Chinese Folklore

В китайской культуре духи-ежи относятся к нескольким типам духов. Это могут быть звери-оборотни, которые превращаются в людей и взаимодействуют с человеком. В отличие от других живот-ных, например лис, ежи-оборотни не были очень популярными пер-сонажами, несколько рассказов о них представлены в «Тайпин гуан цзи», «Тайпин юй лань» (X в.), а также в сборнике рассказов об уди-вительном «Куй чэ чжи» (XII в.). В большинстве случаев ежи в обра-зе пожилых людей, у которых сохраняются некоторые зооморфные черты, встречаются с людьми во дворе или в доме и не причиняют им вреда. Другой тип ежей-оборотней-это священные животные, чей культ получил распространение при династии Цин и остается попу-лярным до сих пор. Эти духи, поселяясь в семье, обеспечивают ей процветание и получают способность к оборотничеству только после достижения бессмертия. Рассказы о различных духах-ежах представ-лены в сборнике Ли Цинчэна «Рассказы Цзуйча об удивительном» («Цзуйча чжигуай»), изданном в 1892 г. Эти истории произошли в г. Тяньцзине, где был очень популярен культ белой ежихи. В неко-торых из них персонаж обладает особенностями, характерными для разных типов духов.

... the "motif-spotting" studies in popular mass-media (fiction film and tele ... In addition to studying the "folklore" that is already represented in the film, folklorists are also interested in looking at the intent and impact of using or creating such folklore in fiction films. ...

A delightful collection of modern Chinese tales

The Dragon Daughter and Other Lin Lan Fairy Tales brings together forty-two magical Chinese tales, most appearing for the first time in English. These stories have been carefully selected from more than a thousand originally published in the early twentieth century under the pseudonyms Lin Lan and Lady Lin Lan―previously unknown in the West, and now acclaimed as the Brothers Grimm of China.

The birth of the tales began in 1924, when one author, Li Xiaofeng, published a set of literary stories under the Lin Lan pen name, an alias that would eventually be shared by an editorial team. Together, this group gathered fairy tales (tonghua) from rural regions across China. Combining traditional oral Chinese narratives with elements from the West, the selections in this collection represent different themes and genres―from folk legends to comic tales. Characters fall for fairies, experience predestined love, and have love/hate relationships with siblings. Garden snails and snakes transform into cooking girls, and dragon daughters construct houses. An introduction offers historical and social context for understanding the role that the Lin Lan stories played in modern China. Appendixes include information on tale types and biographies of the writers and contributors.

The Dragon Daughter and Other Lin Lan Fairy Tales is a captivating testament to the power of storytelling.

ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0691214417
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0691214412

In Oral Traditions in Contemporary China: Healing a Nation, Juwen Zhang provides a systematic survey of such oral traditions as folk and fairy tales, proverbs, ballads, and folksongs that are vibrantly practiced today. Zhang establishes a theoretical framework for understanding how Chinese culture has continued for thousands of years with vitality and validity, core and arbitrary identity markers, and folkloric identity. This framework, which describes a cultural self-healing mechanism, is equally applicable to the exploration of other traditions and cultures in the world. Through topics from Chinese Cinderella to the Grimms of China, from proverbs like “older ginger is spicier” to the life-views held by the Chinese, and from mountain songs and ballads to the musical instruments like the clay-vessel-flute, the author weaves these oral traditions across time and space into a mesmerizing intellectual journey. Focusing on contemporary practice, this book serves as a bridge between Chinese and international folklore scholarship and other related disciplines as well. Those interested in Chinese culture in general and Chinese folklore, literature, and oral tradition in particular will certainly delight in perusing this book.
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1793645132
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1793645135

The story of Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty 梁武帝 (r. 502-549) rescuing his wife Lady Xi 郗氏 from an unfortunate rebirth as a snake was a common subject in popular literature related to Buddhist beliefs in late imperial China. Its history can be dated back to the twelfth century, when it quickly spread throughout the country. It is interpreted as a foundation of monastic Buddhist rites for the salvation of the dead, and it has also appeared as a narrative used in ritual storytelling and drama in several areas of China. Although Lady Xi's story played a major role in the dissemination of Buddhist ideas and rituals among the common folk, its history and cultural impact still remain understudied. The present paper explores the development of Lady Xi's story in the particular literary form of baojuan 寶卷 (precious scrolls) with the focus on 漢學研究第 37 卷第 4 期 2 performance traditions of southern Jiangsu. It compares three different recensions of the Baojuan of the Liang Emperor that represent two distinct periods in the development of the baojuan genre (the so-called "sectarian" scriptures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the "folk" narrative texts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), as well as two regional traditions (Northern China and Wu dialect-speaking areas of Jiangsu). The evolution of this subject shows how elements of historical narrative were incorporated into Buddhist ritual storytelling. The article also demonstrates the connections between differences in the contents of the recensions with their functions in ritualized performances based on information from contemporary recitations of this baojuan in southern Jiangsu.

