I.The Discovery and Identification of the Poya Folksongs

The Poya folksongs were discovered by accident during a cultural survey.This survey took place in February 2006 when a television series on the Zhuang cultures entitled“Li Zai Meng Liao”was being filmed in Funing County.The chief planner,writer,and producer of this series was Mr.Dai Guanglu,the Deputy Director of the People’s Congress of Yunnan Province.The Communist Party Committee of Funing County and Funing County People’s Government took this opportunity to arrange for a comprehensive survey of Zhuang cultural resources to be conducted by the Funing County cultural industry office and the county Zhuang Studies Institute.

On February 26,2006,a Sunday,a small group of researchers from the county cultural industry development office,including Mr.Liu Bingshan,Mr.Li Shenggen,and Mr.Li Ning,accompanied Mr.Xu Liujun,the former director of Publicity Department of Wenshan University(formerly Wenshan Teachers’ College)and the music composer of the television series“Li Zai Meng Liao”to record Zhuang folksongs in Poya Village.In the home of the villager Mr.Nong Jiaxing,the investigation group noticed a paper on which were painted a variety of strange pictographs.Nong Jiaxing explained to them that it was a scroll of songs,which included the symbols representing forty songs and copied from a similar scroll belonging to village singers Nong Fengmei and Nong Liying.They had scrolls containing the entire collection of eighty-one songs,whereas the forty songs that Nong Jiaxing had were those that only men sing.The group of researchers immediately set out to find the two mentioned singers and were able to view the scroll later entitled the“The Zhuang Folksongs of Poya Village,Funing,China”(“Bwh Va Fwen”in the local Zhuang dialect).This scroll is actually a piece of cloth about one foot(33cm)wide and two feet long(67cm),and was owned by the female singers Ms.Nong Fengmei,who was then 39 years old,and Ms.Nong Liying,then 37 years old,who is Nong Fengmei’s sister-in-law.Nong Fengmei explained that on this piece of cloth there were eighty-one symbols.Each symbol represents a particular folksong and the relationship between the symbol and the song it represents is fixed.The symbols on the cloth record eighty-one Zhuang love songs.Each symbol is a picture of some image described in the song it represents.Whenever a singer sees any of these symbols,he or she is then able to sing that song.According to the two singers,the symbols were passed down from their grandmother.Nong Fengmei told the researchers that when she was young,the elders helped her learn to sing folksongs by drawing the patterns on the ground while holding her hand,and used this method to help her memorize all the songs.As time went on,these symbols planted deep in her heart and thus the particular image showed up in her mind whenever she sang that particular song.This is how the folksongs in this collection were recorded by the Poya village people themselves and were passed down from generation to generation.

The group of researchers immediately reported what they had found to the county Communist Party Committee,to the county government and to the provincial Zhuang Association.Leaders from the provincial and the prefectural governments and the Zhuang associations attached great importance to this discovery and requested that all the relevant departments carry out further research and ensure strict protection of these songs,based on detailed study of them,while informing the relevant academic departments at each step in the process.

In early March,the publicity department of the county Communist Party Committee appointed a group of specialized personnel from the county cultural industry development office,the county’s artists’ union,and the county cultural bureau to visit Poya Village for a second research trip.“Poya”is a name with poetic charm,meaning a place full of blooming flowers.(“Po”means“slope”and“Ya”is a kind of yellow flower which is used as a dye to make the Zhuang multicolored rice.)The village is nine kilometers away from the market town of Bo’ai where the township government is based.There are fifty-five households in the village and all are ethnically Zhuang.The surname of the majority is Nong(forty-eight households).According to the village elders,the villagers migrated from Bo’ai and Zheshang townships to form this village in early Qing Dynasty(1644-1912 CE).Since then,the people have made their living in traditional ways by rice-paddy farming and hunting.There was little impact from other cultures in this village due to its location in a mountainous area previously inaccessible to the outside.So far,the Zhuang traditional customs and etiquette are quite intact in this village.The tradition of singing the folksongs has,therefore,been preserved in the village from generation to generation.At the time of the research,there were more than twenty people who could read the song symbols in the village.Among the experts are Ms.Nong Fengmei and Ms.Nong Liying,who are the leader singers for most of the important traditional events,such as at weddings or funerals.They often assume the role of the master of ceremony.In Zhuang wedding ceremonies,the master of ceremony must be someone who has a reputation of being proper and acting with decorum,who is eloquent and a good singer,who is familiar with traditional etiquette and customs,especially as concerns the ceremony of welcoming and sending off the bride.Because there continues to be such a strong social demand,the folksongs remain a part of the people’s daily lives and continue to be their way of expressing their thoughts and emotions.

