Si Gangli

Name of Chinese national intangible cultural heritage: Sigangli

Applicant: Ximeng Wa Autonomous County, Yunnan Province

Item No.: 561

Project No.: i-74

Time of publication: 2011 (the third batch)

Category: Folk Literature

Region: Yunnan Province

Type: Extension Project

Applicant: Ximeng Wa Autonomous County, Yunnan Province

Protection unit: cultural center of Ximeng Wa Autonomous County

Introduction to Sigangli

Applicant: Ximeng Wa Autonomous County, Yunnan Province

Sigangli, the Creation Epic of Wa people, is popular in Cangyuan, Lancang and Ximeng Wa Autonomous County of Yunnan Province. "Sigang" means "stone cave", "cave" or "gourd" in Wa language. The work describes all kinds of stories that happened after human beings came out from sigang, including the origin of human beings, the generation of animals and plants, ancestral deeds, village history, family history, national history, national relations, hero stories, love stories, etc. The content involves Wa people and natural phenomena, animals and plants, production and life, family history, traditional customs, tribal war, sacrifice, reproduction and so on.

Sigangli, through the unique interpretation of the universe and the origin of human beings by the wa ancestors, imaginatively describes the process of creating the world through labor and the primitive cosmology, and expresses the desire of all ethnic groups to get along well with each other and unite harmoniously. The whole poem has more than 5700 lines, which is a magnificent creation ancient song of Wa nationality.

As the Wa people have no written language, Sigangli has a history of more than one thousand years, from oral inheritance of story telling to singing. After generations of singing, the content is constantly enriched. It has become a comprehensive carrier of the traditional folk culture of the Wa nationality, such as history, morality, religion, philosophy and customs. It is the crystallization of the collective wisdom of the Wa people and a classic of the oral literature of the Wa people. It has important historical and literary value for the study of the origin of Wa nationality, literature and art, customs, production and life, religious philosophy and so on.

When the people's Republic of China was founded in 1949, the Wa people directly entered the stage of new democratic society from the end of primitive society. Its creation epic Sigangli was first recorded in writing in the national survey in the 1950s. In the 1980s, there was a complete recorded text, which was translated into Chinese and published.