.
A major theme is the work of Hu Jie and Jiang Xue on the short-lived magazine Spark, published by a group of students in Tianshui in 1960. At first they had the upright resolve to make the people’s desperate plight during the famine known to the central leadership, but soon, as it became clear that the latter had compelled the chain of regional and local cadres to report fictitious, exaggerated grain yields, they penned cogent critiques denouncing the people’s communes and the whole socialist edifice. Forty-three of those involved were soon arrested and sentenced to long prison terms; two of the leaders, Zhang Chunyuan and Du Yinghua, were executed in 1970.
Ian cites the solitary anti-Nazi propaganda of Otto and Elsie Hampel under Hitler, driven to tell the truth even if the attempt was futile—a story evoked in Hans Fallada’s novel Every Man Dies Alone / Alone in Berlin.
Spark 1st edition, 1960: “Give up your fantasies and prepare to fight!”.
From 2008 Hu Jie filmed compelling interviews with many of the original Spark group, still passionate in their determination to speak the truth. He released a moving documentary online in 2013 (note the mournful shawms from 3.00 to commemorate Du Yinghua):
In “Memory: Snow’s visit”, Ian introduces Jiang Xue’s own work on Spark with a vignette on her extended, intimate interview with Xiang Chengjian in 2016—here’s the film, edited by Tiger Temple (see below) (slightly different edit here):
Just as moving is an earlier film by Hu Jie, Searching for Lin Zhao’s soul (2004), on the horrifying fate of a young Peking University student, unable to compromise her democratic ideals as society disintegrated in the wake of the Anti-Rightist campaign, who was imprisoned for six years before she was executed in 1968:
Ian looks back at the Party’s machinations, casualties, and pathological purges at Yan’an in the wartime Shaanbei Base Area, with the stories of Liu Zhidan and Liu Jiantong’s banned 1962 novel about him; of Gao Gang, Wang Ming, and Xi Jinping’s father Xi Zhongxun. Even after a palatable version of the Maoist era was being fabricated in the 1980s, and as “Red tourism” swept the country, Gao Hua embarked on a scathing indictment of the Yan’an period.
Ian gained experience of the Party’s control of archives in his study of the fate of the Maoshan temples since the 1930s (see Ritual life around Suzhou). Under Xi Jinping, with history ever more rigidly controlled, the National Museum of China has become a mere propaganda showcase.
In Part Two we meet the novelist Wang Xiaobo and his wife Li Yinhe, documenting subaltern lives; and the anthropologist Guo Yuhua, whose research on “the sufferers” in Yangjiagou village thoroughly demolished the Shaanbei myth. In Xi’an (setting for the cult novels of Jia Pingwa) Ian accompanies Jiang Xue to visit citizen journalist Zhang Shihe (“Tiger Temple”), with his bitter past as a child labourer in the Cultural Revolution. We eavesdrop on meetings of the editors of the Zhiwuzhi public forum.
Returning to Ai Xiaoming, Ian explains her background, and her support for rights-defender lawyers. Assessing the current retrenchment she comments,
The severe political pressure unleashed through governmental response has made it clear that it is unshakable, it does not need to listen, it has idolized itself. What happened in the past, the demonization of those critical of the government, is taking place once again.
The mass murders of the early Cultural Revolution in Daoxian county, Hunan, where—at the instigation of the Party—over 9,000 were murdered in August 1967, have been exhaustively researched by Tan Hecheng, and published in English as The killing wind: a Chinese county’s descent into madness during the Cultural Revolution. Ian provides a vignette on Yu Luoke’s exposé of the massacre in Daxing county in the Beijing suburbs at the same time. Yu was arrested and executed in 1970, but since 2016 his story has been circulating again.
A couple of instances of how such scars should impact on our fieldwork: in the 1990s I was impressed to find amateur Daoist and Buddhist ritual groups in Daxing, but I never learned of the 1967 massacre there. Ian comments further:
One survey of local gazetteers [Yang Su, Collective killings in rural China during the Cultural Revolution] shows that between four hundred thousand and 1.5 million people perished in similar incidents, meaning there were perhaps another one hundred Dao County massacres around this time.
And, from a distance, I’ve long been curious about the expressive culture of Gansu province—including its household Daoist traditions. The counties that scholars of religious and musical life should do fieldwork are among those where the most disturbing abuses under Maoism took place—so somehow we have to integrate society and culture into our studies.
Ian visits retired film historian Wu Di, co-founder of Remembrance (one of a whole series of samizdat journals), taking up the shocking topic of high-school girls in Beijing torturing and beating their vice-principal Bian Zhongyun to death in 1966—subject of another harrowing film by Hu Jie, Though I am gone, recounted by her bereaved husband:
This leads the Remembrance group to debate the career of Red Guard poster-girl Song Binbin, who witnessed (at least) the murder.
In Sichuan we meet Huang Zerong, who, undaunted by over two decades in labour camp as a “Rightist”, in his old age began publishing an unofficial history magazine, Small scars of the past—earning him another prison sentence, a fine, and close surveillance. In a reproach to the reluctance to “dwell on the past” (common among many traumatised peoples), he explains the importance of the 1958 Anti-Rightist Campaign:
Without the Anti-Rightist Campaign there would have been no Great Leap Forward; without the Great Leap Forward, people would not have starved to death. If people didn’t starve to death, there would not have been the Cultural Revolution. Without the Cultural Revolution, there would have not have been Tiananmen.
Fanning out from Beijing, Cui Yongyuan (Oral History Centre) and Wu Wenguang (Village Documentary Project and Folk Memory Project, focusing on the Great Famine) have done impressive work.
Li Wenliang.
Part Three, “The Future”, reveals shifting concerns. Ian documents the Coronavirus in Wuhan and whistle-blower Li Wenliang; while the Party was busy suppressing the truth, the awful realities of life under a draconian lockdown were again exposed by independent counter-historians, including Ai Xiaoming, along with front-line diarist-reporters like Zhang Zhan and the reputable novelist Fang Fang. Ian’s account is always nuanced:
The events in Wuhan show the potential anger, dissatisfaction, and critical thinking that lies beneath the surface. People like Ai Xiaoming, Jiang Xue, Tiger Temple, and Tan Hecheng represent a minority of Chinese. But their well-articulated critiques resonate when people are shaken from their lethargy.This is why one way to look at the Wuhan outbreak is as an example of government power. But a more convincing explanation is that it was a classic example of the repeated eruptions against unchecked government authority.
Lhasa, 1966: from Woeser’s Forbidden memory.
The ever more vexed flashpoints of Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong are another major area for underground historians. Ian introduces the work of Tsering Woeser on her father’s photos of the Cultural Revolution in Lhasa, and the Tibetan stories collected in Conflicting memories. We learn of the travails of Hong Kong and the elimination of the free publishing world there. Part Three ends, perhaps rather more tangentially, with another trip with Jiang Xue to visit the Zhongnanshan hermits (also outside society), alongside an account of the lockdown in Xi’an.
The excellent Conclusion confronts the underlying questions: are the odds too great, is resistance to the authoritarian state useless, are those few who resist doomed to failure? Ian ponders how we should engage with China, challenging conventional wisdom on how to view it—when
the dominant way of understanding China is that nothing happens there except a string of dystopian horrors: surveillance, cultural genocide, mindless nationalism.
But
Government propagandists can flood the media with their version of reality or slow down unwanted information. This sophisticated form of censoring means that most people will still agree with the government version of events. And yet enough people now have access to alternative interpretations of the past that questioning has become widespread and persistent, despite harsher and harsher crackdowns. […]
The fact that people still resist and do so in a more coordinated form than at any time in the past, seems more significant than the banal point that an authoritarian regime is authoritarian.The fact is that independent thought lives in China. It has not been crushed.
He goes on,
The Party does not always win. Despite overwhelming odds, people inside China today still publish works and make films that challenge authority. Their ideas continue to spread, and when problems in society reach a critical point, people look to them for ways of thinking about their country. This is why Xi Jinping has made control of history one of his signature policies—because he recognises counter-history as an existential threat.
Thus Ian queries whether amnesia has really triumphed:
Saying that “most people” don’t know or care is a truism applicable to almost every society in every era; what matters is that many Chinese do know and continue to battle, today, to change their society.
Moreover,
Prosperity is not inevitable. For any country, it requires constant self-reflection and an ability to think up new solutions to new problems. The Chinese Communist Party’s ability to do so is open to question, especially when we consider its decade-long aversion to meaningful economic reform and its failure to build a top-ranked education system for non-elites.
Before the extensive Bibliography comes a useful Appendix on Exploring China’s Underground History. Ian notes dGenerate Films, Icarus Films, and the Chinese Independent Film Archive, while on YouTube there are channels for Hu Jie, Ai Xiaoming, and Tiger Temple—I’ve featured some of his recommendations above. He also offers a succinct list of recommended books. And an important new site, the China Unofficial Archives, has just gone live (see my introduction). Endnotes (a system that I much admire, cf. Eat the Buddha) provide detailed further references.
* * *
One naturally characterises such figures as “brave”. Guo Yuhua, herself long punished by the authorities and harassed by state security, told me she doesn’t feel particularly brave: rather she acts out of a sense of duty—part of a long tradition of righteous scholars throughout Chinese history, as Ian observes. One can only feel the deepest respect for the people who have stood up for truth, and for those who document their labours.
Still, these are people whom most of us wouldn’t normally encounter—or might not be aware of encountering. So where might The Masses stand on all this—those who swallow their scruples for the sake of a quiet life for themselves and their families? One finds plenty of resentment, of course, and even resistance—such as from organised religious groups; and individual cynicism is often heard, both from those clearly targeted, like “reactionaries”, and from the peasantry, who suffered just as grievously and in larger numbers. But just as distressing are the fates of the many who fervently believed in the Party, yet were assaulted in successive campaigns.
