Baojuan (Jingjiang Baojuan)

Name of China's national intangible cultural heritage: Baojuan (Jingjiang Baojuan)

Applicant: Jingjiang City, Jiangsu Province

Item No.: 13

Project No.: I-13

Time of publication: 2008 (second batch)

Category: Folk Literature

Region: Jiangsu Province

Type: Extension Project

Applicant: Jingjiang City, Jiangsu Province

Protection unit: Jingjiang Cultural Center

Brief introduction of Baojuan (Jingjiang Baojuan)

Applicant: Jingjiang City, Jiangsu Province

Baojuan is a popular text evolved from Bianwen in Tang Dynasty and Shuo in Song Dynasty. Since Ming and Qing Dynasties, Baojuan has contained a large number of folklore, folk songs and social customs. It has become a folk literature style which is also holy and popular, solemn and harmonious, narrative oriented, rhyme and prose combined.

Baojuan's speaking and singing once spread in the vast area from Gansu and Shaanxi to Jiangsu and Zhejiang, especially in the Wu dialect area in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. It has a history of nearly 300 years. There are more than 100 kinds of old texts in Jingjiang Baojuan, and more than 60 kinds of printed copies and transcripts. There are more than 120 Baojuan singers in the city, and more than 3000 Baojuan talks are held every year.

It can be seen from the contents of the three Mao scrolls, the great sage scrolls, the Xiangshan Guanyin scrolls, the fate of the lantern, the fourth Sister Zhang's havoc in Tokyo, the story of blood sweaters, the nine halls selling medicine, the ten golden fans, and the Jiangyin fortress uprising that Jingjiang scrolls integrate art, religion, and folk customs, with a variety of forms of folk literature and colorful folk customs Customs and rich folk knowledge provide a lot of information for the study of folk literature, folk chronicles and cultural history, which is known as the "living fossil" of Chinese folk literature. In January 2007, Jingjiang City was named "the hometown of Chinese Baojuan culture inheritance" by Chinese Folk Artists Association.

Jingjiang Scripture is still handed down, but there are also endangered phenomena: first, the text is damaged and missing. Most of Jingjiang Baojuan's texts are old printed, stone printed or hand copied. With a long history, some texts have been incomplete, motheaten or lost, and have been reduced from more than 100 to more than 60 in the past. Second, the weakening of the inheritance team, hidden in the crisis of no successor. Third, the number of young audiences has decreased. In a few years, with the death of the old audience, Baojuan's speaking and singing activities are bound to decline and need to be protected.