On open ground below stone village walls, two warriors in painted masks with black veils and back flags face off, one thrusting a long spear and the other raising a curved blade. A man at right plays gong and drum as villagers watch.
Mask on the brow, spear in hand
Introduction
Masked martial plays of the Tunpu villages of Anshun, sung by farmers with the mask worn on the brow
Dixi is the masked theatre of the Tunpu people of Anshun in Guizhou, played on open ground in the villages and also called tiaoshen, 'leaping the gods'. The players bind their heads in dark cloth, wear a carved wooden mask on the brow, tie on battle skirts and carry spears and broadswords; they sing lines of seven or ten syllables, one leading and the rest answering, to a single gong and drum, in a vocal style that keeps echoes of the old Yiyang tunes. Each village has its own troupe, which plays mainly at the Spring Festival and in the seventh month. The repertoire of about thirty long 'big books' holds only war stories: the Xue, Yang, Yue and Di family generals, the Three Kingdoms and the heroes of Wagang. It grew up with the garrison soldiers left in Anshun after the early Ming campaign into the southwest and with their descendants; the Anping county gazetteer of the Daoguang reign already lists 'the music of dixi' among the Lantern Festival shows. The Guansuo plays of Chengjiang in Yunnan (IV-151), masked plays on Shu Han stories, belong to the same family.
Timeline
- 1381OriginIn 1381, the 14th year of Hongwu, Ming armies marched on Yunnan and were afterwards left to farm as garrisons, with guard posts and fortified villages set up around Anshun; the national ICH listing ties the birth of dixi to these early-Ming garrison soldiers, whose army nuo rites became the ground opera.
- 1830EvolutionThe customs section of the Anping county gazetteer of the Daoguang reign records Lantern Festival shows 'with dragon lanterns, lion lanterns, flower lanterns and the music of dixi', the first appearance of the name in the sources; the Republican-era sequel to the Anshun prefectural gazetteer explains the leaping of the gods as a way 'to rehearse martial skills so that they are not forgotten, keeping soldiers within the farming folk'.
- 2006ImpactIn 2006 Anshun dixi entered the first national ICH list (IV-90), and in 2011 the Guansuo plays of Chengjiang entered the third (IV-151); the Anshun area still has about three hundred village troupes, more than a hundred and ninety of them in Xixiu district.
Heritage Listings
- 2006National List of Intangible Cultural Heritage1st batch · IV-90 Anshun dixi [no. 234 · Anshun · Guizhou]
- 2011National List of Intangible Cultural Heritage3rd batch · IV-151 Guansuo plays [no. 1113 · Chengjiang · Yunnan]