Foreign scholars may visit China for a variety of reasons. However much we may wish to eschew politics, and however much we like and esteem our friends in China, the gruesome history of the Party, trampling people’s lives, is the essential backdrop to all the topics that we study in modern (and indeed imperial) China—including history, culture (art, architecture, music, literature), and religion (see my post Cultural Revolutions). Mao was right about one thing: “There is no such thing as art that is detached from or independent of politics”. No walks of life have been untouched by all this, and Sparks should be essential reading for us all.
Craig Clunas gleefully spotted this clip (posted by Tong Bingxue on what I still like to call “Twitter”), performed by the Yuzhang Daoist Music Troupe 豫章道乐团 (original here):
The troupe (YouTube playlist) is based at a temple in Nanchang (in Jiangxi province, where some of the most vibrant household traditions of Daoist ritual are to be found, BTW)—but regional style is irrelevant here. There are two issues in need of unpacking:
First, Beethoven—much as I like to blame him, in this case he’s obviously Not Guilty (cf. Monty Python: “the second tune, which Beethoven said on his arrest was ‘just a harmless bit of fun’…”). Anyway, the Yuzhang Daoist Music Troupe clearly aren’t in the market for a Beethoven work that might evoke a suitably profound and abstruse mood, like the HeiligerDankgesang of the A minor string quartet—rather, they’ve gone for the ultimate cliché, Für Elise—such a heavy albatross around the necks of generations of hapless piano students. And if we have to hear it yet again, this arrangement has a certain charm, I suppose, in a cutesy chinoiserie kinda way—a step up from its use for the garbage trucks of Taiwan (“Whenever I hear Für Elise, I feel like I need to take out the garbage as well”).
But quite apart from the choice of piece, far more insidious is the style of instrumental ensemble itself. Adopted in recent years by such “Daoist music troupes” (a concept that I dismantled here!), it’s based on the modernised “national” conservatoire style.
In both musical and religious affairs, it would clearly be wrong to expect central authorities to have more taste than local cultural officials. Since the White Cloud Temple in Beijing led the way, * the chimera of the Intangible Cultural Heritage also plays a dodgy role in encouraging this kind of style, with Disneyfied staged performances of “Daoist music” given by temple groups such as the White Cloud Temple in Shaanbei.
So here we have a mixed-gender ensemble (itself an affront to tradition, but hey) playing modernised sheng, erhu, yangqin, ruan—a Veritable Smorgasbord™ of kitsch. The style is garish enough when it’s just accompanying Daoist hymns, but with this video, what ARE they thinking?! To imagine that Furry Lisa (as it’s known in the biz) would be just the thing to enhance their international credibility—just picture the troupe’s apparatchiks in a meeting:
After decades creating a debased concept of “Daoist music” to delude the ignorant masses, what more can we do to consolidate our reputation? Aha, I know!!!
Beat that, Richard Clayderman. One can only look forward to a Yubu Can-can. Re-education required (though not in a 1958-labour-camp kinda way). Meretricious (and a Happy New Year)!
I mean, Don’t Get Me Wrong, I’m all for experimentation—in a suitable context (e.g. “world music” versions of Bach). Of course there is a certain audience for this kind of thing in China, and even abroad; some listeners whose taste monitor isn’t programmed for China may find it charming, and It’s a Free Country (Yeah right—Ed.]. It is what it is. The ethnographer may feel obliged to document all kinds of activities, but whether or not we believe in the Wisdom of the Ancient Sages, it’s our solemn duty to ridicule such folly, which distorts and cheapens the whole notion of Daoist ritual and its soundscape [Go for it—Ed.].
Meanwhile, away from the concert platform, household Daoists like the Li family in Shanxi continue to perform life-cycle and calendrical rituals for their local communities—and so do temple priests, even in Shanghai and Beijing.
The only way I can bear to hear Furry Lisa is with the brilliant Two Set Violin (complementing their Mahler 5 and Pachelbel’s capon):
* Under the misguided rubric of “Daoist music”, the style was “developed” in the 1980s at the White Cloud Temple (Baiyun guan 白云观) in Beijing, headquarters of the national Daoist Association and official showcase for the acceptable face of Daoism under Party control. By 1985 the venerable Min Zhiting (1924–2004)—whose former priestly career had hitherto been based in Shaanxi—was chosen to teach at the temple, going on to serve as figurehead of the Daoist Association. But despite his great wisdom, the temple authorities were adept at serving the demands of Party conformity.
There’s a certain merit in the temple’s performance of the daily services, or occasional rituals such as Flaming Mouth (yankou), as they still practise the tradition of vocal liturgy accompanied only by percussion—albeit in the “southern style” that has been widely promoted in recent years. Among many videos on YouTube, here’s the final part of a yankou in 2015:
I’ve just updated my list of Great Chinese stammerers with the Southern Tang dynasty muralist Dong Yu—joining early luminaries such as Deng Ai, Han Feizi, and Sima Xiangru; and for the modern era, Feng Youlan and Gu Jiegang.
Uh-oh, I’ve been cajoled into giving local partygoers another burst on the erhu fiddle—* I’m more used to people asking me not to play it… This gives me another pretext to roll out my old excuses, such as “It was in tune when I bought it”, and “I just sort of… picked it up” (cf. my early days with Ray Man).
Along with Abing’s inescapable Erquan yingyue (immortalised in Yang Yinliu‘s 1950 recording), the plangent Jianghe shui (literally “River waters”, but often rendered, suitably, as “Song of suffering”) has been a mainstay of the erhu concert repertoire since the 1960s (see here, and David Badagnani’s notes).
The concert piece derives from a melody of traditional shengguan ritual wind ensembles in south Liaoning—sadly, I can’t find a rendition, so we’ll just have to imagine it from other recordings, such as the guttural shawms on #6 of my Audio Gallery in the sidebar (notes here). Soon after the 1949 “Liberation” it was adapted to the conservatoire style (for which see here, and here) as a solo for the double guanzi oboe (shuangguan)—here’s Gu Xinshan with the Lüda Song and Dance Troupe of Dalian in 1956:
Hu Zhihou on (single) guanzi, with a sparsely-inflected rendition:
Indeed, the melody has re-entered the folk repertoire in Liaoning, as we can hear on #12 of the Ocora CD Chine: musiques de la première lune.
But Jianghe shui soon came to be known mainly as an erhu solo, accompanied by yangqin dulcimer, following Huang Haihuai’s 1962 arrangement—click here for his recording from 1963.
Min Huifen, 1963.
It became a signature piece of the great Min Huifen—here she is in 2007:
Even conservatoire solos were largely a male preserve until the 1980s (see e.g. the archive CD-set Xianguan chuanqihere), when women players began to dominate; see e.g. Song Fei’s lecture-demonstration on her own highly emotive interpretation.
In between the flexibility of the traditional wind ensemble style and the rigidly-prescribed conservatoire version, all I might add is that while playing Jianghe shui on erhu it’s always worth bearing in mind the plaintive timbre of the double reed. And I learn much from the sheer physical dynamism of the great players, their kinetic grace with both hands and arms. Of course I can’t even begin to emulate the sheer technical perfection of conservatoire virtuosos, but I can just about get away with it before an audience that has never heard real Chinese musicians who can actually play it. And as a change from my usual diet of rural funerals and temple fairs, it’s an interesting challenge to think myself into the heart-on-sleeve romanticism of the conservatoire style.
The current floods in north China are severely affecting counties on the Hebei plain such as Zhuozhou, Laishui, Bazhou, Xiongxian, and Anxin, whose villages were our fieldbase through the 1990s (see under Local ritual).
1930 donors’ list, South Gaoluo.
While the climate crisis intensifies, faith in the protection of the gods has diminished under the assaults of Maoism and capitalism. Those villages relatively unaffected by natural disasters traditionally attributed such immunity to the divine blessings afforded by their ritual association—as in Gaoluo, where the floods of 1917 and 1963 are still part of popular memory. The 1963 flood came during a brief cultural restoration between famine and the Cultural Revolution (see Cai An’s story here).
But whether or not villages still have active ritual associations, the current flooding is devastating people’s lives and livelihoods. Political decisions made to protect key economic areas (e.g. here, here) have also led to protests.
* * *
Conversely, the main affliction of north China is drought—as Li Manshan observes at the start of our film, “nine droughts every ten years”. For this the folk recourse for villagers was to make collective processions to pray for rain. Hence the importance of the Dragon Kings and their temples (note images on the website of Hannibal Taubes), and related deities like Elder Hu in north Shanxi.
Rain procession, Shaanbei.
As in much of the third world, for the fieldworker it is a salutary reminder of the precarity of life to wash one’s hands and face over the day in a single shared enamel bowl of water fetched from the well.
Fetching Water, Zhuanlou village funeral, Yanggao 1991.
Template of memorial for Fetching Water to Release the Deceased, no longer displayed. From Li Qing’s volume of miscellaneous ritual documents.
As to ritual, Fetching Water (qushui 取水) or Inviting Water (qingshui 請水) segments are common throughout China, for temple fairs, domestic blessings, and funerals, parading to a nearby well or stream. One might expect them to be especially meaningful in the drought-prone north. Inviting Water is common in temple ritual and in south China (e.g. Hunan), but I have hardly heard of it in northern folk ritual, where Fetching Water is standard (for Yanggao in Shanxi, see my film Li Manshan, from 41.06, and the DVD Doing Things; see also Daoist priests of the Li family, pp.67–8, 209–10).
The text on the right (“I declare, sprinkling the ritual water of the three lumens”) is a shuowen introit preceding the Gātha to Water on return to the soul hall.
Though running water has gradually been reaching more villages since the 1980s, such rituals continue to be a significant component of the whole symbolic repertoire of ritual sequences, perpetuating historical memory.
Kundera worked on the book in the years following his expulsion from the Party in 1950. Published briefly before the Prague Spring was crushed, it shows personal and political to be enmeshed, as well as the degradation, nihilism, and duplicity of life under state socialism—through a brilliant exposé of the “fakelore” indignities to which the regime subjected traditional culture in Moravia.
