▲ The Sixth Cross-Strait Shennongyan Emperor Folk Ancestor Worship Ceremony held in Gaoping City Courtesy of Jincheng City News Center
"Every year around the fifteenth day of the first month, many villages in the county will hold a nine-curved Yellow River lantern festival that combines traditional formations with folk flower festivals, and people swim around them to seek a smooth year and peace in all seasons." Zhang Binghui, director of the Culture and Tourism Bureau of Baode County, Xinzhou City, Shanxi Province, introduced that the Jiuqu Yellow River Array Lantern Festival is an ancient folk custom circulating in the Yellow River Basin, taking the meaning of the Nine Curves and Eighteen Bends of the Yellow River, replacing soldiers with lamps, and arranging games, and has now become a necessary project for Spring Festival tourism in some parts of Shanxi.
In Wangjiayuan Village, Baode County, until 8 o'clock in the evening, people in a radius of more than a dozen miles will help the old and young to come to the meeting to turn the lights and dip some joy. People are accompanied by threes and twos, entering from the entrance, smoothly passing through the chain array, and then returning from the exit, which means that the year is smooth and safe.
The Jiuqu Yellow River Array Lantern Festival was not held every year in the past because of its wide area and cumbersome exhibition. Nowadays, with the rise of cultural tourism, the lantern array has gradually developed into a relatively simple circular lantern array, allowing tourists to experience the strong Flavor of Shanxi New Year, but also allowing this traditional custom to be better passed on.
Shanxi is located in the middle reaches of the Yellow River, is an important bearing area for the protection, inheritance and promotion of the Yellow River culture, the province's Yellow River Basin intangible cultural heritage resources are widely distributed, diverse, known for its early historical origin and complete inheritance chain, involving the Chinese humanistic ancestor culture, the ancestral culture, farming culture, ethnic integration culture, Jinshang culture and other important cultural forms.
▲ Yicheng flower drum in Yicheng County primary and secondary school inheritance Hu Bo Bi Donghua photo
For thousands of years, Shanxi gongs and drums have expressed the simple, straightforward, passionate and heroic feelings of the sons and daughters of the Yellow River with their rough, fierce, majestic and natural regional characteristics. There are as many as 18 kinds of Shanxi drum music with different characteristics, and it has a broad and deep mass base.
"In recent years, while inheriting and promoting the traditional drum art, we have boldly innovated, integrated the elements of the times, and created more drum works that are more in line with the aesthetics of modern people's art." The person in charge of the Shanxi Daizhou Drum Music Art Troupe said that the drum music works of Daizhou such as "Bull Fighting Tiger", "Rolling Walnut", "Mouse Marrying Relatives", and "Qin Wang Dianbing" won the National Stars Award, and the art troupe has repeatedly gone abroad, stepped onto the world stage, and performed in schools and scenic spots. At present, the year is approaching, and it is getting busy again.
Old tunes and new repertoire, old traditions and new folklore, today, combined with the consumption habits and aesthetic orientation of contemporary people, more and more intangible cultural heritage resources of the Yellow River Basin in Shanxi are applied to contemporary life scenes.
▲ Tourists watch the live tourism performance project "Like a Dream Moraine Mouth" in The Ancient Town of Moraine in Lüliang County, photographed by Zhu Meng
The ancient town of Linxian Moraine in Lüliang City, named after the second largest moraine of the Yellow River, integrates local elements such as Linxian Umbrella Head Song, Moraine Mouth Rap, Dao Love Drama, and Moraine into the real-life tourism performance project "Ru Meng Moraine Mouth", allowing tourists to re-appreciate the Yellow River culture by recalling the prosperity of Jin merchants, the majesty of the Eighth Route Army crossing the Yellow River, the struggle life and love of the sons and daughters of the Yellow River, and even the victory in poverty alleviation.
"In ancient times, transportation was inconvenient, and people running on the water by the Yellow River overturned boats and drowned. In order to pray for safe travel, Hequ County, which is located at the junction of the three provinces and regions of Jin, Shaanxi and Inner Mongolia, has gradually formed the custom of worshipping Dayu and putting river lamps. Zhao Yindong, a river lamp maker in Hequ County, Xinzhou City, said that since its development, every year on the fifteenth day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar, the people of the three provinces and regions on both sides of the Yellow River will rush to Hequ County to meet and participate in the river lantern festival activities.
Relying on the Hequ River Lantern Festival, a national intangible cultural heritage project, Hequ County has held a variety of forms and rich contents of the River Lantern Festival for more than 20 consecutive years. At nightfall, above the Yellow River, the river lights reflect the river surface, drifting forward along the main channel of the Yellow River, carrying people's beautiful expectations for the future. "The River Lantern Festival has become a resounding brand in the county, an important carrier for local exchange of culture and economic development, and our family's craftsmanship of making river lanterns has also been inherited in the development of the River Lantern Festival." Zhao Yindong said.
Over the years, the legend of Yandi, the legend of Yao, the legend of Shun, the ancestor culture of the great locust tree and other Chinese humanistic ancestor culture and ancestral culture have become the cultural heritage of cultural tourism events held in Jincheng, Yuncheng, Linfen and other places; the yanmen house construction skills and other valuable skills produced in the past shanxi due to geographical and ethnic minority exchanges and integration, have been applied in the restoration of Yingxian Muta, Daizhou Confucian Temple and other national key cultural relics protection units and other projects, with an annual output value of hundreds of millions of yuan.
The story of Jinshang, which is inseparable from the cultural symbols of river transportation such as rafts, ferries, wharves and boardwalks of the Yellow River, has become an inexhaustible source of creation for major art academies in Shanxi, and intangible cultural heritage projects such as three carving techniques and Pingyao push light paint have also been applied to cultural and creative products, which are well received by tourists.
At present, there are still problems in Shanxi that there are homogeneity between intangible cultural heritage resources and neighboring provinces and regions, the degree of identification is not obvious, and the development of intangible cultural heritage is unbalanced, insufficient and uncoordinated. In order to solve these problems, not long ago, the Department of Culture and Tourism of Shanxi Province issued the "Special Plan for the Protection, Inheritance and Promotion of Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Yellow River Basin of Shanxi Province (2021-2035)" (hereinafter referred to as the "Planning"), which clarifies the protection, inheritance and promotion measures for related resources in the coming period, and proposes to create the intangible cultural heritage IP of the Yellow River Basin in Shanxi.
The scope of implementation of the "Planning" is divided into the main area and the radiation area, covering 11 cities in Shanxi. Measures such as establishing a database of intangible cultural heritage in the Yellow River Basin of Shanxi, combing the representative labels of intangible cultural heritage in the Yellow River Basin, implementing a comprehensive record of representative projects and inheritors of intangible cultural heritage in the Yellow River Basin, and promoting the efficient use of intangible cultural heritage archives and data resources in the Yellow River Basin are all included in the planning. By 2025, the system of intangible cultural heritage protection, inheritance and promotion of the Yellow River Basin in Shanxi will be initially established.
January 20, 2022 China Culture Daily
Special reports were published on the 8th edition
Shanxi:
"Intangible Cultural Heritage +" Helps Yellow River Culture Carry Forward in the New Era"
Editor-in-charge: Chen Xiaoyue