Home › Intangible heritage › Yingge dance › Who dances

Yingge · Who dances

This is Volume 4 of ten in the Yingge feature: roles, women’s teams and children’s teams; the twenty-five teams of the full table are in Volume 6.

Header texture: photo by Auongkinghe, CC BY-SA 4.0

Puning Yingge’s national-level representative inheritor is Chen Laifa (born November 1957, no. 02-0355). There are many more at county level, mostly leading and teaching in village teams.

Roles: the characters the record can name

A Yingge team lines up as the heroes of Mount Liang with the lead stick at its head. In these records, these are the characters that can be named:

Guan Sheng— the lead stick of the Helong kindergarten team, played by Wu Tongbin (2026-03-05).
Song Jiang— the lead stick of the Lugang township team, called “Black Charcoal” in the team (2026-03-09).
Shi Qian— carries the cloth snake at the head of the line, called “flying snake” in the record, and comes on paired with Gongsun Sheng (2026-03-17).
Gongsun Sheng— carries the command flag, one before and one behind Shi Qian (2026-03-17).
Wu Song— in the Jin’ou township team; the video notes that he “broke his stick” (2026-04-02); the Caowei team has one too (2026-04-21).
twin princes— a Caowei team character, singled out in title after title (2026-01-04).
Hua Mulan— a costume borrowed by the women’s teams; the Qiaozhu Jiudi team uses it (2025-11-07).

Two ranks kneeling on red carpet, a stick in each hand, heads to the ground. Photo: Zheng Zi 0661

Banners are a set of their own. Dancers of Luxi Shangcuo carry the ward-off-evil flag and wear the five-element flags on their backs as vanguard (2026-03-16). The Jin’ou township team’s director Chen Zhihong is called “red beard” in the team (2026-03-23).

In Yingge costume: a green face with red lines, gold crown — In costume: a green face with red lines. Photo: Xiao Kaihong

The designs are not one per team, nor are they without rules. The Chaoyang district standard states the rules: the face is painted in colour cosmetics, with red, black and white as the base, blue, green and yellow as secondary, and crimson or light brown as the harmonising colour. Two methods: in gou the brush is loaded and drawn straight on; in rou colour is rubbed on with the hand and the key lines are then brushed in. The order should be brows first, then the eye sockets, the sides of the nose, the corners of the mouth and the cheeks, and the face lines last. Two classes: theatrical faces borrow stage make-up and mostly show Water Margin characters; ghost faces are mainly black and white, and should avoid the ghastly.

One clause of the standard matters more than any colour code: in most Yingge teams only the first few have fixed roles, and the rest are not securely identified. So the sentence “who plays which character in this team” does not hold for most teams. The steadiest pairing of role and colour is the first two: the lead stick is red-faced with a red beard, usually Qin Ming or Guan Sheng; the second stick is black-faced with a black beard, usually Li Kui. Annex A of the standard collects the shapes and faces of the 108 generals; the photographs come from the Mianbei Houxi team, each general is named, and not a word is said about brushwork.

The method has changed twice in recent decades. Chen Laifa says the old pigment was candle wax melted with colour and the work was crude; the pigment changed, the faces stayed folk-painted, and you told the men apart by a waist tablet with the name written on it — Lu Zhishen, Li Kui. When he became coach he set his own rule: Lin Chong gets a leopard’s mouth and a leopard’s whiskers; Ruan Xiaoqi, a strong swimmer, has his whole face pushed towards a frog. In his team the brush is handled by the make-up artist Song Cai.

What is still missing is the brushwork. The same character carries different ground colours and patterns in every team; how many strokes run along the edge, how many daubs on the cheek, the standard does not say and a long-shot video does not show. Only a clear photograph of the design, with someone from the team explaining it, would let it be written down.

The face painter's first stroke at the forehead, the design half done — The painter’s first stroke at the forehead, the design half done. Photo: Bailin

There can be writing on the design too. In this one from the Jin’ou township team the character for “army” is written at the centre of the forehead; red and black ground, a yellow crown, a black beard — a finished face.

A design with the character for “army” at the centre of the forehead. Photo: Bailin

The people: women’s teams and children’s teams

Dancers in full costume marching down the street, the team banner in front

The women’s teams that appear in the records are: Guiyu Huamei, Houxi, Taguan Ximen, Xinan, Qiaozhu Jiudi, Fumei women, Nanshan (women’s group), Chaoyang vocational, Guiyu Beilin, Xianpeng and Yuxin. These eleven are given as the records list them; seven are already in the Volume 6 table (Guiyu Huamei, Qiaozhu Jiudi, Xinan, Chaoyang vocational, Fumei women, Nanshan, Yuxin), while Houxi, Taguan Ximen, Guiyu Beilin and Xianpeng appear only in the records and are not separately listed. Fumei and Yuxin are both recent: Fumei formed at the end of 2025 and now has sixty-odd, Yuxin was founded in June 2026. Among the recent arrivals, Qiaozhu Jiudi reappeared in August 2025 “after many years”, and the Fumei youth came out on the second day of the first lunar month 2026 as “the first women’s Yingge group” (2026-02-18).

At Jinpu the performance is before the ancestral hall: the women’s team unpainted, red vests, a stick in each hand.

The Jinpu women's team raising sticks before the ancestral hall — The Jinpu women’s team raising their sticks before the ancestral hall. Photo: Zheng Zi 0661

The children’s teams are another line. At the Zhuoyue kindergarten in Helong, Tongyu, the “straw-hat children’s yingge” has Guan Sheng as lead stick and kindergarten-age dancers (2026-03-05); the Puning Liantan junior team has Jiang Haorui as Shi Qian (2025-04-19); a small boy from Guiyu Xincuo appeared at the Chaoyang Yingge carnival (2026-02-21). The one recorded again and again is Zhuang Enqi: in the records from March 2025, “6 years old” in August 2025, and in February 2026 “in training for the Spring Festival show in Hong Kong, China”.

On age and role the plainest statement comes from the Puning Nanshan team: “Chen Jinshan, 15” is in the line (2025-09-30).

The Huizhai team forming up, a young member at the front, the vertical banner reading “Huizhai Yingge” behind — The Huizhai team forming up. Photo: Chaoshan A Fa Documentary

“Women’s team” and “children’s team” are phrases from the records, not divisions in any establishment. Some women’s teams belong to the same village as a men’s team: a Taguan Ximen title says “mixed men and women” (2025-08-10).

← Previous volume: schools Back to the feature Next volume: when it is danced →

Sources	Type
Intangible cultural heritage: Chaoyang Yingge (DB 4405/T 315—2025)Shantou local standard, Shantou Administration for Market RegulationIssued 2025-02-24, effective 02-25	Local standard
Behind Yingge dance’s breakoutFarmers’ Daily (reprinted by China Economic Net)2023-06-06	report
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

Access date: all eight 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”.

Last revised: 24 October 2026