For insights on the musical elements of The joke, I recommend
Michael Beckerman, “Kundera’s musical joke and ‘folk’ music in Czechoslovakia, 1948–?”, in Mark Slobin (ed.), Retuning culture: musical changes in central and eastern Europe (altogether a useful volume—see under Musical cultures of East Europe).
With The Ride of the Kings pageant as the novel’s climax, Kundera saw through the propaganda:
… Tereza, when she met the chairman of the collective farm at the spa, conjured up an image of the countryside (a countryside she had never lived in or known) that she found enchanting. It was her way of looking back, back to Paradise. […]
The state supported folk music and festivals in an attempt to show, quite simply, that in this “people’s paradise” the folk, at least, were alive and well.
Cynical as Kundera’s alter ego Ludvik is, he has a genuine attachment to the folk culture that was now being distorted. But his revenge is hollow. Here’s an excerpt from the 1969 screen adaptation by Jaromil Jireš:
Just as fascinating is Jireš’ short film about the Ride of the Kings:
* * *
All this, and more, is brilliantly evoked in the Polish movie
Ravishingly filmed in black-and-white, it’s a visual and musical tour de force. The early scenes, soon after the Communist takeover, are revealing in themselves. Fieldworkers Wiktor and Irena avidly record folk musicians in the countryside, then help develop the sanitised style of the “Mazurek” song-and-dance ensemble (based on the real-life Mazowsze troupe), until the folk ethos is further compromised by numbers in service of the Party agenda.
My post on folk traditions of Poland opens with this brief period of energy in the collection of folk music after the Communist takeover. The soundtrack, masterminded by Marcin Masecki, illuminates the whole drama. Opening strikingly with a gutsy song accompanied by bagpipe and fiddle in a snowy village, the early scenes, with Irena and Wiktor inspired by the project, communicate the whole excitement of discovering folk culture through fieldwork (see also Musics lost and found).
As in The joke, prescriptive apparatchiks play a disturbing role. Their companion Kaczmarek, soon to become director of the new state troupe, doesn’t share their enthusiasm; this revealing exchange is horribly familiar to me from meetings with cultural cadres in China:
You’re not afraid it’s too crude, too primitive? No, why?
Where I come from, every drunk sings like this.
Kaczmarek is also a believer in racial purity. Listening to a beautiful recording they’ve just made:
What language are they singing in? Lemko.
Thought so. Shame. Why?
That it’s not ours. Mr Kaczmarek, whether it’s ours or not is none of your business.
They record a young girl singing an unadorned Dwa serduszka (Two hearts)—a song which punctuates the story in successive reincarnations:
Kaczmarek soon becomes director of the new state troupe, spouting sonorous platitudes. As Peter Bradshaw comments:
Of course, they are not “welcoming tomorrow”—they are welcoming the past, a hyperreal, state-sanctioned, quaintly fabricated time of “folk” tradition that will combine Soviet obedience and ethnic conformity. […]
This kind of genteel artistic display is vital for foreign diplomacy, for establishing relations with Russia and a prestigious display for the west. It is a world of privileged foreign travel, with fears of defection.
Auditioning for the troupe is young singer Zula. Though she looks the part, she’s “a bit of a con”— not from politically-correct peasant stock, on probation, and choosing to sing a song learned from a Russian movie. Himself resistant to ideology, Wiktor is charmed by her energy, spirit, and originality. As Zula goes “from victim to victor and back again”, their fatal attraction now unravels over fifteen years from Poland to East Berlin, Paris, and Yugoslavia.
While many peasants were nonplussed by the state troupes’ misappropriation of their culture, the film does well to observe that this new sanitised style was welcome to some audiences who perhaps (like Kaczmarek) found folk music unpalatable in its raw form. After one glossy spectacle, an audience member comes up to Wiktor and Irena:
I never believed in all this folky stuff. But this—it moved me. You are a genius. To take something so… and make it so beautiful. Thank you both—this is the most beautiful day of my life!
At a tense meeting a stony-faced Party Boss dictates the direction the troupe is to take:
In your repertoire you access priceless treasures of our People’s culture. This is highly commendable. We want you to become a living calling-card for our Fatherland. But I think it’s time for you to add something new to our repertoire—about Land Reform, World Peace and the threats to it. A strong number about the Leader of the World Proletariat. And we, in turn, will do everything in our power to show our gratitude. […]
Irena politely protests:
I would like to express gratitude on behalf of the whole ensemble for your appreciation of our hard work. But when it comes to our repertoire, it’s based on authentic folk art. The rural population doesn’t sing about Land Reform, Peace and Leaders—simply doesn’t do it, so it would be difficult.
But the canny Kaczmarek hastily reassures the Boss:
Comrade Bielecka, I assure you that our nation is not so ignorant, including its rural elements. Quite the contrary. And it will sing about those issues—as long as it is encouraged, and given direction. This, I believe, is exactly what I believe the role of our ensemble should be.
The principled Irena soon quits, while Wiktor (a male archetype straight out of a Kundera novel) bides his time as musical director—and as Zula’s lover. Not to toe the new ideological line could destroy lives.
And all that’s just in the first half-hour—essential viewing for the impact of state socialism on expressive culture, more eloquent than volumes of worthy academic analysis.
While the ensemble is in East Berlin on tour in 1952, Wiktor defects, going on to eke a living at a jazz club in Paris. Over the following years the lovers’ brief encounters become ever more bleak as they come together and pull apart, until the degradation of their final meetings back in Poland, crossing paths again with Kaczmarek. Peter Bradshaw again:
A love affair thrashes and wilts in the freedom of a foreign country, and then begins to submit to the homeland’s doomy gravitational pull.
Cold war richly deserves all the praise it has gained. Now I’m also keen to watch Pawlikowski’s 2013 film Ida (trailer here), set in 1962.
The state’s manipulation of folk culture that Kundera and Pawlikowski evoked was a common element throughout the Soviet bloc, such as sharovarshchyna in Ukraine—and also a major theme in China.
And the impasse has continued in the “Golden Age” myth, idealising the Glorious Past (see Debunking “living fossils”). Even in cases where local cultures have not been explicitly targeted by the state for remoulding, scholars may unwittingly impose their own agendas, notably in the flummery of “Intangible Cultural Heritage“. See also Different values, and The politics of ethno-trad.
David Francis Urrows, François Ravary SJ and a Sino-European musical culture in nineteenth-century Shanghai(2021),
is introduced in Sixth tone by Zhang Xiaoyi, librarian at Xuhui District where material has been discovered.
As she observes, some have traced the “first Chinese orchestra”
to the formation of the Shanghai Public Band (now the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra) in January 1879, which was headed by Jean Rémusat—“Europe’s premiere flautist”—and composed largely of Filipino musicians. Others argued that Sir Robert Hart’s brass band, founded in 1885, should be considered the earliest Western orchestra in China because its members were Chinese. And a few pointed instead to a music course taught by American missionaries at Shandong’s Tengchow College in 1876.
The French Jesuit missionary François Ravary (1823–91) arrived at the Collège St. Ignace in the Xujiahui (“Zikawei”) district of Shanghai in 1856 to direct the school choir. Now, thanks to Urrows, we know that he founded an orchestra there, using instruments shipped from Europe by Ravary’s friend Hippolyte Basuiau, a violinist-turned-Jesuit.
Together with fellow Jesuits Louis Hélot and Léopold Deleuze, Ravary also made his own instruments, setting up a workshop in what was then St Ignatius Church and recruiting four Chinese carpenters to help them build a pipe organ out of bamboo, modelled on the sheng mouth-organ.
Organ made by Léopold Deleuze and his team.
Deleuze and a team of Chinese craftsmen later built another organ, this time with three special stops to reproduce the sound of the Chinese xiaoend-blown flute, ditransverse flute, and sheng. Dedicated to the son of Napoléon III, then king of France, it is now preserved at the Musée de la Musique in Paris, though the pipes have rotted and can no longer produce sound.
Once his instruments were ready, Ravary began recruiting Chinese students to take lessons in Western music. In 1864, when a group of orphans was moved near the school in advance of the opening of T’ou-Sè-Wè orphanage, he included them in his orchestra training as well.
After their first performance, Ravary wrote “It is fortunate that in this country, people’s ears are not as discerning as they are on the Champs-Élysées”. Once the performance ended, the nervous student-musicians gorged themselves on steamed buns.
By 1871 the orchestra was more assured: an Austrian baron enthused, “Haydn played in China by the Chinese! … We were all deeply moved.”
In my experiences in China studies, when it comes to music repertoire in the missions from the late 16th century onwards, most of what people write—and then perform—is 10% based on documentation, and 90% based on fantasy, resulting in a kind of musical chinoiserie of a New Age type. I don’t want to promote, much less add to this pile of pseudo-scholarly dreaming, pleasant as it is to listen to…
When Ravary was transferred from Xujiahui, the orchestra declined—until 1903, when the Shanghai-born Macanese Francisco Diniz and his friends organised a military band at the T’ou-Sè-wè orphanage known as the Fanfare de Saint Joseph. With Joseph Tsang, Diniz also co-edited Rudiments de musique, a textbook in question-and-answer format to teach students to play wind instruments like trumpets and tubas—apparently China’s earliest known textbook on Western instrumental music, and the earliest such book written in the Shanghai dialect.
In 1907, Louis Hermand, a Western music teacher who worked with the band, predicted that “In a few decades … we will see a Chinese child take their place among masters like Gounod and Wagner.”
All the while, of course, Shanghai was home to a wealth of musicking, including silk-and-bamboo clubs, Daoist ritual, shawm bands, local opera, narrative-singing, and puppetry. See also China’s hidden century.
Editors can play a most constructive role—such as gently suggesting that it might be inadvisable to use the word “wombat” three times in the same sentence, or explaining the legal repercussions of slagging off evil xenophobic Tory bigots. On my blog, however, as the attentive reader [singular, eh? Mrs Ivy Trellis I presume—Ed.] will have noticed, the main role of my imaginary editor is to constantly snigger at my pretentious ideas and take the piss out of my slavish devotion to PC.
