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“Yingge” is the general name. The national list splits it by the place that nominated it: Yingge (Puning Yingge) under Jieyang, Yingge (Chaoyang Yingge) under Shantou, Yingge (Jiazi Yingge) under Shanwei’s Lufeng. All three share one item number, Ⅲ-8, yet their branches and temperaments differ.

This page sets the three branches side by side: who divides by what, what each figure is, and which statements cannot be swapped. Each branch has its own page — rhythmic pattern, establishment, make-up, field formations and sources are all recorded there.

Puning This branch plays the Liangshan heroes attacking the Daming prefecture; the masks follow the Liangshan outlaws, the dress is warrior garb with tight short jackets. Formation figures include “Two Dragons Out to Sea”, “Tiger Descending the Mountain”, “Wheat Ear” and “Snail Spiral”; movement sets include “Planting the Field”, “Washing the Street”, “Spinning the Mace” and “Mace Flower”; the style is fierce and vigorous. A local saying runs: “Ansai waist drums in the north, Puning Yingge in the south.” There are naming years as well: in 1996 Puning was named a “Home of Guangdong Provincial Ethnic and Folk Art (Yingge Dance)”; in 2008 the Ministry of Culture named it a “Home of Chinese Folk Art (Yingge Dance)” (Jieyang municipal government website, “Homes of Chinese Folk Art”, published 2011-06-21, source Jieyang Daily). Puning has more than a hundred Yingge teams: a July 2026 visit-site briefing from the Provincial Foreign Affairs Office puts the number at 103, in fast, middle and slow branches; a January 2024 Puning government website citing the municipal culture and tourism department also gives 103, said to be nearly 30 more than in 2022. The two figures match but the dates differ, and neither is a live count.

Puning This branch’s establishment can be given in exact numbers: the official project page records performing teams of “at least 24 or 36 people, at most 72, up to 108 at the maximum”; besides drums and gongs the accompaniment includes conch horns, and when the dance reaches its fastest the shouts and the conch rise together. The same page sets rules for the mace and the step too — each dancer holds a pair of round short wooden maces, feet in a horse-riding squat stance, legs lifted and springing sideways. The 108 on the official page is the number of the 108 heroes of Water Margin; actual teams field 107, and the one missing is the rescued Lu Junyi, who does not take a place in the ranks (see Volume 1).

Chaoyang has more teams: the Chaoyang district government, replying to a district CPPCC proposal in May 2025, said the district has over 130 Yingge teams, 10 heritage bases and 47 inheritors at various levels; a November 2024 report on Southcn.com also gives over 130, noting “incomplete statistics”. The Ximen Women’s Yingge Team was founded in 1952, lapsed for a time and was rebuilt in 2011; built on the “five-beat” foundation, it has in recent years added the ten-beat paired set “Hundred Phoenixes in Flight” and the solo “Returning Taiji”, and its usual formations are Double Coins, Four Columns and Plum Blossom. In naming there is another year: the official entry records that “in November 1996 Chaoyang was named a ‘Home of Chinese Folk Art’ by the Ministry of Culture” (Chaoyang project page text) — that title does not carry the words Yingge, unlike Puning’s 2008 title, so each is set down here as written.

The detail of the three-part division is in the Chaoyang project page’s own text, copied here: the slow branch builds a set from three or four beats, and there is also a “drunken mace” in which the dancer looks like a drunkard; the slow branch is current in Wenguang, Mianbei and Chengnan. The middle branch’s basic method uses grouped beat counts — five or seven beats to a group, or eight, ten, eleven or thirteen to a group; its drum and gong pattern differs from the slow branch, whose drumbeat pauses and stretches in the middle while the middle branch beats continuously. The fast branch divides further into paired-combat sets, the Nanshan civil school and the Nanshan martial school. Eight inheritors are listed at the end of the page: Hong Feiying, Guo Yaoyang, Chen Hanlong, Yao Xinta, Yang Wei, Zhou Xiuxing, Chen Kunli and Lin Abao.