This article traces the history of baojuan (scroll recitation) performances in Shang-hai in the period 1875-1915. Scroll recitation is a type of ritualized storytelling that originated in Buddhist preaching, but that also included secular subjects in the later period. This study demonstrates how a traditional performative art was integrated into the cultural environment of a developing cosmopolitan city at the end of the nineteenth century, and how it was transformed for the new demands of urban audiences in the early twentieth century. This study analyzes the process of seculariza-tion of scroll recitation through the growth of entertaining aspects of its contents and performance style in Shanghai. It makes use of newly discovered historical materials , including newspapers and periodicals of that period, which help to clarify many details of this art's evolution in the modern city. Keywords Baojuan (precious scrolls) · Storytelling · Folklore · Vernacular literature · Shanghai entertainment culture Baojuan (寶卷, precious scroll) performances, known as "scroll recitation" (xuan-juan 宣卷), which represented a type of ritualized storytelling that originated in Buddhist preaching around the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries and evolved during the Ming and Qing dynasties, 1 were still popular in Shanghai during the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries. They also acquired local characteristics there, including new content, melodies, linguistic features, and performance style.

The title " Sie Djin Koei Tjeng Tang" in Hokkienese Chinese  dialect , it means      " Sie Djen Koei's Eastern Invasion".
Very popular classic graphic novel in the Chinese diaspora (peranakan) Indonesia community, the origin story is Chinese traditional folklore. Semi historical novel.
Drawn by Siauw Tik Kwie, he prepares every week one page to be published in STAR  WEEKLY an Indonesian language publication . During 1950s. The story was continued with " Sie Djin Koei Tjeng See" (eastern invasion).
The weekly editor was the late  Mr. Auw Yong Pengkoen.


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In this paper, the author offers a perspective on the evolution of the Hairy Maiden (Mao-nü) legends in Chinese written and oral tradition, from the twelfth century to the present day, on the material of poems, short stories and records of the collectors of the Song – Qing eras, as well as memories of Hebei from the 1920s – 1940s and modern collections of fairy tales and legends. Attention is also paid to the pre-Song history of the character. Field research data from 2014–2016 were used in the article. Mao-nü lives in wooded mountains; she is benevolent towards people. Stories about her can be divided into two distinctive groups. In the first group, she is a supernatural being for whom there is no return to ordinary life. In the second group, she returns to human existence, leaves the liminal zone, and is doomed to die. W. Eberhard and Li Jianguo constructed the schemes close to the invariant of the Mao-nü plot. However, a few stories do not correspond to those schemes as a whole or their parts in which the Hairy Maiden acts as a magical assistant. The paper describes the concept of Mao-nü as a deity and traces the connection of the Mao-nü stories to the Daoist hagiography (from "Lie xian zhuan" and on). The author also provides data on the perception of Mao-nü in the visual arts. The paper elaborates on the evidences that prove the direct descendance of the plot of the revolutionary opera "The White-Haired Girl" from ancient folklore. It describes further how the "revolutionary play" influenced the circulation of stories concerning the White-Haired fairy. An attempt is made to determine how the Hairy Maiden's stories are connected to the stories about the "wild hairy people," including the Great Wall's builders. The author notes that for contemporary stories about Mao-nü, the proximity to written sources and links to the Huashan mountains are characteristic.

This article first outlines the long history of folklore collection in China, and then describes the disciplinary development in the 20th century. In Section 3, it presents the current situation in terms of disciplinary infrastructure, development, contribution, and challenge, with a focus on the recent practice of safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage. These accounts are largely based on the views of the Chinese folklorists. In the final section, this article discusses the issues of cultural continuity, integration, and self-healing mechanisms in Chinese culture by putting Chinese folkloristics in a historical and world perspective. This paper suggests that, to understand Chinese folklore and culture, one must be aware of the most basic differences between Chinese fundamental beliefs and values and those of the West, and that Chinese folklore and folkloristics present new challenges to the current paradigms put forward in the post-colonial, post-modern, and imperial ideologies.

This chapter explores supernatural beliefs in the urban space of contempo- rary Beijing. It examines representations of traditional demonic characters and plots in modern urban culture, the ways in which they survive and adapt in new social and cultural contexts, forms of interaction between traditional and contemporary mass culture, and some specific features of Asian traditions of ghostlore and ghost storytelling. It also discusses demonology as a special realm of Chinese culture, and its main features and new functions in urban conditions, as well as various authorities which influence the content of the supernatural in the spaces of the capital.