So perhaps we can find some clues to the character and tastes of this elusive figure—like Elena Ferrante, being of indeterminate gender, I like to think of her/him as Ermintrude or Algernon.
The notional editor likes to nominate me for a Pseuds’ Corner Award for passages such as:
I was just admiring Messi weaving his way through yet another helpless defence, and recalling his time at Barcelona, comparable only to Bach at Leipzig…
reminiscent of Mahler’s sudden revelation of alpine pastures adorned with cowbells, or an incandescent Messiaen meditation suffused with ondesmartenot [Steady on—Ed.].
Pondering my early exposure to the ouevre of Godard:
my musical tastes were already imbued with Ravel, Messiaen, and Boulez [Weirdo—Ed.]
As the fleet plies its trade between East and West, like a medieval caravan along the Silk Road weaving its way through the bustling markets of oases like the fabled Bush of Shepherds [That’s enough now—Ed.]
Some of my finest fantasies are met by a suggestion of inebriation:
Often when I seem to overreach myself, a sarcastic put-down suffices—such as a raised eyebrow when I claim familiarity with these new-fangled Popular Beat Combos:
my new acquaintance with Turkish-German rap [Yeah right—Ed.]
The editor’s disinterested eye can be useful, as here:
We shouldn’t allow our fascination with iconography [Speak for yourself—Ed.] to detract from documenting people’s actual religious observances.
Ermintrude/Algernon tries to keep me in check:
One evening after doing the Monteverdi Vespers, or should I say Vespas [No you should not—Ed.]
Could it be that emissaries called out “da-yig!” to announce their arrival, a custom that eventually found its way to Venice via the Silk Road, becoming the gondolier’s cry of O-i? [No it couldn’t. Stop it.—Ed.]
My obsession with Chinese folk music surfaces in the most unlikely places, like this on Irish fiddlers:
What a wealth of creative wisdom under all those nimble fingers, immersed in the style, each with their own lineages and influences, full of regional and personal variation—like shawm players in north China [I was afraid you were building up to that—Ed.].
Craig and any other art historians who have managed to read this far might care to exact revenge by writing Specious Flapdoodle [famous 19th-century Baptist pastor—Ed.] about early music or Daoist ritual…
But in all, I feel most fortunate to have such a tolerant editor, something of a kindred spirit…[Philately will get you nowhere—Ed.] [Hey, that’s my line!—SJ]
At least no confusion in proofreading arises such as befell Guangdong Arts and Crafts when preparing their half-page advertisement for the China Daily:
Musapir is a Uyghur scholar now based in the west, publishing under a pseudonym. Until the clampdown she/he was carrying out research for the Xinjiang Folklore Research Centre (XFRC), led by Uyghur anthropologist Rahile Dawut, working with local communities “to create a digitised knowledge base that could both exist within the state’s ICH framework and honour local cultural protocols and knowledge”.
Rahile Dawut on fieldwork, before she was detained.
The project was “abruptly shut down when Dawut was disappeared in 2017 and the XFRC was abolished as part of the state’s crackdown in Xinjiang”. But there was already a widening gulf between the lives and practices of knowledge-holders and the discourse of “intangible cultural heritage”:
the entanglement of ICH and stability discourses and policies created a highly sensitive and confusing environment within which villagers were constantly trying to understand what was “heritage” and what was illegal practice. […]
Musapir illustrates this with a telling vignette about “Hesen Aka”, a Uyghur elder from one of Kashgar’s vibrant oasis villages, “a holistic practitioner of Uyghur narrative, musical, and healing traditions who has spent his life transmitting Indigenous knowledge and lifeways through prose, poetry, melodies, and ritual practices that have been passed from master to student for generations”:
As a designated regional-level bearer of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) for Uyghur folk songs, Hesen Aka had been assigned to perform “red songs” in villages and at regional events. At that day’s meshrep, he played a traditional two-stringed instrument as he sang There is no New China if there is no Communist Party, The East is Red, and other songs praising the state’s family-planning and poverty-alleviation policies. That night, when it was almost midnight, a woman with a small toddler in her arms knocked softly on his door, affixed to which was a sign in both Chinese and Uyghur, “Glorious Red Singer”. The woman asked Hesen Aka to perform a healing ritual for her son who had a fever and was groaning with pain. “It’s too dangerous”, Hesen Aka said. “If I use the drums, it might draw attention, so it is not good for you or me.” But the woman insisted, pleading very softly, and he finally agreed. He told me to bring some warm water and candles, and then started the ritual, presenting some dried fruit, nuts, and pieces of white cloth as offerings before starting to gently tap upon a drum. He recited some verses in Arabic from the Quran and in another language that I did not recognise, and lastly offered some Uyghur-language munajet [supplications] in the Yasawi style. When he finished, he offered the food and cloth to the woman, telling her that her child had caught the evil eye and she must ensure he rests well. The mother thanked him with tears and quietly left.
I’ve always recoiled from the flummery of UNESCO’s “Intangible Cultural Heritage” (ICH) programme, both generally and for Han Chinese traditions. If its effects have been bad enough for the latter, its alienating effects are even more flagrant among ethnic minorities, as Rachel Harris and others have noted. It has been “used to further Chinese state nation-building in ways that do not meaningfully include the grassroots knowledge and holistic practices of Indigenous communities.” In Xinjiang, “top-down ICH policies have been implemented in tandem with increasingly repressive security policies and anti-extremism discourse”.
In a fine section entitled “Lost in translation: ICH as ‘Strange Culture”, Musapir unpacks linguistic incongruities. While the Chinese term fei wuzhi wenhua yichan is cumbersome and alien enough, it becomes even more so in the Uyghur version gheyri maddi medeniyet mirasliri. It was “the language of the state, routinely encountered as official jargon or media-speak that was difficult to relate to”. People were widely aware of the term, often heard on TV, but even its designated representatives seldom used it in conversation (cf. Tibetans).
As Musapir explains, gheyri means “different” or “strange”, and carries a negative connotation; thus the term gheyri maddi was often misunderstood by Uyghur villagers to mean “odd” or “weird” rather than “other-than-material”. Rather as the ponderous Chinese term is abbreviated to feiyi, Uyghurs abbreviate gheyri maddi medeniyet mirasliri to gheyri medeniyet, literally “odd culture” or “strange culture”.
The negative connotation of gheyri in everyday life was compounded by its wide usage in the so-called People’s War on Terror. In this context, gheyri was used in the sense of “strange” or “odd” as a descriptor for practices that had been criminalised as “extremist”. For example, public information broadcasts and posters pasted on billboards on the side of the road that announced the ban on Islamic clothing would instruct people: “It is forbidden to wear strange clothes” (gheyri kiyim keymeslik).
Thus “there was a disconnect between what was officially celebrated as ICH and the heritage that knowledge-holders like Hesen Aka carried and embodied.” Mutatis mutandis, I would apply the following account to ICH projects for the Han Chinese too:
Uyghur practices deemed “outstanding” and inscribed on UNESCO or on national- and provincial-level ICH lists have mostly been reduced to the forms of song, dance or handicrafts. Integral parts of these practices that have a religious connotation, as well as associated traditions such as Sufi rituals, healing ceremonies or ancestral relationship, have been disregarded. As such, ICH plays an important role in the long line of China’s civilising projects, constructing and validating “authentic” versions of Uyghur culture that are stripped of religious or “superstitious” elements.
Musapir goes on:
Supporting the carriers of ICH is an important plank of ICH discourse. However, the knowledge-holders whom I met were clearly struggling for survival. The political pressures they were under were tremendous. With almost no public gatherings being permitted, and even private practice of anything with religious content becoming increasingly risky, many had also lost their only source of income. Some, like Hesen Aka, had joined official song and dance troupes or become “red singers” performing at state-approved meshrep and weddings in villages, at regional events and on state media. Others had become farmers or peddlers, but were struggling to adapt, having been professional storytellers, musicians and (in some cases) healers for their whole lives.
Noting the poverty of the region, he comments:
On one occasion, when I enthusiastically tried to explain the difference between tangible and intangible cultural heritage to a local woman, she retorted: “Tangible? Intangible? Are they edible?” This brought me back to the reality of what was important to them at that very moment, and the vast chasm between their lives and the authorised ICH discourse that had marginalised and alienated them from their embodied Indigenous knowledge.
“Hesen Aka” was detained in 2018-19 and died soon after being released—just one among innumerable victims of the Chinese state’s repressive policies in Xinjiang.
I never know which of my diverse topics will prove popular. In a way I’m not bovvered—you don’t spend half your life doing fieldwork on Daoist ritual if you’re hoping to be an overnight TikTok sensation. Like Flann O’Brian, I write largely
without regard to expense or the feelings of the public.
Still, I sometimes find it perplexing when one post gets a lot of readers while another related one goes down like a one-legged man at an arse-kicking party.
For instance, Shamans in the two Koreas went modestly viral, whereas readers were underwhelmed when I reposted my roundup of essays on Spirit mediums in China. Would that be because the word “shaman” is clickbait—or is it that North Korea seems more exotic than the PRC?
My lengthy reflections on the new British Museum exhibition China’s hidden century have been well received, with many instances of the wealth of material on the late Qing that can be gained from fieldwork among local rural traditions. Just as fascinating is the life of Nadine Hwang—her high-flying early life in Beijing and Paris, then meeting her partner Nelly Mousset-Vos in the hell of Ravensbrück, and living together in Caracas after their release.
To my chagrin, rather few readers seem to share my enthusiasm for either WAM or pop music—both Beethoven’s Op.109 sonata and Mr Sandman are utterly captivating!
Following in the footsteps of Kristofer Schipper, John Lagerwey has taken research on living Daoist ritual into new territory, expanding the field for scholars in mainland China. A new volume, published in Hong Kong and edited by Lin Chenyuan and Pan Junliang,
Wandering on the way of history and fieldwork: an anthology of essays by Professor John Lagerwey translated in commemoration of his retirement 優遊於歷史與田野之道：勞格文教授榮休紀念譯集,
consists of Chinese translations of some of the seminal works in his voluminous ouevre, made by many of the scholars whom he has inspired to do their own fieldwork (cf. Daoist ritual in south China, with links), including (besides the editors) Lü Pengzhi, Tam Wai Lun, and Wu Nengchang. David Faure pays tribute to John in a preface. Cf. Daoist ritual in north Taiwan.