Jiazi Around Jiazi town in Lufeng, listed in the third batch in 2011. This branch is processional: the appearance is divided into four columns — righteous banner, Yingge dance, small opera, and the great banner carried on the shoulder; the movements include the slicing mace, the lowering mace, the mixing mace and the threading dragon; it is performed at the Lantern Festival, the Dragon Boat meet and the Mid-Autumn moon-viewing gathering. A small opera troupe follows behind, playing as it walks — “Damo Crossing Guanyin”, “Father and Daughter Meet”, “Two Bamboo Maces”, “Two Oars”, plus comic turns such as “Stealing the Piglet”, “The Fool Visits the Hall” and “Husband Carrying Wife”; the flower-drum woman climbs onto the flower-drum man’s shoulders and twirls a short stick as the team moves. Material for comparing the three places is still scattered; this page records only the listing and known features and does not force a regional division.

Jiazi divides not by rhythmic pattern but by column, and the headcount is fine-grained: 16 carrying the righteous banner, 54 dancing Yingge (13 of them on drums and gongs), while the small opera and the horizontal banners together are capped at 107 (Shanwei Daily, 2017-10-15). The dancing column itself has two layers: the first 24 paint the flower face and hold paired wooden sticks, the last 12 wear martial-role masks and carry small bell-drums, 36 in two rows. The team is opened by Shi Qian — golden flowers in his hair, a red silk warrior’s crown, a silver snake dancing in his hand; he turns a sideways somersault, sits cross-legged, rises into a war-horse fist posture, and then Li Kui leads the thirty-six in after him. Dress is uniform: red trousers, five-colour leg wraps, straw sandals with small bells that ring with each step; the step is the centipede walk, the formation includes the threading dragon, and the movements are the slicing, lowering and mixing mace.

The team’s year turns around the temple. The Yuandi Ancestral Temple stands inside Jiazi town, and the first drum, the setting out and the return all start and end there: the first drum is beaten before the temple, the date set by the management committee and written on the notice in both solar and lunar form (for instance 1 July 2026, the seventeenth of the fifth lunar month), at half past seven in the evening; the stretch before the team sets out for the performance ground is called “da xiong” in the notices, and the return to the temple after the performance is called “fan miao”. These three follow the ritual calendar, not the solar one (site record).

Four field records: ground and headcount

This page also checked the field formations against four on-site records: two for the Chaoyang branch — Yubei in Tongyu circles a large round in the village clearing, Xiashan Yiying forms a long column at the street mouth; two for the Puning branch — Qiaozhu Xinliao performs in a ring under a red awning before the temple, Qiaozhu Puzha performs at night on the temple forecourt with two columns pushing forward. The ground shape changes with the occasion; temple front, open square and street each have their own way of moving, and no formation split corresponding to the “Puning / Chaoyang” division can be seen. The headcounts do differ plainly: several tens circling at Yubei, around twenty at Xinliao and Puzha, a full 107 at Jin’ou township. The distinction between the two branches is still recorded here only in the listing and in existing statements; these clips are not used to prove it. Above the three branches lies another dispute over origins: the sound-shift from yangge, the rise from martial practice and the reading as a surviving exorcist dance all stand side by side, see Volume 7, Origins and Controversies.

The three cards only spread out the points made above; the wording and the sources stay in the text. Click a card to open that branch’s page.

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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
Jiazi Yingge dance, Lufeng, Shanwei: a dance of heroesShanwei Daily2017-10-15	report
“Once in a lifetime, you must see Yingge dance in Chaoshan!”China News Service2024-02-28	report

Access dates: of the nine items above, the first eight were opened one by one on 23 October 2026 and the Shanwei Daily item on 24 October 2026, and all links resolved on those days. Two further sources for team counts outside the table have no stable direct link: the November 2024 Southcn.com figure for Chaoyang and the January 2024 Puning government website figure; both are named in the text. The figures they give can be checked against two government documents in the table above (the Chaoyang district government reply of May 2025 and the Provincial Foreign Affairs Office visit-site briefing of July 2026), so the text sets the two statements side by side and does not argue from the unlinked ones alone. Two further pieces were read but not cited in the text and are not listed: the National Ethnic Affairs Commission, “Dance drama Yingge: where the mace sounds, the family and the nation share a pulse” (2026-08), and the Guangdong Provincial Department of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, “Light and shadow paint the hometown of overseas Chinese, the cultural line guards the Chaoshan voice”.

Claims on this page against sources

The three things most easily confused on this page are three groups: the three branches, the two team counts, the three rhythmic patterns. They are not the same thing. Each of the three notes below points to its basis, and the bracket after each heading is Evidence status: recorded directly on the official project page / published by a government website / site record — the three are never mixed. Points already spread out in the table are not repeated.

Last revised: 24 October 2026