Hexi Baojuan (Zhangye)

Hexi baojuan is a folk chanted literature descended from the bianwen and popular sutra-telling of Tang-dynasty Dunhuang and Song-dynasty scriptural preaching, found chiefly along the Hexi Corridor of Gansu, one of the few regions where such recitation still lives. Zhangye is a major home and declaring base of the tradition, and in 2019 a national-ICH Hexi Baojuan transmission studio was set up in Tunliang village, Minle county. Hexi baojuan entered the first national ICH list in 2006 under folk literature.

Reciting a baojuan, called xuanjuan, takes place in the farming lull or at festivals, around the kang of a farmhouse or at a temple fair: one lead teller narrates while the company answers with chanted refrains, in local dialect, alternating verse and prose; the stories draw on historical romances, folk legend and Buddhist-Daoist moral tales, running to many volumes, a central entertainment and moral teaching of rural Hexi life.

Hailed as a living fossil of Dunhuang's bianwen and sutra-telling, Hexi baojuan is a precious living sample for the study of Chinese folk narrative, the secularising of religion and the westward spread of culture along the Silk Road; Zhangye, as one of its heartlands, bears a key share of safeguarding and transmission.