Left, Lagerwey with Master Chen Rongsheng, 1975.
Right, with students and colleagues, 2001.
In his own introduction, John expresses his gratitude to his Chinese students, first in Paris and then in Hong Kong, “who gave new meaning to the work of recovery”:
If what I thought to have found in their culture made sense to them, then perhaps what I had found was truly theirs and not some foreigner’s projections or idealisations.
Following the flummery of the Coronation, I keep finding myself perplexed by the ways in which elites dominate images of society.
Exhibition catalogue.
The new exhibition at the British Museum, China’s hidden century, is a splendid idea. If the Qing dynasty is a poor cousin of the Ming, the 19th century has suffered by comparison with the long and glorious early-Qing reigns of the Kangxi (1661–1722) and Qianlong (1736–95) emperors. So it’s a worthy mission to reinstate the period, “often defined—and dismissed—as an era of cultural decline”, amidst economic crisis, uprisings, and foreign invasion. The Opium Wars of the 1840s marked the beginning of a “century of humiliation”, the late Qing making one of several instances of hitherto thriving empires that now suffered in turn at the hands of foreign imperialism (cf. Pankaj Mishra on the wider context of Ottoman modernization, at end of this post).
Attending a preview of the BM exhibition, I’m reminded that museums and art galleries, and indeed libraries, depend largely on material that reflects the values of a tiny minority of urban educated people (mainly men). This approach was long standard for most societies, but it’s clearly one that more recent historians have been seeking to refine. And of course, like books, artefacts are silent and immobile. Now I don’t mean to give you another of my “What About the Workers?” rants; I quite understand the brief of museums, and the culture of elite minorities has a rightful place alongside those of other social groups. But as anthropologists and ethnomusicologists seek to engage fully with the “red and fiery” nature of performance in local society, the limitations of both museums and elites soon become apparent (see e.g. Society and soundscape, and What is serious music?!).
So I’m grateful to the exhibition for stimulating me to revisit some of my own material from the field. In this I’m always in awe of the incomparable erudition of Yang Yinliu (1899–1984). Brought up in Wuxi during the final years of the Qing dynasty, Yang learned instruments from Daoist priests from the age of six, going on to join the refined Tianyun she society and to become a fine exponent of qin zither, pipa and sanxian plucked lutes, while supplementing his training with an education in Western culture.
In his research he had a rare grasp of both early and later imperial history, and at the helm of the Music Research Institute in Beijing after the 1949 “Liberation” he embodied continuity with Qing traditions of performance and scholarship, as well as directing major fieldwork projects.
I’m used to people (often local officials, indeed) citing this saying to explain
the inability of Communist policies to penetrate the countryside (an instance here),
but of course its original usage referred to imperial society.
In her online essay, exhibition curator Jessica Harrison-Hall asks,
How did Chinese cultural creativity demonstrate resilience in the face of unprecedented levels of violence in the long 19th century?
In the countryside some ritual and other performing groups suffered interruptions from warfare. Around Jiangsu, the Taiping rebellion must have disrupted some groups; but rather few local traditions were affected by military conflict, and those that were, recovered quite soon. The ritual association of Hejiaying village just south of Xi’an was caught up in conflict soon after the outbreak of the Hui rebellion in 1862, with instruments and scores destroyed and performers killed. The association was only able to relearn much of its repertoire in 1915 from the nearby village of South Jixian; both groups are still active today. I’d like to learn more about reasons for this remarkably long period of inactivity—much longer, for instance, than that between the 1949 Communist takeover and the 1980s’ reforms.
Xi’an village festival, 1950s.
Through the 19th century a major change in local societies was the arrival of Christian missionaries, vividly documented for Shanxi by Henrietta Harrison. By 1900, as the Qing regime went into terminal decline, tensions with traditional religious communities led to the Boxer uprising, when Catholics around Beijing and Tianjin were massacred (as in Gaoluo)—with village ritual associations supporting the Boxers against the Allied armies. Senior villagers whom we met in the 1990s had heard many stories about the events from their parents.
The exhibition has five main themes: court, military, artists, urban life, and “global Qing”. As the online introduction explains,
The show illuminates the lives of individuals—an empress, a dancer, a soldier, an artist, a housewife, a merchant and a diplomat.
Visitors will glimpse the textures of life in 19th-century China through art, fashion, newspapers, furniture—even soup ingredients. Many people not only survived but thrived in this tumultuous world. New art forms, such as photography and lithographic printing, flourished while technology and transport—the telegraph, electricity, railways—transformed society.
This makes sense as far as it goes; but while seeking to reach beyond the elite, whose culture is only the tip of the iceberg in any era, it can hardly address the poor rural areas where the vast majority of the population lived—so any attempt to broaden the topic rather depends on “going down” to the countryside. The evidence for material and expressive cultures may also invite significantly different perspectives. When Dr Harrison-Hall writes “Representing the millions of people who were not wealthy is a challenge as so little survives”, she refers to the material culture preserved in museums. Among the folk, local traditions of ritual and music that endured throughout the troubled 20th century go back multiple generations; many groups preserve early artefacts such as instruments, scores, ritual paintings, and pennants, but more importantly they transmit life-cycle and calendrical rituals that were being modified in ways that can rarely be glimpsed—even in the wealth of field reports for Hebei, Shanxi, and elsewhere in my series on Local ritual.
This reflects another common difficulty: we often seek to document history through major, exceptional events, whereas for peasants customary life is more routine. And apart from artefacts, much of the history of this (or any) period lies in oral tradition—which doesn’t lend itself so well to exhibitions.
Nor do women play a greater role in the traditions I’m about to outline; while we regularly came across elderly women with bound feet, they had hardly been exposed to the public activities of the village with which we were concerned (for posts on gender in China and elsewhere, click here; right, women of Gaoluo).
The elite solo art of the qin zither is a close ally of museums, having an intrinsic bond with calligraphy, painting, and poetry. Again, qin scholars tend to focus on tablatures from the Ming and early Qing, but John Thompson’s definitive site lists around fifty such volumes from the 19th century. Within this tiny coterie, collections like the 1864 Qinxue rumen 琴學入門 and the 1876 Tianwen’geqinpu 天聞閣琴譜 must have been in more common circulation than were early manuscripts.
Xiansuo beikao score, copied by Rong Zhai in 1814.
It’s also worth observing that there was constant interplay between folk and elite traditions. In Beijing the Manchu-Mongol court elite, such as prince Rong Zhai, were patrons of lowly blind itinerant street performers, with whom they performed a recreational chamber repertoire. For the 19th century we have names (and not much else) of musicians like the blind sanxian player Zhao Debi, and Wang Xianchen, a protégé of the empress Cixi.
“Musiciens Chinois. légation a Pékin”, Paul Champion, 1865/1866.
In 19th-century Shanghai, the paraliturgical instrumental ensemble of Daoist temples gave rise to the new secular style of silk-and-bamboo, with amateur clubs thriving right down to today. And we can even listen to recordings of music from the late Qing, such as those made by Berthold Laufer in Beijing and Shanghai. Even later releases (e.g. here) reflect an tradition that was unbroken from those times.
* * *
Former Buddhist monks from Wutaishan with the exquisite arhat at the British Museum, 1992.
As to local temples, again we tend to focus on early dates when they were founded rather than on their social life thereafter, with steles commemorating their periodic renovation. In the temple network of imperial Beijing, traditions of shengguan ensemble which served ritual were inter-related. The Zhihua temple, built in 1443 as the private temple of a Ming eunuch, is famed for not only for its architecture but for its shengguan music, for which we have a precious gongche score from 1694.
Here it’s worth clarifying a significant misapprehension. As with notations for other genres (for the qin zither, the Beijing entertainment repertoire, or the village ritual groups we meet below), the date of copying was always long after the pieces came into currency. Scores were not consulted during performance, but constituted a prestigious artefact for their custodians. So the 1694 score of the Zhihua temple was not “composed” then; moreover, through the 19th century, long after the temple had lost its imperial prestige, the musical monks (yiseng 藝僧) of a network of Beijing temples continued to exchange and recopy scores—an energy that we can only imagine (I eagerly await the publication of Ju Xi‘s research on the evolution of the temple, in the next volume of the major EFEO series Epigraphy and oral sources of Peking temples). Meanwhile, temples in not so distant towns like Chengde and Shenyang were also acquiring new ritual repertoires.
South of Beijing, most village ritual associations on the Hebei plain seem to have been attracted by the same myths as the elite, tracing their history back to the Kangxi and Qianlong eras, or even the Ming—mostly on the basis of long oral tradition or early artefacts. While fieldworkers tend to dismiss the Chinese scholarly fashion for seeking “living fossils” in local traditions, when we extend our enquiries beyond contemporary observation to the past, perhaps we too are guilty of focusing on such early clues, rather downplaying references to 19th-century reign-periods:
Yet despite the successive upheavals of the 20th century, visiting such groups in the 1990s we gained an impression of remarkable continuity.
Recopyings of shengguan scores transmitted by Miaoyin,
including Tongzhi 13th year (1874). Hanzhuang village, Xiongxian, 1920. Photo: 1993.
Mostly we have to imagine Buddhist and Daoist priests arriving in rural temples to invigorate village ritual associations. In villages around Xiongxian county, the Buddhist monk Miaoyin transmitted a magnificent repertoire of shengguan suites in 1787, whose gongche scores were periodically recopied over the following 150 years.
Base of yunluo gong-frame with a Guangxu-era date equivalent to 1903,
South Shilipu ritual association.
Around the Baiyangdian lake, members of the Buddhist-transmitted association of Greater Mazhuang recalled an account in their old scriptures that in the Xianfeng era (1850–61) an elderly monk called Runan, from the Xingfu si temple in Libao village in Mancheng, came here regularly for three years to teach them. Nearby in Xin’anzhuang, a 1990 history of the association lists three changes of pennant over the previous two centuries and more: Daoguang 12th year [1832], Guangxu 3rd year [1877], and Republic 26th year (1937).
