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FOLK ECOLOGY AND EPICS IN RURAL CHINA
Anne E. McLaren, University of Melbourne1
Mongolians, Tibetans and other minority groups residing in the Chinese landmass
have rich epic traditions that are well known to anthropologists and folklorists. It has
long been assumed that the largest ethnic group in China, the Han Chinese,
comprising ninety-one percent of the population, had no epic tradition. This
assumption has come into question in recent years with the discovery of lengthy
narrative songs that appear to warrant the label “epic”. Performers of these epics are
performed by Han Chinese and are concentrated in the lower Yangzi delta, especially
the region of Lake Tai and Wuxi.
This region has long been recognised by Chinese scholars for the performance of
short songs known as Wu Songs (Wu ge). 2 The local people simply call them
1
This paper was presented to the 17th Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of
Australia in Melbourne 1-3 July 2008. It has been peer reviewed via a double blind referee process and
appears on the Conference Proceedings Website by the permission of the author who retains copyright.
This paper may be downloaded for fair use under the Copyright Act (1954), its later amendments and
other relevant legislation.
2
The region is traditionally known as the Wu region, after the ancient kingdom of that name in the
lower Yangzi delta.
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2
“mountain songs” (shange), a term referring to songs sung outdoors by amateurs as
distinct from songs sung at performance venues.
Wu songs have been studied for generations. In the first half of the twentieth century
famous scholars of China’s folk culture, such as Gu Jiegang, collected a treasure trove
of folk songs in circulation amongst the commoner classes of the lower Yangzi delta,
and there have been many other studies.3 However, the performance of shange was
repressed during the early socialist period (after 1949) and terminated entirely during
the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). This means that there was an unfortunate hiatus in
the performance and the scholarly compilation of “mountain songs” for several
decades. It was not until the early reform period (from the 1980s) that local
ethnographers began once again investigating folk customs in the Lake Tai area.
To their surprise they found elderly performers who could sing relatively long
narrative type mountain songs. The first ‘discovery’ was of a song comprising 500
lines about a local folk hero, Shen Qige, sung by Zhu Hairong in 1981. Subsequently
a much longer narrative song, “Wu Guniang”, comprising almost 3,000 lines, came to
light. Local culture cadres toured villages in order to collect material from villagers
who remembered narrative songs from the past. Gradually a series of significant
narrative songs emerged, including favourites known nationally such as “Meng
Jiangnü Weeping at the Great Wall”, as well as a number of other songs with local
circulation only (“Shen Qige”, “Zhao Shengguan”, “Xue Liulang” and so on). By the
early 1990s around thirty to forty sung narratives of varying length had been collected
by enthusiasts of Wu songs.4 In the 1990s Western scholars such as Antoinet
Schimmelpenninck and Frank Kouwenhoven produced important studies of Wu
songs.5
3
These anthologies from the early twentieth century have been republished in Wang Xunhua (1999);
see also Wu ge (1984).
4
For the re-discovery of the folk heritage of the Lake Tai region and these narratives in particular see
Qian Shunjuan (1997), 1-14;also Qian Shujuan, “Preface-Afu shige da guobao” in Zhu Hairong,
(1997:1-10).
5
See Schimmelpenninck and Kouwenhoven (1999) and Schimmelpenninck’s doctoral dissertation
(1997). Their primary focus is on the short type of song.
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3
With the discovery of a relatively large number of performers who can sing lengthy
verse narratives, Chinese folklorists and local enthusiasts are now asserting that their
local region has produced epics that rival the well-known epic songs of non-Han
Chinese peoples in the borderlands (Qian Shunjuan 1997).
Some of the Lake Tai ‘epics’deal with mythological themes, including the myth of the
origin of the Wu people (“Shen Qige). Others, such as “Hua Baoshan”, focus on a
legendary hero in a historical context. A large number are love stories where young
people pursue their romances in violation of Confucian norms. Romantic epics are
believed to contain explicit treatment of sexual encounters.6 This helped to account
for their great popularity in the late imperial period but also explains why they were
subject to prohibition in the mid nineteenth century and are difficult to recuperate in
the present day. The Lake Tai ‘epics’ were not related by professional storytellers in
urban areas but by amateur performers amongst mostly illiterate farming
communities.7 In the late imperial period many were copied in manuscript form and
circulated as material to be read. A number of the most famous ‘epics’ were collected
by publishers and printed for circulation within Jiangsu province.8
To date most work has been done on simply recording elicited performances,
transcribing these in Chinese script and then compiling them for publication (Jiang
Bin 1989). Analytical studies are relatively few. I first began examining the Yangzi
delta narrative songs in a field-trip to Wuxi in 2004 and have completed an initial
study on one example, the story of Xue Liulang (see McLaren, forthcoming). In
understanding the delta narrative songs I have found it useful to adopt the framework
of Stuart H. Blackburn, who has identified what he calls “folk epics” of India (1989).
