IAC Culture Talks Series 2
Date: Wednesday 17 April, 2024
Time: 4:00PM – 5:00PM AEST
Location: Online
The country that we call “China” is built on the foundation of a vast empire close to the size of Europe that spans radically different climatic and environmental zones. Populations in these different zones developed distinctive languages, customs, cuisines, and ethnic identities. Over the millennia, these different ethnic zones largely retained their own unique identities. Archaeological discoveries in the late twentieth century have demonstrated that the development of China was not unidirectional as once thought but multiregional. There were significant civilisations to the south and west of the Chinese heartland that developed earlier than the first known dynastic states based near the Yellow River.
The focus of this talk will be on the culture of China’s southern civilisation. One of the most significant divisions in Chinese space is the massive Yangzi River, which rises in the uplands of Sichuan and flows towards the eastern coast. To the north one finds the sites of the earliest known dynasties, the so-called “cradle” of Chinese civilisation, based around dryland agriculture. South of the Yangzi River lies a well-watered region of uplands, rivers, and rice cultivation. According to the classical tradition, sedentary agriculture was brought to the “barbaric” southlands by historic figures from the civilised north. However, recent archaeological work has established that the region south of the Yangzi has zones of sedentary culture and permanent settlement at least as ancient as those found in the north. In the late twentieth century, ethnologists investigating ritual practices came across a belief in a feminised rice spirit, as commonly found elsewhere in monsoonal Asia. This is a new discovery as this belief system was previously held to be unknown in China. It also pointed to strong commonalities between the southlands of China and rice-growing communities of Southeast Asia.
In my own research I have investigated the implications of recent discoveries for our understanding of the long narrative songs (or folk epics) sung by rice cultivators in the paddy fields of the Lower Yangzi Lake Tai region. These songs and folk epics transmit cultural memories of an indigenous southern source for rice growing, a faith system based around a feminised rice spirit who embodied the transplanted bride, and a belief in the power of song to ensure fertility in the rice fields. The “ritual technology” of rice cultivation underpinned the agricultural strength of the Lower Yangzi delta, which for over a thousand years has been the most prosperous in China. The songs and folk epics remain today as part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of this region and a reminder of the multiethnic nature of the former Chinese empire.