Ritual artefacts, South Gaoluo:
left, dragon placard, Guangxu reign 1st year [1875] 3rd moon 15th day,
at the behest of ritual leaders Heng Yun and Shan Wenrong;
right, ritual curtain, 1892.
In the village of Gaoluo, my main fieldsite through the 1990s, a new temple built in 1844 proclaimed the identity of a separate south village. In 1875 a “dragon placard” asserted allegiance to the new emperor, and a ritual curtain from 1892 was still displayed in the lantern tent for the New Year’s rituals in the 1990s (see early history, and ritual images).
Among ritual associations in this region the popular “southern music” that competed with the “classical” shengguan instrumental ensemble is commonly dated to the early 20th century, but Qianminzhuang in Xushui county (later famed during the Great Leap Forward) was among several village associations said to have learned in the Xianfeng era (1850–61) when the Daoist priest Wang Leyun came from Nangong county to transmit the style.
Genealogy of the Li family Daoists, from Li Fu, first in the lineage to learn Daoist ritual
in the 18th century (see also Customs of naming).
Our perspectives change once we engage with living traditions. By the 1990s, when we met senior ritual specialists born around the 1920s, they could often list the names of their forebears back five or more generations. Even if we can rarely do more than document their names, they would naturally feel more of a connection with their grandfathers than with earlier ancestors. For Shanxi, I think of hereditary household Daoist traditions like that of the Li family Daoists in their home village of Upper Liangyuan; if only we could learn more about the life of Li Qing‘s great-grandfather Li Xianrong (c1851–1920s), some of whose ritual manuals the family still preserves.
Left: manual for Presenting the Memorial ritual, copied by Li Xianrong.
Right: Li Manshan discovers temple steles.
Temples continued to be restored throughout the late Qing. The village’s Temple of the God Palace (Fodian miao) fell into disuse after Liberation (see our film, from 08.25), but we found a stele composed in Guangxu 6th year (1880), the year after the villagers completed a new bell tower and four priests’ rooms in gratitude for the end of a drought following a rain procession in Tongzhi 6th year (1867). But severe droughts again afflicted Shanxi from 1876 to 1879, so perhaps the stele further offered gratitude for this second recovery.
Another instance from Shanxi: we can trace the hereditary transmission of the Zhou lineage of Complete Perfection household Daoists in Shuozhou county. Of the third generation, probably active from the late 18th century, Zhou Laifeng was a temple Daoist, his younger brother Zhou Lailong a household Daoist.
Their descendant Zhou Erdan showed us a manuscript Yuhuang shangdi beiji (above, probably copied by his uncle Zhou Fusheng), that reproduces an 1813 stele of the Yuhuang miao temple in Shuozhou town, mentioning the brothers’ fine calligraphy.
From Qing-dynasty Tianjin Tianhou gong xinghui tu 天津天后宫行會圖.
Yet another instance of a tradition maintained through from the 18th to the 20th centuries is the “imperial assembly” of Tianjin, in this case among folk dharma-drumming associations.
* * *
Wanhe tang musicians, 1993, heirs to an illustrious tradition.
As to local traditions of narrative singing and opera, the respective provincial monographs of the great Anthologyof folk music of the Chinese peoples (Zhongguo quyi zhi, Zhongguo xiqu zhi) contain much evidence for both material artefacts and oral tradition (e.g n.2 here; further citations in posts under Chinoperl). Near Suzhou, the Wanhe tangKunqu association was founded in the second half of the 19th century, performing largely for life-cycle ceremonies.
In Shaanbei, the Yulin “little pieces” are said to have been transmitted outside the regional court in the Daoguang era (1821–50) by Li Diankui and his son Li Fang—and the brief biographies throughout the volumes of the Anthology introduce many locally-renowned 19th-century performers. The style of the “little pieces” is thought to be influenced by opera troupes brought by Qing-dynasty regional governors from the Jiangnan region; some local scholars claim that it was based on the opera of Hunan, which may have been brought during the Tongzhi reign (1862–74) by a company attached to a division of Zuo Zongtang’s Hunan army on campaign in the region.
Nanyin in Quanzhou, 1986.
Further evidence is to be found in the riches of Hokkien culture of south Fujian, such as the exquisite nanguan (nanyin) ballads—the study of which is again rooted in the search for early origins rather than its vibrant later life. Similarly, scholars of Daoist ritual set their sights firmly on Tang and Song texts, but monographs on local household altars around south China also contain material on 19th century transmissions, including particularly rich collections of ritual paintings and manuals.
Late Qing murals are characterised by strong use of blue and white. While all of the old themes continued to be painted, a variety of new types of painting appeared in this period, some of them seemingly unrelated to anything which had come before. Important new developments include: new genres of opera-stage murals, often incorporating Western architecture, figures, or text; paintings connected to the Yellow River Formation 黃河陣 ritual; and a large number of rather eccentric Buddhist murals commissioned by charismatic wandering monks.
* * *
Given its parameters, the BM exhibition is very fine; here I’ve just offered a few suggestive instances of the potential for documenting grass-roots history through local fieldwork. Much as we may hope to broaden the social base of our enquiries, it’s often hard to say much more than this: despite growing challenges, rural and urban ritual and performing groups, founded in the 18th century or earlier, maintained activity not only through the late Qing and Republican eras, but even after the 1949 “Liberation” and the convulsive campaigns of Maoism. Still, as the exhibition reminds us, it’s important to join up the dots between the late Ming/early Qing and the 20th century; and whether or not we spell it out, the late imperial period makes a constant backdrop to our fieldwork.
My book Daoist priests of the Li family, and the film that complements it, mainly document the maintenance of their ritual tradition in the countryside of Yanggao county (for a roundup of posts on the Li family Daoists, click here). But Chapter 18 of the book makes an interlude discussing their recent wider exposure, “marching towards the world”.
Taking the Li family Daoists on tour between 2005 and 2018 was both delightful and instructive. Our first forays to perform abroad were to Amsterdam in 2005 and the USA in 2009. After I began visiting the Li family Daoists again in Yanggao in 2011, the following year we visited Italy in the first of three tours sponsored by local Confucius Institutes (CI) (see also here, and here).
* * *
In 2013, after a year of constant emailing with the various German CIs, we’re on the road again at last.
This time on gongs we have Guicheng instead of Third Tiger, who is busy organising a campaign in his work-unit. I meet up with the band at Hamburg airport on 5th April. At our hotel the Daoists get back in practice with the coffee machine, and we catch up. Next afternoon we walk over to the CI, impressive with its elegant new repro Yuyuan pavilion teahouse modelled on the one in Shanghai. They rehearse and discuss the new item I have suggested, an a cappella sequence based on the Invitation ritual at the edge of the village. At first they were reluctant, worried that performing an item so explicitly funerary might be unsuitable. I point out that some of the greatest music in the Western concert tradition is for the dead. Apart from requiems, I go onto YouTube to play them the Buxtehude Klaglied (do you know that piece? It’s amazing!). The Invitation turns out a great success in the program, a moving tranquil interlude between the uproar of “catching the tiger” and the wild percussion of Yellow Dragon.
Next morning we just make our connection to Geneva, first of several fraught changes at the labyrinthine Frankfurt airport. On the plane, without any encouragement from me, the Daoists soon realise the beer is free—touring musos after my heart. Wu Mei listens to Chinese pop on his headphones. At Geneva we are received splendidly by the CI and Xavier Bouvier, enthusiastic head of the Geneva Conservatoire. Apart from the concert I give a lecture and show my film. As in Italy, I am happy to introduce the Daoists to old friends. Before rehearsing in the fine conservatoire hall we take some fun photos, with Li Manshan seated at the grand piano.
At Leipzig airport we are met by Thomas Rötting, indefatigable CI fixer all these months. Leipzig is wonderful. Our hotel is right opposite the Nikolaikirche—not only Bach’s church but the starting point of the 1989 Montag protests, only a few months after the Tiananmen demos. If the date means anything to the Daoists, they would recall how they were learning to do rituals with Li Qing. Apart from the GDR legacy (see under Life behind the Iron Curtain), I feel as if I am taking the Daoists to a holy site (cf. Bach—and Daoist ritual). I have played Bach here myself, even before the fall of the Wall, and have been banging on about him to the Daoists for years. On our visit to the fine new Bach museum they are as spellbound as I am, finally getting what I have been on about all this time. As I stand with Li Manshan at the urinals in the posh new loo there, he muses, “Wow, so this is where old Bach used to take a piss, eh!”.
Next day in our lecture-workshop at the CI I observe, “Now that the Li family know about Bach and have heard his music, I wish I could invite him to hear them!” Bach would have adored Wu Mei’s guanzi playing (cf. Bach and the oboe).
The gig is magnificent. The audience goes wild, their faces rapt; I love the feeling of turning on audiences to this music that has enchanted me for so many years. By now all the CIs are latching onto how very special this tour is.
Heidelberg concert, April 2013.
Happily, our last two concerts are in churches, the two sheng mouth-organs filling the building with a majestic sound just like Bach on a huge organ with all the stops out; indeed, it is the same instrument. Heidelberg is charming, if overrun with tourists (again mostly Chinese), whereas Erlangen, our final stop, is more tranquil. There, leaving Li Manshan to rest at the hotel, we are given a guided tour of the local brewery, where the Daoists imbibe the beer tastings keenly—so we can organise a piss-up in a brewery, then. The final concert is majestic. Meanwhile I’ve had plenty of opportunity to keep consulting Li Manshan and Golden Noble about the finer details of funeral segments, both on the road and while resting at hotels.
