Gengcun Folk Tales

Gengcun lies in Gaocheng District of Shijiazhuang, an ordinary yet extraordinary northern village. Generations of villagers have handed down a great body of folk tales told by many narrators across a vast family of stories whose contents reach across more than twenty provinces and cities and over one hundred and seventy counties, earning it the name "China's No. 1 Story Village" and the praise of "a major discovery in the history of Han folk literature." It entered the first national ICH list in 2006 under folk literature.

Gengcun's tales are passed by word of mouth among villagers young and old; their tellers, called "storytellers," can recount dozens or even hundreds of stories. The tales span myth, legend, everyday stories and jokes, and strung together form an oral local and folk literary history; field surveys have systematically recorded and published the stories of the whole village.

Gengcun folk tales are an important sample for the study of oral tradition, social memory and folk narrative in northern Chinese villages, hailed as a major discovery in Han folk literature and irreplaceable for understanding how folk culture is transmitted.