As he points out, in the West the word “epic” is associated with a work that is
narrative, poetic and heroic, which would generally exclude works dealing primarily
6
Contemporary performers have been embarrassed to perform the sexually explicit sections because
they are held to violate norms of socialist morality. For this reason, the contemporary transcriptions
probably contain far less sexually explicit material than the pre 1949 oral performances. See discussion
in McLaren, forthcoming.
7
On the performative context of the lengthy narrative songs see Zheng Tuyou (2004).
8
I discuss the case of the nineteenth century written tradition in McLaren, forthcoming.
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with non-heroic themes.9 Contrary to the Western tradition, Blackburn distinguishes
between three epic types in India: martial, sacrificial, and romantic. In the case of the
Yangzi delta narrative songs one can also talk of mythological, legendary and
romantic sung narratives. Some of these are very long, comprising several thousand
lines and were performed at length over several days. As Zheng Tuyou has
demonstrated, these lengthy narrative songs were built up of many smaller tales or set
pieces performed in various contexts that could be deployed flexibly by a performer
who had mastered the full repertoire (Zheng 2004).
They also offer valuable insights into understanding the ‘ethnoecology’ of the
region. Ethnoecology has been defined as a “traditional set of environmental
perceptions-that is, [a] cultural model of the environment and its relation to
people and society” (Kottak 1999:26). Ethnoecological models underpin the way
that communities interpret the local landscape and their own land use, and
provide easily understood rationales for the use of resources, including the
exchange of women in marriage, and control of local demographics through
family size and sex ratios. Early ethnoecology studies focused on how a set of
beliefs and practices enabled communities to better adapt to their local
environments (Rappaport 1971). More recent scholarship on ethnoecology takes
into account the impact of social change in the modern era, changing population
flows, the impact of Western production techniques and the depletion of the
natural resources of the past (Kottak 1999). As for the Yangzi delta region, it has
become one of China’s burgeoning high-tech, industrial and manufacturing
centres. The traditional folk customs and performing arts are no longer in active
transmission as part of a living culture in the delta today. However, well into the
mid twentieth century, folk epics and songs sung in paddy fields, laments
performed at weddings and funeral ceremonies, and ritual practices associated
with the production of silk, cotton and rice, together with the exchange of women
in various marriage forms, permeated the working lives of communities in the
delta, forming a distinctive ethnoecology that has been little examined.10
9
Felix Oinas, cited in Blackburn, ibid. p.3
10
For a study of delta bridal laments within their communal context see McLaren 2008.
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It is ironic that the scholarly investigation of the delta folk epic is happening at the
very same time as the destruction of the original ecology of the region is taking place.
In mountain songs performers refer to their landscape as ‘an embroidered tapestry of
streams and mountains’ (jinxiu hao he shan) (cited in Qian 1997:45). But the network
of waterways, the water-laden rice paddies, and the traditional cotton and sericulture
industries of the region are no more. In a process that gathered speed in the last ten
years, the dense green and blue of the fields and rivers has been replaced by the grey
concrete of industrial complexes. Billboards line the new highways and international
high-tech enterprises have set up their home here. Mansions are being built for newly
affluent farmers who scorn to labour in paddy fields. Their children work in the new
industrial enterprises, while migrant workers from poorer hinterland regions engage in
vegetable cultivation in former paddy fields. In November 2004 and again in May
2008, when I visited the delta region, I found cottages lying abandoned next to silted
up canals.11 The polluted air hung like a pall over the landscape. In the hot summer of
2007 Lake Tai was attacked by an algal bloom that all but poisoned this water
resource on which three million people rely. A journalist for the outspoken paper,
Nanfang zhoumo, by the name of Zhang Jingping, in his recent book, Zhongguo de
ziwo tansuo, (2007) has written a lament for the loss of native ecology of the delta
region, particularly the destruction of rice paddy fields. Citing the work of social
scientist, Cao Zhihong, he notes the critical importance of the rice paddy fields in
soaking up excess water from the Yangzi River which commonly floods during the
warmer months. Fields of vegetables cannot carry out this role and will simply be
flooded and ruined (Zhang 2007:313).
