Hechi celebrates Spring Festival with ICH activities

During this year's Spring Festival holiday, people from different ethnic groups in Hechi celebrated the Chinese New Year with vigor, beating bronze drums, cutting paper, singing mountain songs, and eating eight treasure rice. These intangible cultural heritage (ICH) activities carry Hechi traditions during Chinese New Year period.

The bronze drums are beaten at the beginning of spring to pray for good harvests. This year, cultural artists and intangible cultural heritage inheritors taught the local villagers the art of bronze drums while they performed in Latang village, Disu town, Du'an Yao autonomous county.

Mulam paper-cutting has a long history, first appearing in the Tang Dynasty (618-907). Before this Spring Festival, the inheritors of Mulam paper-cutting cut out more than 300 pieces of works for the Year of the Rabbit and gave them to local families.

Every Spring Festival, Hechi people like to eat eight treasure rice to pray for happiness and a good harvest. Huaiyuan eight treasure rice is a sweet dish made of locally produced glutinous rice along with eight ingredients, such as dates, wolfberries, roast pork, candied melon, lotus seeds, Chinese olives, and melon seeds.

Among these ICH representative items, the Liu Sanjie song and Zhuang's martial arts are also popular. This Spring Festival, in Yizhou Liu Sanjie's Hometown Scenic Spot, the Liu Sanjie song team members sang to express their longing for a happy and beautiful life.

Hechi's folk paper-cutting artists display their paper-cutting works. [Photo/Hechi Daily]