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Yingge · Origins and disputes
This is Volume 7 of ten in the Yingge feature. Record, oral account and inference are written in three separate layers; two questions raised by present-day circulation are also recorded.
Header texture: photo by H2v5o68z, CC0
Origins: the accounts that stand side by side
This section is written in three layers: what the project pages record, what the villages say, and how scholars explain and argue it. The three are not run into one sentence. What a project page writes and whether the matter has been settled are two different things.
What the project pages record
The Puning and Chaoyang pages share one description: Yingge is “also called eagle song, parrot, singing yingge or yangge”, and “traditionally has a history of more than three hundred years, its origin mostly explained as a variant of the local people’s martial custom or as a staging of Water Margin stories”. Several points sit in that passage: “traditionally” means there is no earlier first-hand record of the date; “mostly explained as” means the entry sets two explanations side by side without settling on one; and “circulated in Guangdong, Fujian and elsewhere” means the range is wider than Chaoshan.
The Chaoyang page has a separate passage on Chaoyang alone: “Chaoyang Yingge continues the Han folk square dance and the forms of nuo culture, with some change in the course of that continuity, and by the Ming absorbed the northern big-drum yangge, gradually evolving into Yingge dance.” That sentence is not the same thing as “yangge” among the other names: the other names are what it is called, this speaks of absorption.
The Jiazi page speaks of Jiazi only: “In the early Ming it came from Fujian to Jiazi town, Lufeng. In the late Ming some martial artists took the Yingge dance that had come from Fujian and, with the guidance and improvement of local martial masters, formed the Jiazi Yingge dance with its own style.”
All of the above is what the project pages state directly. That an entry says so, and whether scholarship has settled the matter, are again two different things.
What the villages say
Most speakers begin with martial practice: in the slack season men gather to drill boxing, the routines are set into a team dance and drums are added to give it shape. The other line begins with staging: the passage in which the heroes of Mount Liang assault Damingfu is brought into the street to be played, and since the full 108 cannot be assembled the team is set at 36 or 72. In oral accounts the two often merge into one and the tellers see no conflict. Both match what the entry says — “a variant of martial custom”, “a staging of Water Margin stories” — only the entry is brief and the telling is detailed. The common figure is more than three hundred years; beyond that there are only village genealogies and oral accounts, no earlier written record. This page takes the three-hundred-year figure and does not write “a thousand-year intangible heritage”: the two are too far apart, and the latter has nothing behind it.
How scholarship explains and argues it
The earlier compilation is the 1996 volume of the China Ethnic and Folk Dance Compendium for Guangdong. According to Liu Jianwen’s 2024 paper, which cites it, the book lists five hypotheses — Confucius sacrifice, opera, martial training, introduction from another province, and evolution from god-parade fairs — “without detailed presentation or argument”. The book itself has not been seen here, so it is marked as cited at second hand; the five are recorded claims, which does not mean each was argued, nor that the five carry equal weight of evidence.
In 2000 Wei Fu of Shantou University proposed that “Yingge is a survival of ancient nuo dance”, a sixth hypothesis, setting out six pieces of evidence over time.
In 2024 Liu Jianwen of Hanshan Normal University published “A query on ‘Yingge dance derives from nuo’” in the Journal of Guangzhou University (social sciences), vol. 23 no. 3, examining the six items one by one and concluding that Yingge does not derive from nuo and that its main source is martial dance. That is the conclusion of one paper, not a settled finding. The Chaoyang project page’s phrase “continues the forms of nuo culture” is kept separately as what the page says; both stand, and this page rules for neither.
Two questions raised by present-day circulation (questions only)
This section records two questions that often get raised, not conclusions of this page. Both would need complete performance records from different periods, interviews with teams and comparable material before anything could be said; the present material is enough only to raise them.
One is the claim of distortion. After staging and short video, what the camera shows is often only tens of seconds; from that some argue that formations and tempos have been compressed, and that the steadiness of the slow tempo is the first thing to go. A short clip is not the same as an altered tempo — whether the same team plays the same way before a temple and before a lens is something this page has no records to compare.
The other is the claim of homogenisation: that teams copy each other and differences between counties are narrowing. The four on-site records in Volume 3 are enough only to show that the grounds differ, not to prove a division of formations between the two routes; nor to judge whether the differences are growing or shrinking. Settling that would need comparable records from two places in different years.
Where this volume does not rule,Volume 8, Questions and gaps, carries a separate list of gaps on the same basis.