By now most of the Daoists are miraculously speaking standard Chinese—more, I hope, from talking with educated urban Chinese helpers and other laowai than from being with me. Next day we take the train from Nürnberg to Frankfurt airport. The Daoists get tax refunds on their gifts, which they promptly spend on duty-free. We bid fond farewells, their plane arrives on time for the train back to Yanggao, and next morning they’re ready to Open Scriptures for yet another funeral—hitting the ground running, just as on later tours (cf. Li Bin’s 2017 diary). For all the ephemeral pleasures of touring, the basic context for their performance, their daily “food-bowl”, remains the local funerary business.
For our 2017 mini-tour of France, click here, leading to a series of related posts.
It’s the last in Magnus Gertten’s documentary trilogy on the lives of women rescued from Nazi concentration camps in 1945, preceded by Harbour of hope (2011) and Every face has a name (2015) (cf. this site).
While it makes sense within the trilogy, I’m not sure that the contrast between the nightmare of Ravensbrück and the couple’s later carefree life in Caracas quite works. Of course, it was a common reaction for survivors to remain silent about their hellish experiences; for Nadine and Nelly this was compounded by the double burden of their sexuality. In the film, recreating the story in rural France features too prominently, with little context about either the resistance, the camp system, or the Swedish rescue missions. It works better as a love story, in particular that of two brave women.
The story of Nadine asking Nelly to sing an aria from Madam Butterfly on Christmas Eve in Ravensbrück might lead us to the remarkable story of M. Butterfly.
* * *
The story of Ravensbrück and Nadine’s later ménage with Nelly tends to overshadow her earlier life—note articles here and here, the latter with a documentary:
Nadine was born in Madrid of a Belgian mother and a Chinese father, both Catholics. Her father was a diplomat; transferred back to Beijing in 1913 after the collapse of the Qing dynasty, the family moved in high circles.
Nadine Hwang in the late 1920s. These and other images here from the articles cited above.
Nadine resisted conventional gender roles from young, learning to drive a car and fly planes, and wearing men’s clothes. She became a honorary colonel in the Air Force of Shandong warlord Zhang Zongchang and later a lieutenant in Chang Hsueh-liang’s army. By the age of 25 she was working for the Beiyang government as adviser to Prime Minister Pan Fu. As a 1928 German report described,
She changes her personality with her costume and appears in the twelve hours of the day as a tomboy par excellence, a dashing officer, a politician, a young society girl and an accomplished world lady. In the morning she is seen riding, fencing or playing tennis in a correct man’s suit, until she goes to her office punctually at 8 o’clock, at the flounce of her own car, with a chauffeur-soldier behind her.
But by 1933 unrest and Japanese incursions prompted her to move to Paris, giving lectures around Europe and the USA while leading a bohemian life. She became chauffeur and soon lover of the socialite Natalie Clifford Barney, taking part in lively artistic salons. Under Nazi occupation Nadine seems to have worked as a spy for the French Resistance. She was deported to Ravensbrück in May 1944.
Kerchief embroidered with names of Ravensbrück inmates.
Filmed around the very regions where I’ve done my long-term fieldwork on ritual life in north China, the documentaries of Xu Tong 徐童 (b.1965) make deeply uncomfortable yet necessary watching. *
His work explores aspects of subaltern people’s lives of which I’ve only been peripherally aware. I’ve never wished to filter them out: unlike most portrayals of religious activity in China, my films show glimpses of itinerant performers, grave-diggers, beggars, pop music, smoking, joking… But my focus has made it hard for me to do these people justice.
As peasants migrate to urban areas in search of labour, choosing urban squalor over rural poverty, the depletion of the villages continues. In Xu Tong’s films, the scenery alone challenges our image of China’s rapid economic progress; the values of the pre-Liberation and Maoist eras (whether traditional, religious, or socialist) are almost entirely absent, yet one catches hints of a different kind of morality. As I observed in my post on Guo Yuhua, under Maoism the Chinese Masses were thoroughly exploited even while they received empty praise as salt-of-the-earth laobaixing, but since the 1980s’ reforms, state media have serially demonised them with the taints of “low quality” and “low-end population”.
Cut out the eyes (Wa yanjing, 挖眼睛, 2014) is a most striking documentary (substantial review in Chinese here), in which Xu Tong follows round an itinerant blind errentai singer in rural Inner Mongolia—just north of my fieldsite in north Shanxi.
Small groups performing errentai songs and skits appear regularly at weddings and funerals along the broad northern expanse of Hebei, Shanxi, and Shaanxi. I’ve often come across them—several scenes in Cut out the eyes remind me strongly of fieldwork, such as the funeral beggars (from 16.41), or Blindman the Fifth’s troupe (from 54.38). The shawm bands (known here as gujiang 鼓匠), very much part of this lowly milieu, include errentai in their repertoire (see vignettes in my DVDs Doing things and Notes from the Yellow Earth that come with my 2007 and 2009 books); even household Daoists incorporate such pieces in their popular sequences (see my film Li Manshan, from 42.52). Note also Yanggao personalities; A flawed funeral; Blind shawm players of Yanggao; Women of Yanggao 3; Hequ 1953; An unsung local hero; and Blind musicians in China and elsewhere.
However, the way I’ve delineated my topic has never afforded me time to immerse myself in this world—mercifully, one might say; so Xu Tong’s ethnography of their lives, “warts and all”, is most welcome. It all feels so familiar: gambling, dysfunctional families, pimps, dope-smoking, overturned lorries by the roadside… And hearing the dialectal expression bulei (“great”) again, which would be bulai in putonghua, is music to my ears.
Here’s the blurb for Cut out the eyes from a recent festival:
At once piercingly observant and intimately complicit in his approach, director Xu Tong trains his mobile, intimacy-generating camera on unique real-life characters in order to explore the ongoing clash of rural traditions with China’s rush to modernity.
In Cut out the eyes, Xu follows Er Housheng, a blind musician who travels Inner Mongolia with his lover/partner Liu Lanlan performing the saucy, sensationally bawdy form of musical duet comedy called errentai. Er Housheng’s female audiences are particularly enthralled with his combination of sensuality, Rabelaisian earthiness, and socially subversive lyrics.
Er Housheng is a charismatic, mesmerising narrative-generating machine, singing of his own incredibly fascinating, violently tumultuous life, and of the (mostly) sex lives of the people who form his community, grass roots down-to-earth folk whose lives haven’t changed much in decades, in rural Chinese Inner Mongolia.
Live performance, in Er Housheng’s hands (and in his and Liu Lanlan’s voices) is something both enthrallingly surreal and earthily commonplace: his audiences hear him boast about his prowess, his courage, his creativity, his trouble with women, not unlike a 1930s American blues singer, or even a 21st-century Chinese rural Kanye West!
The commonplace becomes spectacle, reality shines like magical fables, but there is darkness, danger, and unspeakable violence in Er Housheng’s life, love, and lyrics.
While the film is on one level an enthralling ethnographic showpiece, at its core Cut Out the Eyes is a passionate, frenzied psychodrama of lust, violence, and genius.
At last in a long scene on a visit home, Er Housheng tells how his lover’s husband cut out his eyes when he was 29; later (1.02.13) his graphic retelling of the lurid true crime story in song (and even the sexist denouement) has a painful authenticity which, just as much as his bawdy lyrics, explains his popularity. His songs contrast with much of the music in Xu Tong’s films, where the brash propriety of revolutionary songs and the saccharine pop from recent times express the degradation of people’s lives in a different way. For more on his life (he died in 2021), click here.
Here’s the film, with subtitles in Chinese and English:
Guo Youshan, senior master of “east-road” (donglu) errentai, recalls the perils of singing “unhealthy songs” after Liberation (cf. Gansu: a sequel).
He and cultural pundits may deplore the “unhealthy” downward spiral represented by performers like Er Housheng and Lanlan, but men and women, old and young, gobble it all up (and I suspect that’s a more subtle pun than you’ll find in the songs!).
Cut out the eyes gives an unflinching portrait of grass-roots errentai, utterly remote from the sanitised image of state troupes (cf. my vignette on attending a “concert” in Shaanbei) and the razzmatazz of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Unsettling as it is, this film should be compulsory viewing for anyone interested in Chinese society and its expressive culture.
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The sense of voyeurism in viewing such harrowing scenes is accentuated when watching the “Vagabonds trilogy” (Youmin sanbuqu 游民三部曲) with which Xu Tong made his name—films on subaltern lives around Beijing that are also most revealing:
Wheat harvest (Maishou 麦收, 2008). The protagonist Hongmiao is a sex worker at a brothel in Fengtai district of south Beijing. Her home village is in Dingxing county, where I found ritual groups through the 1990s (see under Local ritual, notably The Houshan Daoists), very near Gaoluo. This world of migrants drawn to Beijing—construction jobs, rudimentary health care, brothel workers and clients, seedy karaoke bars—is one that I only glimpsed. The benefits of modernization look most elusive; contrary to Partyspeak, there’s nothing noble about the plight of “the masses”. But the characters consider “culture”, “moral quality”, and “respect”.
You can watch the film complete in three parts, which should follow on from here; or, on YouTube, here’s the first 68’ (missing the last 31′) (this and the following videos with Chinese subtitles only):
Fortune teller (Suanming 算命, 2009; see here, wiki, and this critical review on the “Screening China” site). Caring for a mentally and physically handicapped partner, the disabled Li Baicheng moves round Hebei province offering his services as a fortune teller (his story far from those of the prestigious hereditary Daoist lineage of Li Manshan in Shanxi). The stories his clients tell him are distressing too—sexual violence, self-harm, prison, begging. Here it is, punctuated by Xu Tong’s instructive commentary:
One of Li Baichang’s clients in Fortune teller became the protagonist of
Shattered (Lao Tangtou 老唐头, 2011; see e.g. here and here), uploaded in three parts, which should follow on from here. After her release from prison, the tough brothel owner Tang Caifeng returns home to visit her family in rural Heilongjiang in northeast China. Her father Old Man Tang recalls how he joined the Party in 1948 but withdrew in 1958, disgusted by the farcical, and tragic, steel campaign; still, like many veterans, he deplores the decline since the 1980s’ reforms. Dysfunctional family dynamics are paraded on camera again. Caifeng is impressed by Brother Wu, owner of an illegal coal mine (cf. Platform); in the final scene, captions reveal that she has hired thugs to beat up the man who reported the mine to get it closed down.