In order to determine whether the use of graphic symbols like those of Poya to record the folksongs of Zhuang people at Funing County is merely an isolated incident or whether it is more widespread,research group identified the radius over which these songs had spread and chose research data points at a distance of every ten kilomoters from Poya Village.In April and June,2006,having decided on an outside radius of 70 km for the research,they conducted three different research trips,each trip visiting three villages within the three districts or townships of Bo’ai,Zhesang and Guichao in eastern Funing County.The villages of Liuyi,Zhening,Laojie were visited along with six others.The survey results show that in Liuyi Village and Zhening Village,which are more than ten kilometers from Poya,most of the elder singers,especially the women,used to record the folksongs with pictorial symbols similar to those of Poya,but their set of symbols remained incomplete.In mid-June,the research group visited Guichao Township,seventy kilometers from Bo’ai township,and there the people in Naguan Village confirmed that in the early years the older singers used to teach the women the traditional folksongs by drawing graphic symbols on the blackboard at the Women’s Home in the village.In Laojie Village,investigators showed the Poya folksong symbols to Wei Shihui and other three singers to see whether they could identify the songs represented by the graphic symbols.The results where that singers,especially women,were very aware of the symbols and were able to identify about 80% of the folksongs represented by the symbols,and the content of those songs that they recognized matched that of those same songs as sung in Poya.

The discovery of the Poya Folksongs was a significant event in the history of Zhuang ethnic culture research.As a precaution,the Communist Party Committee and Government of Funing County had invited experts from inside and outside the province to Funing for field research and evaluation.From July 28,2006 to July 31,Mr.Huang Jianming,Vice Chairman of the Chinese Ethnic Ancient Characters Association,and Deputy Director of the Center for Chinese Ethnic Minority Studies at the Central University of Nationalities,and Mr.Pu Weihua,Deputy Director of the Yunnan Ethnic Minorities Museum,joined two other experts to form a special Poya folksong focus group which visited Poya Village for further field research.The expert group,headed by Huang Jianming,initially determined that the eighty-one symbols had the basic properties of a written language.Firstly,the written form of the symbols was fixed.Secondly,the sounds the symbols represented were fixed.However,the represented sounds were not the sounds of a single word,symbol or phoneme,but of an entire song.Thirdly,the meaning represented by the symbol was fixed,though the body semantic content represented by a single symbol was extensive.The expert group also believed that this was a specimen of valuable cultural heritage,an example of the ethnic minority cultural resources of Yunnan province,which might prove characteristics with the famous ancient Dongba culture.The Poya symbols were determined to be living hieroglyphics of China,with great value for research,knowledge and development.The discovery of these symbols has answered the question of whether the Zhuang people had ancient characters of their own.Finally,the expert group named it the“The Zhuang Folksongs of Poya Village,Funing,China,”and as“Bwh Va Fwen”in the local Zhuang dialect,meaning“cloth of the song drawings”.

On August 19,2006,when the Chinese Zhuang Rice-based Culture and Regional Economic Symposium opened in Funing County of Yunnan Province,an exhibition about the ethnic rice-farming customs of the Zhuang culture was put on by the publicity department of Funing County in the lobby of Puting Hotel.A display of photos of the Funing Zhuang Poya folksong images aroused great interest on the part of the participating experts.Professor Liang Tingwang(former Vice President of Central China University of Nationalities,who is also a doctoral supervisor and authoritative expert of Zhuang culture studies),Professor Qi Qingfu(Director of the Chinese Minority Nationality Research Center at the Central China University of Nationalities,who is also a member of the expert group of the Chinese Center for the Protection of Intangible Cultural Heritage and a doctoral supervisor),Professor Huang Guoying(a doctoral supervis or at Tsinghua University)and Dr.Yuan Li(a researcher at the art institute of the Ministry of Culture and the Chinese Secretary to the International Society for Asian Folklore)all have appraised the discovery of the Poya folksong collection of Poya a great importance.In January 2007,after conducting research in Poya Village and in the surrounding villages,Professor Huang Guiqiu,a master supervisor at Guangxi Normal University and expert on Zhuang ancient books determined that the discovery of the Poya folksong collection was of“world-class”importance.“These indigenous folk pictographs of the ancient Luoyue civilization are the passwords to enter into the natural love songs of the boys and girls of the Zhuang village.”In May,2007,after repeated discussions of the Poya folksong collection,experts from the Research Center of Ancient Chinese Texts came to an agreement and published a report“On the Identification of the Poya Folksongs”which confirmed that the symbols used in the Poya folksong collection should be defined as pictographic characters.They embody the knowledge of Zhuang laborers and are a precious resource within the treasure house of Chinese texts,worthy of protection and research.In June of the same year,Mr.Huang Yilu,a Zhuang scholar in Yunnan Province,described the Poya folksong collection in Yunnan Daily as“the first pictorial songbook in the world”.In July,Professor Liang Tingwang,former Vice President of Central China University of Nationalities and doctoral supervisor,wrote the preface for the publication of the Poya folksongs in the Chinese-Zhuang book Poya Ge Shu·Sw Fwen Boyaq,stating that the Poya folksong collection is the“encyclopedia of Funing and Wenshan Zhuang society”.In December,at the invitation of Liu Zhifeng,executive director and researcher of the China Rice-based Culture Committee,Zhao Liming,professor of Tsinghua University,and researcher of the China Nüshu Script Culture Committee^[1]visited the Poya Village with a group and pointed out that the“survey work into the Poya folksong symbols”was done very carefully and could be considered a national model.He also proposed that the symbols used to represent the Poya folksongs were more ancient than the Dongba characters,due to the form of characters as well as the literary charm of the songs that they represent.The symbols used to represent the Poya folksongs confirm the process of the development of the Chinese characters.It is a treasure of our national ethnic cultures.