Xingshan Folk Songs

Xingshan folk songs circulate in the deep valleys of Xingshan county in Yichang, sung across generations by farming people at work, rafting, weddings and funerals. Their chief scholarly value lies in preserving the rare "third-and-a-half" interval—between a major and minor third—held by musicologists to echo the tuning of the Marquis Yi of Zeng bronze bells and to be a living fossil of archaic Chu music. The songs entered the first national ICH list in 2006 under traditional music (code Ⅱ-9).

Xingshan's songs are mostly high-pitched mountain airs and work shanties, sung with soaring tones and elaborate ornamentation, often alternating chest and falsetto voices; a representative piece is the Resting-voice Shanty. The national-level inheritor Chen Jiazhen, affectionately "Granny Chen," has sung them all her life and taken them to national stages, called a living treasury of the tradition.

With its unique semi-tone scale, Xingshan folk song offers a rare living specimen for the study of ancient Chinese tonal systems, the roots of Chu culture and the evolution of Han folk song, a treasure of traditional music in the Yangtze basin.