← Previous volume: the team tableBack to the featureNext volume: questions and gaps →
| Sources | Type |
|---|---|
| Yingge (Puning Yingge)China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network / Digital Museum of China ICHNo publication date on the item page; announced in the first batch, 2006 | National list entry |
| Yingge (Chaoyang Yingge)Ibid.No publication date on the item page; announced in the first batch, 2006 | National list entry |
| Yingge (Jiazi Yingge)Ibid.No publication date on the item page; third batch, 2011 (extension item) | National list entry |
| Publication of the revised protection units for national ICH representative itemsDepartment of Intangible Cultural Heritage, Ministry of Culture and Tourism2019-12-05 | Ministry release |
| Puning Yingge DanceOffice of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Guangdong Provincial Committee (Foreign Affairs Office of the Guangdong Provincial People’s Government)2026-07-24(https certificate error; this link runs on http) | Government website introduction |
| Reply to Proposal No. 20250334 of the Fourth Session of the 14th Shantou CPPCCOffice of the Chaoyang District People’s Government, Shantou2025-05-14(https certificate error; this link runs on http) | Government information disclosure |
| Ximen Women’s Yingge Team, ChaoyangShantou Polytechnic, “Yingge dance” feature2025-03-06 | College feature |
| “Once in a lifetime, you must see Yingge dance in Chaoshan!”China News Service2024-02-28 | report |
| “A query on ‘Yingge dance derives from nuo’”Liu Jianwen, Journal of Guangzhou University (social sciences), 2024, vol. 23 no. 3, 145–1552024 | Academic paper |
Access date: all nine items above were opened one by one on 23 October 2026 and were reachable that day. Two further team counts sit outside the table for want of a stable direct link: the Chaoyang team count in Southern.com, November 2024, and the Puning team count on the Puning municipal government site, January 2024; both are named in the text. The figures they record can be checked against two government documents already in the table (the Chaoyang district government reply of May 2025 and the provincial foreign affairs office’s July 2026 note on a visit), so the text sets the two accounts side by side and does not argue from the unlinked items alone. Two further pieces were read but not cited and so are not listed: the National Ethnic Affairs Commission’s “Dance drama Yingge: where the sticks rise, one family” (2026-08) and the Guangdong Department of Housing and Urban-Rural Development’s “Light and shadow on the hometown of emigrants”.
Claims on this page against sources
The statements on this page come from different places: what the project pages say, what the villages say, what scholars argue, and an old compilation known only at second hand. The six notes below each point at one of them; first separate “who is speaking” from “which layer is being spoken about”. The square brackets after each heading are Evidence status; where two parties argue, a separate line is marked who claims it.
1 · The three sentences on the project pages sit side by side; they are not a finding What the official project page records
Where in the text: “What the project pages record”, first paragraph
Basis：the Puning page and the Chaoyang page share one description — “traditionally a history of more than three hundred years, its origin mostly explained as a variant of the local people’s martial custom or as a staging of Water Margin stories” — and the same passage adds “circulated in Guangdong, Fujian and elsewhere”.
boundaries: “traditionally” shows there is no earlier first-hand record of the date; “mostly explained as” is the entry setting two explanations side by side, not choosing one. The passage should not be read as a finding.
2 · Nuo: only the Chaoyang page says it What the official project page records (on origins)
Where in the text: “What the project pages record”, second paragraph
Basis：the Chaoyang page Text: “Chaoyang Yingge continues the Han folk square dance and the forms of nuo culture, with some change in the course of that continuity”.
boundaries: this is the Chaoyang page speaking of Chaoyang Yingge; it is on that page alone, and the Puning and Jiazi pages do not carry the sentence. It belongs to “the page says so” and is not a scholarly consensus; a 2024 paper disputes it, see note six.
3 · Absorbing yangge is not the same as the other name “yangge”What the official project page records (on origins)
Where in the text: “What the project pages record”, last sentence of the second paragraph
Basis: the next sentence on the same page: “by the Ming absorbed the northern big-drum yangge, gradually evolving into Yingge dance”.
boundaries: the four other names (eagle song, parrot, singing yingge, yangge) are what it is called; this sentence is about absorption, and the two cannot be combined into one argument about origins; the absorption claim is also written only on the Chaoyang page.
4 · Coming from Fujian: Jiazi only What the official project page records (on origins)
Where in the text: “What the project pages record”, third paragraph
Basis：the Jiazi page Text: “In the early Ming it came from Fujian to Jiazi town, Lufeng. In the late Ming some martial artists took the Yingge dance that had come from Fujian and, with the guidance and improvement of local martial masters, formed the Jiazi Yingge dance with its own style.”
boundaries: this passage speaks of Jiazi only. The shared sentence “circulated in Guangdong, Fujian and elsewhere” describes a range, not an argument about origins — the two may be read together but cannot be used to prove that “all Yingge came from Fujian”.
5 · The five hypotheses of 1996 are at second hand An earlier scholarly compilation (cited)
Where in the text: “How scholarship explains and argues it”, first paragraph
Basis：Liu Jianwen, 2024 citing the 1996 China Ethnic and Folk Dance Compendium for Guangdong, records that it lists five hypotheses — Confucius sacrifice, opera, martial training, introduction from another province, evolution from god-parade fairs — “without detailed presentation or argument”.
boundaries: the book itself has not been seen here and only the citation is available, so it is marked second-hand; the five are recorded claims, which does not mean the book argued each one, nor that the five carry equal weight. The names of the five follow the citing paper and have not been merged.
6 · Wei Fu’s nuo hypothesis and Liu Jianwen’s query A scholar’s claim and a scholarly rebuttal
who claims it: Wei Fu (Shantou University, proposed in 2000 that “Yingge is a survival of ancient nuo dance”, setting out six pieces of evidence); Liu Jianwen (school of music, Hanshan Normal University, examined the six one by one in 2024 and holds that the main source is martial dance)
Where in the text: “How scholarship explains and argues it”, second and third paragraphs
Basis: “A query on ‘Yingge dance derives from nuo’”, Journal of Guangzhou University (social sciences), 2024, vol. 23 no. 3, 145–155 (the issue’s contents can be checked). The abstract states that “examination of the six pieces of evidence and argument finds them hard to sustain” and that “the main source of Yingge dance is martial dance”. The full text as pushed by the journal’s WeChat account runs in six sections, one for each item of evidence, each examined in turn; the six details are not repeated here, only the conclusion. The printed version has not been seen, hence “full text as pushed”.
boundaries: the conclusion of one paper is not a settled finding; the Chaoyang page’s phrase about continuing the forms of nuo culture is still kept separately as what the page says. This page sets both sides out and rules for neither.
Last revised: 24 October 2026