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Associated Press
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Thousand-year-old temple fair held in Central China's Henan
XUN COUNTY, China, Feb. 14, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- On February 6, 2025, the ninth day of the first lunar month, the 17th Central Plains (Hebi) Folk Culture Festival ushered in the Dapishan Temple Fair. The event was a vibrant display of traditional Chinese folk culture, with performances such as stilt-walking, lion dances, and yangko dances captivating the audience. Meanwhile, a large number of netizens tuned in to the live broadcast on Global Times Online ( to experience the authentic charm of 'Celebrating Spring Festival in Xun County, Hometown Henan.' Shehuo, a traditional Chinese folk performance with a history spanning centuries, is predominantly celebrated in rural areas. On this day, more than a dozen performance troupes gathered, marching from the ancient city of Xun County to Dapishan. They moved in an orderly fashion to the beat of drums, performing as they walked and turning the one-mile-long street into a grand stage. At the main venue, performances such as stilt-walking, yangko, dragon dances, lion dances, and drumming took turns to showcase their unique skills, highlighting the artistic appeal of these traditions. A notable feature of this year's temple fair was the increased participation of young people in community performances. Participants ranged from 4-year-old children to teenagers, injecting new vitality into the ancient festival. Xun County's Shehuo has a history of over 1,000 years and is recognized as a national intangible cultural heritage. The performance roles are derived from folk legends, historical accounts, traditional operas, and literary works, and are given new life through the innovations introduced by the performers. Xun County, Henan Province, known as the hometown of Chinese folk art, is famous for its ancient temple fairs. These fairs are renowned for their long history, rich cultural significance, far-reaching influence, and enduring vitality. The temple fairs last for a month, with the Dapishan Temple Fair opening on the ninth day of the first lunar month and the Fuqiu Mountain Temple Fair, held on the 16th day, being the most historic and famous. In December 2024, China's Spring Festival was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. In the official video submitted to UNESCO, the temple fair in Xun County was showcased as a vibrant and dynamic celebration of the Spring Festival. Xun County is a national historical and cultural city. The Xun County section of the Grand Canal and Liyang Warehouse in the ancient city are listed as world cultural heritage sites. Other historical sites, such as the ancient city walls and the Wenzhi Pavilion, provide a strong foundation for the preservation of traditional culture. In recent years, Xun County has vigorously developed its cultural tourism. The image of the ancient city, with its blend of mountains, water, and sightseeing opportunities, has been renewed through the temple fairs, transforming this destination into a new tourist highlight, especially during the Spring Festival. 'Temple fairs are a grand gathering of people, culture, and commodity trade, extending the reunion culture of the Spring Festival to the entire society, from family reunions to social reunions,' said Qiao Taishan, director of the Central Plains Intangible Cultural Heritage Research Institute and consultant to the Henan Folk Artists Association. 'Harmony and reunion are the core of Spring Festival culture. Our culture's pursuit of harmony is the confidence that drives Chinese traditional culture to go global,' Qiao added. The Fuqiu Mountain Temple Fair is held on the sixteenth day of the first lunar month each year. Community performance troupes from surrounding areas of Xun County also gather to enjoy this millennia-old cultural feast.
Yahoo
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
A photographer's fantastical portrait of rural China during Lunar New Year
Editor's Note: A version of this article was first published on February 10, 2024. In photographer Zhang Xiao's images of the Shehuo festival, an ancient celebration still observed in parts of northern China during the Lunar New Year, rural life comes alive with something altogether more fantastical. Villagers dressed as cranes, roosters and mythical lions pose for portraits standing amid crops or in fallow farmland. Costumed performers parade past brick houses against hazy backdrops, the eyes of their masks seemingly lost in thought. In a harvested wheat field, a group of almost a dozen men line up to hold aloft a colorful dragon puppet. In his book 'Community Fire,' Zhang said he wanted to capture the surreal 'disconnect' between people's everyday lives and the mythical personas they assumed. 'Their characters seemed to come from the sky itself, and … formed a huge theatrical stage that transcended the confines of reality, transporting a collective of sleepwalkers to a dreamworld,' he wrote. 'I wandered among them and photographed them quietly, because I did not want to wake them up.' Rooted in millennia-old agricultural practices of worshipping fire and the land, the folk rituals of Shehuo (often translated as 'earth and fire') traditionally entailed praying for good fortune and bounteous harvests, or to drive away demons. Festivities vary between regions but now typically see various performers, from stilt walkers to opera singers, parading through the streets or staging shows. Today, celebrations coincide with the Lunar New Year, which starts Wednesday. As such, they have come to encompass many of the traditions — such as temple fairs and lion dances — practiced around China during this period. (Lunar New Year celebrations usually last more than two weeks, with Shehuo festival taking place on the season's 15th and final day.) Shehuo celebrations have been recognized by the Chinese government in its UNESCO-style list of 'intangible cultural heritage.' But the festival's place in a rapidly urbanizing country remains under threat, said Zhang, adding that most of the performers he encountered had migrated to cities and only returned to their villages for the holiday. 'The significance of traditional customs can no longer meet the needs of modern lives,' the photographer told CNN via email. 'Today's young people are more concerned about the internet and games. They are not even willing to try and understand traditional cultures. I think that's sad.' Hoping to document the festival's disappearing traditions — and the costumes and props associated with them — Zhang spent over a decade photographing Shehuo events at villages in Shaanxi and Henan provinces. A selection of the images, which were shot between 2007 and 2019, also went on show in the US at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology (and over 100 of them were published in 'Community Fire'). As well as capturing rites, rituals and folklore, the photos speak to the proliferation of mass-produced paraphernalia that has transformed the festival since the turn of the 21st century. One image depicts a stack of expressionless plastic masks; a set of 12 eerie pictures shows smiling prop heads hanging from trees in flimsy carrier bags. Several pages of Zhang's book are dedicated to screengrabs of Alibaba-owned shopping platform, Taobao, where Shehuo items can be purchased at bargain prices. They range from an elaborate two-person lion dance costume, offered for just 360 yuan ($50), to a selection of headdresses priced under 17 yuan ($2.40). The rise of cheap goods and e-commerce has been a mixed blessing for these villages. Some of them — including Huozhuang, in Henan province, which features heavily in Zhang's project — have taken advantage of the opportunity. The photographer visited and documented several small family workshops that buy semi-complete products in large quantities online before hand-finishing them and selling them on platforms like Taobao for profit. 'In some villages, virtually the entire population has been mobilized to produce and sell Shehuo props,' the photographer writes in his book. But with economic opportunity comes a loss of traditional skills and customs. Materials like paper and bamboo have been replaced by cheap wire frames, plastic and synthetic fabrics, said Zhang, who grew up in a rural area of China's Shandong province but is now based in Chengdu, one of the country's largest metropolises in the southwest. A third-generation prop maker told Zhang that, in the photographer's words, that he 'lamented the gradual disappearance of traditional crafts.' But most of the villagers the photographer encountered were indifferent to the loss of cultural heritage, he claimed. And while Zhang, as a documentarian, assumed the role of a 'quiet spectator' while on assignment, he nonetheless expressed regret at the festival's rapid commercialization. 'People are not focused on how to improve product quality and craftsmanship,' said the photographer, who is currently working on a documentary about life in rural China. 'Instead, they are obsessed with how to manufacture these products as quickly as possible, and at the lowest cost, so as to gain an advantage against the competition. This has led to a gradual decline in product quality, and the entire industry has fallen into a vicious cycle of price wars.' 'Community Fire,' published by Aperture and Peabody Museum Press, is available now.