It is in the context of the virtual destruction of the traditional ecology and social fabric
of the Lake Tai region that members of the local culture bureau and regional
ethnographers and scholars seek to record and in this way preserve the folk epics of
the very recent past. This process of compiling, reshaping and sometimes reinventing
local traditions has been noticed in many regions of China (for example, see Siu
11
I am greatly indebted to Professor Chen Qinjian, Head of the Department of International Chinese
Studies, East China Normal University, Shanghai, for organising these trips, arranging for interviews
with performers and providing insight into the performative and cultural background. I draw also from
the doctoral dissertation of Zheng Tuyou, who was supervised by Chen Qinjian. I would like to record
my deep appreciation here.
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1990). As I have noted in earlier studies, the same ‘invention of tradition’, began in
the 1980s in the Shanghai and lower Yangzi delta region. In the early stages the state
sought to harness the labour of local ethnographers to make an inventory of selected
parts of the folk traditions of each region of China (McLaren 1994). The interest in
folk arts continued with an attempt to link cultural resurgence with commerce and
tourism (McLaren 1998) and also with specific cultural values, including approved
gender norms (McLaren 1998). As Tan Chee-Beng (2006) has argued, the state at
regional level seeks both to reproduce chosen cultural forms and to control the
resurgence of less desirable forms. The sexual nature of many of the Lake Tai folk
epics, for example, continues to be a sensitive issue to local performers and
ethnographers.
The composition of Yangzi delta folk epics
Regional scholars have debated the extent to which the sung narratives of Lake Tai
conform to notions of ‘epic’ with regard to length. The issue is complex because most
performers can only perform short narrative songs or, from another point of view,
excerpts from a larger narrative cycle. Only a few individuals show mastery of a sung
narratives of epic length. The doctoral dissertation of Zheng Tuyou (2004) has been of
great assistance in uncovering the performative conditions that gave rise to both the
short ‘excerpts’ and the longer epic-length narratives. He conducted lengthy fieldwork
in the area and interviewed a large number of contemporary performers of Lake Tai
shange. According to Zheng there are three major contexts for the performance of
lengthy narrative songs. The first is while working in the paddy fields, the second
while poling light skiffs along the waterways in the environ of Lake Tai, and the third
while resting from the summer’s heat. There were particular reasons why these sung
performances needed to be lengthy and to relate an elaborate story. In this region,
two harvests of rice paddy was the norm, which required a very intensive form of
communal labour. There was a belief that the performance of mountain songs during
rice cultivation helped to raise work efficiency. Before 1949 landlords actively sought
out farmers who could were regarded as good performers of mountain songs to
provide entertainment and encouragement to those toiling in the paddy fields, helping
to relieve the tedium of this backbreaking labour. Skilful performers learnt how to
combine the progress of their narrative songs with the flow of work in rice cultivation.
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“Shen Qige”, in particular, was performed in the paddy fields and contains specific
sections devoted to transplanting rice, weeding, harvesting, threshing, and so on.
“Shen Qige” was performed in lengthy sessions throughout the working day and
sometimes over several days. Other songs were sung during boat travel on the lake or
waterways, which provided the main means of transport in the region. “Xue Liulang”,
for instance, contains many sections dealing with life on the waterways around Lake
Tai, including the dragon boat race and the competitive singing of mountain songs by
young men. (McLaren forthcoming). In this study I will turn to the tale of “Shen
Qige”, which makes a claim for the mythological origins of the Wu area and the
sinification of the region in antiquity. It does this by encoding the folk ecology and
traditional land use of the Lake Tai region and seeking to relate this to the migration
of culture heroes from the Yellow River to the Yangzi delta.
“Shen Qige”
The epic, “Shen Qige” (Seventh Brother Shen) was performed during rice paddy
cultivation and its rhetoric and imagery reflect patterns of agricultural toil and the
network of waterways and rice paddies that used to thread through the region. The
narrative is performed today not in rice paddy settings but in elicited performances as
examples of the local folk tradition. It also circulates in transcripts of sung
performances recorded from the 1960s on. The story can be related in prose and song
or in song only, and versions vary from 500 lines to over 2,000 (Jiang 1989:169; Qian
1997:40-41). Shen Qige is said to have been born in the era before the people of the
Wu region tilled the soil. His people gathered fruits and wild grasses and caught fish.
In “Shen Qige” we are told that Shen learns the arts of rice cultivation, animal
husbandry and how to sing mountain songs from the beautiful daughter of a Taoist
magician who comes from far away. After numerous setbacks he marries her and they
then pass these same skills down to their descendants. Shen Qige and his wife are thus
considered to be the founding ancestors of the rice-growing populations of the Wu
area.
