Xiabaoping Folk Tales

The folk tales of Xiabaoping circulate in the township of that name in Yichang's Yiling District, a distillation of the folk literature of the Three Gorges region. Its storytelling resources are extraordinarily rich—more than a hundred people can tell over fifty tales each, more than twenty can tell over a hundred, and four can tell more than two hundred—ranking it alongside Geng Village in Hebei and Wujiagou in Hubei as one of China's famed "story villages." It entered the first national ICH list in 2006 under folk literature (code Ⅰ-16).

The tales are passed mouth to mouth and span myth, legend, everyday stories and jests, told in vivid, earthy language and often improvised in the fields or around the evening hearth. The representative inheritor Liu Defang (born 1938) can recount more than four hundred tales and over a million characters of sung material; his collection Wild Mountain Laughing Tales is a classic of this story group.

Xiabaoping's tales are a living archive of the folk literature of the Three Gorges, holding considerable scholarly and artistic value for the study of rural life, oral art and narrative tradition in the middle and upper Yangtze.