Around this time she changed her name to Tang Xiaoyan, and began working with Xu Tong on his projects (Cut out the eyes was among the films on which she helped him—see e.g. here); in 2023 they married.
Xu must be aware how these scenes will look to his audience—who like him are mainly urban, educated and relatively well off compared to the people on screen. By constantly homing in on aspects of rural life that he knows will likely make this audience squirm, I feel like Xu is—perhaps unconsciously—pandering to the disparaging view of rural life commonly held by Chinese urbanites. […]
I always end up feeling uncomfortable with Xu’s films because I feel like he looks at his subjects with the detached ethnographic gaze of an educated, middle class urbanite fascinated with the “primitive” life of China’s poor—a perspective that can’t help but end up being condescending towards his subjects.
Even if the results may sometimes seem invasive rather than empathetic, with some scenes extended gratuitously, I still admire not just Xu Tong’s choice of subaltern subjects, but the way he masters the considerable challenge of filming them unobtrusively. And his attention to the accounts of older people recalling the Maoist era adds a valuable historical dimension.
All these films are seriously challenging to watch. My focus on ritual performance has to a large extent insulated me from confronting many of these issues; and it reminds me how equivocal my Chinese colleagues must have been when they realised my enthusiasm to get to grips with grass-roots life. Yet the desperation of people cast adrift, the utter inadequacy of the state’s response, and the clash of values, need to be revealed.
On the written page, I value exposés of subaltern China such as Liu Hongqing’s harrowing book on blind bards and their families, Kang Zhengguo’s Confessions, and Liao Yiwu’s vignettes (here and here). And for the “dark underbelly” of Lhasa society before the Chinese occupation, click here.
* Since I began working on this post, this and other links to yimovi.com have become temporarily unavailable, but do check back, as it’s a useful site!
Like Jia Zhangke, Wang Xiaoshuai 王小帅 (b.1966) is part of the “sixth generation” of Chinese film-makers, for whom a fraught relationship with the censors is par for the course.
His film So long, my son (Dijiu tianchang 地久天长, 2019) is deeply moving, “negotiating an ocean of sadness”, deflecting melodrama (reviews e.g. here and here, as well as this interview).
Destroyed by grief at the loss of their son Xingxing, Yaojun and Liyun (the brilliant Wang Jingchun and Yong Mei) relocate to coastal Fujian, their pain compounded when their relationship with the boy they have adopted breaks down. Common themes of the early reform years—falling foul of the 1983 Anti Spiritual Pollution campaign, and a degrading scene illustrating the one-child policy—follow on from the depiction of Maoist-era family dramas such as To live and The blue kite (a particular favourite of mine) (see Chinese film classics of the early reform era). But just as startling is the bewildering pace of more recent change since the reforms began to bite, with factory workers laid off and dramatic changes in the physical and moral landscape—alongside “the terrible burden of grief, rage and guilt, and the greater burden of forgiveness”. The final sequence makes a harrowing yet compassionate denouement.
For comments on other recent movies from China (my “entirely futile effort to keep my finger on the pulse of Chinese popular culture”), see One second, and Return to dust, as well as the TV series Rock it, Mom.
As the scope for debate in China shrinks, the recent sentencing of human rights lawyers Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi for “subversion of state power” has drawn much media attention (e.g. here; for Xu, see translations and interviews by David Ownby, Geremie Barmé, and Ian Johnson—note also this interview).
I gave some links to the work of other righteous dissenting scholars in my lengthy post on Guo Yuhua, who gave me such a valuable education in rural Shaanbei as she collected material for her brilliant book Shoukurende jiangshu [Narratives of the sufferers].
As I suggested, one might expect that exposure to the lives and cultures of poor rural dwellers would prompt us to ponder their situation and stimulate a social conscience. Even if it rarely surfaces clearly in fieldwork on China, perhaps that’s why authoritarian governments are likely to be wary not just of human rights lawyers but of anthropologists and “experts” in general.
The twin disciplines of anthropology and ethnomusicology (see Society and soundscape, and the canonical work of Clifford Geertz and Bruno Nettl, with a roundup of posts on the latter here) seek to study all of human behaviour (not only elites, but including them too, as well as popular genres such as karaoke and Eurovision); still, the lives of the under-represented subaltern poor, women, and minorities emerge as major themes (see also The reinvention of humanity). So perhaps ethnographers make natural allies with the righteous activists.
Thus “world music” should be more than just a fashion accessory. Even Songlines features articles on groups promoting the cause of liberation from oppressive regimes.
With my experience of China, I’ve long been curious about people’s lives under state socialism behind the Iron Curtain, particularly in the GDR (links here), and the potential for expressing alternative viewpoints under such regimes.
In China political and artistic dissent had already been severely punished in the Communist Base Area at Yan’an from the 1930s, and during the Maoist era after the 1949 “Liberation” the scope for variant stances was highly circumscribed, with only a few bold authors like Ding Ling, Wang Meng, and Liu Binyan daring to publicly query the Party line (see e.g. here); the brief Hundred Flowers campaign of 1956–57 was soon regarded as a trap to expose subversion.
As to the GDR, the new translation by Lucy Jones of Brigitte Reimann’s novelSiblings (DieGeschwister, 1963) has prompted a spate of perceptive reviews. *
New German and English editions of DieGeschwister/Siblings, the latter with well-chosen cover artwork by Walter Womacka (1925–2010) (full mural here).
Rejecting the “boy-meets-girl-meets-tractor” tenets of socialist realism, Brigitte Reimann (1933–73; Foundation; wiki) was an idealistic yet conflicted writer. Besides her diaries (citations below from this article),
Her most famous novel, Franziska Linkerhand, which Jones describes as “German history fed through the form of a love letter”, was incomplete when she died, but became a bestseller when it was published in 1974. […]
Her books’ unusually open depictions of day-to-day life in the GDR, told through the particular viewpoint of a woman, led to them playing an important role in the country, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s as East German citizens sought to critically examine the rationale behind a land that either cosseted them or locked them in, depending on your viewpoint. In the post-communist era they have also offered an insight for younger generations keen to understand their own mothers’ attitudes towards the socialist state in which they grew up.
For Elisabeth, a young painter, the GDR is her generation’s chance to build a glorious, egalitarian socialist future. For her brother Uli, it is a place of stricture and oppression. Separating them is the ever-wider chasm of the Party line; over them loom the twin spectres of opportunity and fear, and the shadow of their defector brother Konrad. In prose as bold as a scarlet paint stroke, Brigitte Reimann battles with the clash of idealism and suppression, familial loyalty, and desire. The result is this ground-breaking classic of post-war East German literature.
Charting the reality of the everyday in socialist Germany, she details her time spent as a state-sponsored artist at an industrial plant in the new town of Hoyerswerda where she ran writing classes for the workers. Her stints on the factory floor, during which she sucked in the black sooty air which likely contributed to the cancer that ended her life, also informs her gritty descriptions of industrial life and quotidian challenges of a socialist state, from supply chain issues, to the scorn she attracted for wearing lipstick at work.
Like Reimann herself, Elisabeth “strains against the artistic and political orthodoxies of old party comrades who refuse to listen to young people, especially women, with fresh ideas”.
It wasn’t blind confidence we were after. It was trust. My generation had designed new machines, cleared forests and built power plants. We’d drained swamplands and manned border posts. We’d painted pictures and written books. We had a right to be trusted. We had a right to ask questions if something seemed shady, if a verdict was disputable, or an authority questionable.
The shadows of Nazism and the war are sketched only briefly; and when Elisabeth is visited by a “nice young man” from the Stasi, she is startled but unscarred. Her brother Konrad has already defected; visiting him in the Western sector, she feels out of place:
Even though I heard German words, I felt like a stranger in a foreign country. I’d thought: When I went to Prague last year, I felt at home, and no matter where I went, I heard Czech being spoken, but never once, not for a minute, did I feel like a foreigner.
The translation comes with useful endnotes. Among the attributes of this short-lived lost civilisation, Michael Hofmann notes
the distressing ugliness of the official jargon, the Kaderwelsch, a play on the words Kader (a party cadre) and Kauderwelsch, meaning “gobbledygook’”.
Of course, such words had a life before and since the GDR (see Some German mouthfuls).
Hofmann also remarks, rather too sweepingly, that
Elisabeth’s feelings towards seniority—as I think Reimann’s were too—are informed by expectant obedience, a sort of eroticised respect. […] All the men in Siblings seem to be the same man, and the woman seems to be equally drawn to all of them.
While soul-searching became common—almost de rigueur—in Germany after the fall of the Wall, it’s impressive that writers such as Reimann could represent such nuance amidst the high tide of state socialism.
For a compelling biography of a GDR family over three generations, do read Maxim Leo’s Red love.
Scene from the Great Improvement of Luck ritual:
The Wei Yuan Altar 威遠壇 in suburban Taipei,
From The hundred thousand fools of God.
For both folk and art music in the time of Vermeer, click 
Biographies of Pingtan paizhi master Wang Shanglong and Chen Renzhen.
The Qinghe guan society in Changtai.
Household Daoist rituals, Putian.
Segments of mortuary rituals, Nan’an (again, cf.
The first cycle of Five songs from the Chinese poets (
The couplet comes from a poem by the early-Tang poet 
Besides Tian Qing’s many reflections on the 
So I’m grateful to the exhibition for stimulating me to revisit some of my own material from the field. In this I’m always in awe of the incomparable erudition of 
This reflects another common difficulty: we often seek to document history through major, exceptional events, whereas for peasants customary life is more routine. And apart from artefacts, much of the history of this (or any) period lies in oral tradition—which doesn’t lend itself so well to exhibitions.
From 
From Qing-dynasty Tianjin Tianhou gong xinghui tu 天津天后宫行會圖.
Mural (detail), 
Hofmann also remarks, rather too sweepingly, that
Stephen Jones: a blog 