Xingguo Mountain Songs

Xingguo mountain songs are a folk genre sung through generations in Xingguo county, Jiangxi, said to begin from the work chants and hillside antiphony of the early Hakka, passed orally for centuries. During the Agrarian Revolutionary War, as a model county of the Central Soviet Area, Xingguo turned its songs into a powerful tool for recruiting and comforting the Red Army, leaving many red classics. In 2006 Xingguo mountain songs entered the first national ICH list (item Ⅱ-8) under traditional music.

Its forms are many—solo, antiphonal, chained and riddle-singing—most often improvised on the spot, with tunes that soar and trail freely, typically opened by the call "ai-ya-lei." The words touch on work, love and current affairs, rich in metaphor and comparison and steeped in dialect flavour.

Xingguo mountain songs are a treasure of Hakka folk music and a living fossil of Central Soviet Area revolutionary culture, holding a double value for the study of Hakka oral literature and red artistic tradition, praised as "red memory within mountain song."