A showcase of the large drum dance of the Chino people, which is a national intangible cultural property.[Photo by Jiang Dong/China Daily]
Pumi singer Rong Bak Xinna said that when he visited Cao Changshou, a famous Pumi storyteller in his 90s in Yunnan province, in 2018 and 2021, time was spent preserving the traditions, culture and language of China’s 28 small ethnic groups. I knew it was on. The population is just under 300,000.
As the last generation familiar with the language and culture of the approximately 45,000-member Pumi people, Mr. Cao died after Mr. Longbaixinna’s last visit, but only 20 ancestral stories have been recorded in their native language. Ta.
“The deaths of the elders of these peoples are heartbreaking. They are like living museums that store cultural treasures in their hearts. We have to rescue them and document them before they get lost,” Lombaxinna said.
The 43-year-old was taught to sing by her grandfather, whose melodies always transported her to dreamland in her childhood imagination. His death raised the alarm on the need to rescue the disappearing traditional arts, and she established a national database to record the cultural heritage of these small peoples.
Lombaxinna, the initiator of the project to archive the oral traditions of sparsely populated ethnic groups, said that many of their unique, centuries-old traditions, songs, dances, crafts and festivals are already under threat. He describes this project as a race against time. , may disappear quickly in some cases.
Thanks to a pilot program launched in 2018 by the National Library of China, Yunnan Propaganda Department, and Yunnan Provincial Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection Center, eight ethnic groups in Yunnan province (Jingpu, Bran, Achang, Pumi, The culture of the Nu and De peoples has been revealed. ‘ang, Derung, and Jino are listed, four of which are already documented.