SOURCES OF PU SONGLING’S MINIATURE TALE "MAKING ANIMALS"
The reconstruction of the author’s original strategy in the collection Liao Zhai zhi yi (聊齋誌異) implies the ascertaining of the extent to which the text reflects the ethnographic and folklore facts contemporary for Pu Songling. The article offers an attempt of the approach based on the examination of a miniature tale called "Making Animals" (Zao chu, 造畜). Researchers see its origins either in the Tang story "Third Lady of Banqiao Bridge" (9th century) or in current demonological beliefs. An analysis of the general structure of the miniature and its lexical features has been conducted. On its basis, as well as on the basis of the comparison of the text with earlier works about the transformation of human beings into animals, we conclude that the sources of the tale were ethnographic information obtained by the author in everyday life, and the story "Third Lady…" combined with several widespread folklore motifs.

Реконструкция авторской стратегии в  сборнике «Ляо Чжай чжи  и» (聊齋誌異) подразумевает определение того, в какой степени текст отражает современные Пу Сунлину этнографические и фольклорные реалии. В статье предложен подход к решению этой задачи на материале миниатюры «Превращение
в скотов» («Цзао чу», 造畜). В исследовательской литературе ее возводят или к танскому рассказу «Третья хозяйка с  моста Баньцяо» (IX  в.), или к  актуальным для времени написания демонологическим представлениям. На основе анализа общей структуры миниатюры и  ее лексических особенностей, а  также сравнения текста с более ранними произведениями, посвященными превращениям людей в животных, сделан вывод о том, что источниками текста стали доступные автору в повседневной жизни этнографические сведения, а также переработанное ядро рассказа «Третья хозяйка…», дополненное широко распространенными фольклорными мотивами.

В сборнике Проблемы литератур Дальнего Востока: Избранные материалы IX международной научной конференции, Санкт-Петербург, 28–30 января 2021 года. Санкт-Петербург: Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет, 2021. – С. 56-68.

This is an introduction to the special issue of the journal, Western Folklore, which includes ten short essays by the folklorists in China, showing some of the new directions of Chinese folkloristics.
The “new directions,” in this limited issue, are discussed by
scholars from China. They mainly refer to these aspects: some
theoretical discourses on the discipline of folkloristics (minsuxue
xuekexing) and practical folkloristics (shijian minsuxue); applying
folkloristic expertise in social reform, particularly in rural
governance (xiangcun zhili); writing about village folklore
(cunluo minsuzhi) and engaging in local policymaking; probing
the use of a “grand theory” in an analysis of a village ritual;
changes in and conflicts involving the traditions between the
majority Han group and the minority groups (shaoshu minzu);
and reflective thoughts on the movement of safeguarding Intangible
Cultural Heritage (ICH) in China.

Старостина А. Б. Деревянный журавль Гао Пяня: о моделях чудесных птиц в Китае эпохи Тан (619-907 гг.) //
Вестник Московского университета. Серия 13: Востоковедение. 2021. № 1. С. 58-71.
Статья посвящена особенностям взаимодействия устных и письменных сюжетных нарративов и ритуальных практик в ситуации интенсивного взаимодействия культур. Исследование построено на анализе трех эпизодов использования высокопоставленными функционерами Танской империи деревянных журавлей в религиозных и магических целях, описанных в «Старой истории Тан» («Цзю Тан шу») и в «Повествовании о колдовской смуте в Гуанлине»
(«Гуанлин яо луань чжи»). Описано проникновение в Китай бытовавшего в Индии и в Центральной Азии сюжета о деревянной птице. Разобрано несколько примеров его влияния на повествовательную прозу, а также на религиозную обрядность и на сферу приватных магических практик.
Сделано предположение о том, что заимствованный с Запада образ чудесной деревянной птицы был включен в систему имитативной магии, а сакрализация ремесленного мастерства была соединена с верой в вознесение на небеса верхом на журавле. Подобный подход нашел отражение и в двух рассказах из сборников, составленных в конце IX – начале X в.

The article is devoted to the characteristics of the interaction between the oral and written narratives and ritual practices during times of the intensive contacts of cultures. The study is based on the analysis of three cases of using wooden cranes for religious and magical purposes by high-ranking functionaries of the Tang Empire (619–907) described in “Old Tang History” (“Jiu Tang shu”) and “Chronicle of the Sorcerers’ Chaos in Guangling” (“Guangling yao luan zhi”). The article clarifies the Chinese perception of a legend of a magic wooden bird widespread in India and Central Asia in the early middle ages. The story’s infl uence on Chinese narrative prose and religious rituals and the sphere of private magical practices is explored.
Presumably, the borrowed image of a wonder bird made of wood was included in the system of imitative magic. During the process, the sacralization of craftsmanship was combined with the belief in the ascension of an immortal to heaven riding on a crane. Later, this approach was refl ected in two stories from collections of narrative prose of the 9th – 10th centuries.