According to legend, the originary sites of the story of Shen Qige is Yacheng village
close to Wuxi, which I visited in November 2004 accompanied by folklore experts
from East China Normal University, Shanghai. Here I met Zhu Hairong, a noted
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singer and collector of Wu ge, and a woman singer, Tang Jianqin, who learnt her
version of the Shen Qige story from a noted singer in her region (Jiang 1989:90).
The figure of Shen Qige became associated in the popular mind with the migration of
Yellow River communities south to this area in the first millennium BC. According
to a biography in the Shiji (Chapter 31), a man called Taibo, a prince of the court of
the Zhou dynasty, gave up his right to the Zhou throne and fled beyond the pale of
known civilisation to the “barbarian” land of the Jing (that is, the Yangzi River area)
where people tattooed their bodies. Here the local people enthroned him as Taibo of
Wu and the state became an enfeoffed part of the Zhou polity around 1122 BC.12 At a
later stage, the figures of Shen Qige and Taibo were conflated in popular lore, that is,
Shen Qige became seen as a reincarnation of Taibo or vice versa (Qian 1997:44-45).
This is apparent in the opening lines of “Shen Qige”:
Heaven and Earth, the Qian and the Kun [male and female principle], created [the
world] from chaos,
The Yellow Emperor and Shennong [deity of agriculture], came down into the
world,
On both banks of the Yellow River the five grains were sown,
But the area around Lake Tai was still uncultivated land.
Taibo and [his younger brother] Zhongyong crossed the Yangzi River,
They opened up the land south of the river and changed the barbarian wilderness of
Jing,
Qige and Qiniang passed on the grain and passed on mountain songs,
The uncultivated wilderness of Jing became a fine land of rivers and mountains.
(“Shen Qige” in Jiang 1989:91).
According to the folk epic, through the joint labour of Shen Qige and his wife, the
region around Lake Tai came to be cultivated with a rich patchwork of rice paddy and
water channels.
12
Donald B. Wagner (1990:163) has speculated that the original source from which Sima Qian drew
this story may have been a document forged at the Zhou court in order to legitimize Zhou rule over the
area.
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However, archaeological evidence does not bear out the story narrated in the folk epic.
Rice paddy was grown in Wuxi and the lower Yangzi delta region from six to seven
thousand years ago, long before Taibo made his migration to the Yangzi delta area.13
What seems to have happened is that the tale of an indigenous culture hero of the
Lake Tai region, Shen Qige, became grafted onto legends about Taibo, who is then
seen as responsible for drawing the ‘barbarian’ state of Wu into the greater Chinese
polity. In this way the sinicization of the region that took place in the first millennium
BC became associated with an indigenous culture hero.14 The originary myth of the
Wu people thus involves an identification between the folk ecology of their region
and that of the northern Yellow River civilisation.
Conclusion
Study of the folk epics of the lower Yangzi delta is at a relatively early stage in China
and it is virtually unknown in the West. These epics demonstrate that Han Chinese
populations did indeed have traditions of sung narratives of high quality and epic
length. The content was not one of martial heroes and epic wars but of legendary
heroes and romantic encounters. Wu folk epics constitute a very significant example
of regional oral literature in China. In addition, they were reproduced and reshaped in
manuscripts and printed texts from the nineteenth century onwards. Some of these
written exempla have emerged in recent years and offer light on the much-debated
transition of oral performance into written and print culture in the Chinese late
imperial period. It is sadly ironic that these moving folk epics, which celebrate the
paddy fields and waterways of the delta area, have come to public attention just at the
very end of the ecological destiny of “the embroidered tapestry of streams and
13
For a comprehensive discussion of the story of Wu Taibo and the archaeological evidence see Wang
Mingke (1997:255-287. According to archaeologists, cultivation of rice first emerged in the Lake Tai
region in Majiabin society from c.5000 to 3000 BCE. In the somewhat later Songze society of the same
region, rice paddy was a major activity (c.4000 to 3300 BCE) (Wang 1997:259). Those scholars who
accept the Shiji report concerning Taibo of the court of Zhou and his migration to Wu, nonetheless
dispute which area he actually fled to. Some believe he fled to a nearby region in Shanxi province,
others that he travelled as far as the central Yangzi River region of Ningzhen. There is little evidence
for his residence in the Lake Tai region. The Wu state, located to the east of Lake Tai, was established
during the Chunqiu era (770-481 BCE), long after the time of the historical Taibo of the court of Zhou.
14
How this process of identification came about remains to be examined.
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mountains” recorded in mountain songs, as the rice cultivators, boatsmen and
fisherfolk and their descendants are transformed into factory workers, technicians and
business managers in the highly industrialised economy of the lower Yangzi delta.
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