Рассказ «Жена секретаря» из средневекового китайского сборника «Обширные записки о странном» («Гуан и цзи», VIII в.) содержит несколько мотивов, в указателе С. Томпсона включенных в  группу «Обычаи ведьм». Они нетипичны для средневековой китайской повествовательной прозы, зато могут сосуществовать в  подобной связке в значительно более поздних европейских сюжетах (включая сюжетный тип СУС –832**).
В статье сделано предположение о том, что запись в «Обширных записках о странном» основана на переработке центральноазиатского устного рассказа.

The article aims to clarify the relations between the early versions of tale type ATU 575. Examining the range of Chinese accounts concerning various wooden birds, the author concludes that two groups can be distinguished. The first consists of stories about flying wooden kite-like birds that are not used as vehicles, while in the second, we deal with wooden birds that can carry people. Records belonging to the second group and evidently having their origin in Indian and Central Asian folk tradition appear later in China. An attempt is made to restore possible outlines of the tale type's ancestral stories. The article states that the tale of an enamoured weaver in the Panchatantra evolves from the structure of such an ancestral story.

This file contains the cover image, Table of Contents, Preface by Patricia Ebrey, and Introduction by the author/translator

The book was published by the Edwin Mellen Press (August 1, 2004).
Hardcover : 230 pages.
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0773463526; ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0773463523

This book presents a unique collection of fairy tales from contemporary China, translated into English for the first time. Demonstrating the unique continuity of oral tradition through Chinese history, the thirty tales are selected according to the theme of magic love. Many readers will be familiar with European tales of love and family. These Chinese tales have a very different emphasis. The structural differences are also striking: there are more tales with tragic endings, instead of the familiar happily ever after, and many types of tale. They are fascinating to read and challenging in terms of both morphology and cultural symbolism. Unlike many collections of fairy tales, this book provides contextual information on the tellers, collectors, and time and location of collection, along with an introduction to the Chinese social and cultural background, and folkloristic approaches to fairy tale studies.

Dream analysts at the Chinese court are mentioned in historical sources dating from the second millennium B.C., while belief in portents, omens and systems of prognostication have kept dream imagery and its interpretation very much in the mainstream of Chinese popular culture. This book, illustrated with woodblock prints from classical texts, presents an overview of the subject of dream interpretation in traditional China and an alphabetical compilation of Chinese dream images and their meanings. Perusing them offers extraordinary insights into a dynamic culture with ancient roots, and leads us to a deeper appreciation of goals and aspirations common to humanity, as well as the differences that derive from our cultural diversity.
This is a book for general readers, but provides traceable and reliable sources for all the contents translated.

This short essay introduces the contest of baojuan (scroll recitation) performers held in Zhoupu, Shanghai in 2015 and discusses the problem of modernization of scroll recitation in Lower Yangzi region and an attempt of revival of scroll recitation in Pudong in the modern period.

This is a Chinese festschrift in honor of Professor Dan Ben-Amos.  This volume contains 18 translated essays representing Dan Ben-Amos’s contribution in the areas of context, genre, basic concepts (motif, tradition), African folklore, and Jewish folklore.

梁武帝的皇后郗氏死後轉世為蟒蛇被武帝救度成為中國佛教相關的俗文學流行題材。它起源於十二世紀左右，並迅速在全國範圍內流傳。該故事做為佛教超度亡魂儀式《慈悲道場懺法》的基礎，同時成為中國幾個地區講唱文學與戲曲的題材。雖然該故事在傳播佛教教義與儀式起重要作用，其歷史與文化影響仍缺乏深入研究。本文章探討郗氏故事在寶卷體裁的發展演變過程，以比較三種代表性《梁皇寶卷》版本為基礎。其中一種版本代表明末清初的民間教派寶卷，其他兩種為清末吳方言地區民間敘述性的寶卷：1876年的木刻本與1872年的抄本。該故事演變顯示歷史敘述成分逐漸被吸收到寶卷文本；本文也解釋不同版本特點以及其儀式演唱功能（包括現代一種文本在民間喪葬儀式的用途），以當代江蘇南部寶卷講唱資料為主。

A graphic novel, fictionalized account of Tang Seng 唐僧 , Xuan Zang 玄奘 (602-664 CC）he is a Buddhist monk and translator, journey to the west: India (629-645 CC), during the Tang Dynasty (618 - 907). The story was written by Wu Cheng'en  吴承恩 (1500 - 1582) during the Ming dynasty (1368 - 1644)

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