Cultural revitalisation after catastrophe: the Qiang culture in A’er

Abstract

The culture of the Qiang ethnic minority in Western China has been threatened by assimilation with the majority culture, and many Qiang no longer take part in traditional ceremonies or use their cultural skills and knowledge. The devastating 2008 earthquake in Sichuan killed a 10th of the Qiang population and destroyed monuments, houses and villages. The Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Centre (CHP), a citizen volunteer non-governmental organisation, launched a project to help a Qiang village named A’er preserve its intangible and tangible cultural heritage. This paper describes the damage that was done and the needs of the Qiang people in the remote village of A’er, which is generally considered one of the last major repositories of traditional Qiang culture. The A’er people, despite their desperate situation, were determined to save their cultural heritage. The CHP team, working with them, provided necessary instruments and methods for recording. The Qiang people of A’er village themselves decided what they would record and produced an introduction to the A’er Qiang culture named ‘The A’er Archive’ and an elementary conversation booklet over which A’er villagers explicitly maintained copyright.

Keywords:

• A’er Archive
• A’er village
• CHP
• Cultural Revitalisation
• Qiang culture
• Shibi

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

The authors also would like to thank CHP for supporting ethnic minority cultural revitalization projects. Many thanks to the US Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation for supporting the A’er Village Qiang Minority Cultural Revitalization Project, the Switzerland Embassy in China and the Prince Claus Foundation for continued help. Special thanks to Miss Carla Nayton, currently working in Melbourne as a Migration Support caseworker with the Australian Red Cross, for her contribution in fundraising for the A’er Village Qiang Minority Cultural Revitalization Project when she worked as an intern of the CHP in 2008.

Notes

1. According to the statistics given by the State Ethnic Affairs Commission of PRC, the population of Qiang is 306,100, ‘China Facts and Figures 2000’, http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/china/203686.htm.

2. A’er village has a female Shibi, considered to be the only female Shibi in the Qiang area.

3. For the purpose of rural management, a village cluster is formed as an administrative entity under current Chinese social structure.

4. There are five mountains surrounded the four hamlets of A’er village alongside the steep valley. A torrential steam named Longxi (Dragon stream in Chinese) flows through the five mountains. The Qiang people in A’er believe that the Mountain God lived there so they worship the five mountains during the New Year celebration.

5. From the 1950s on, the Chinese government studied the Qiang language in all the Qiang areas and tried to develop a unified written language for all Qiang people. However, since Qiang oral language has many branches and has differed from village to village over a thousand years, there was no outcome until the 1990s. In 1991, a team of experts created a written language based in Qugu area dialect in Maoxian (a county north of Wenchuan County), and approved by the Sichuan provincial government. However, it was difficult for Qiang people to accept a newly created written language based on a specific dialect unlike their own. To date, only very few well-educated Qiang people have been able to learn it. Generally speaking, the effort has not been successful.

6. While the Western New Year’s Day (following the European Gregorian Calendar) is 1 January, by the Chinese L`unar Calendar, with years of 12 or 13 months, New Year’s Day in 2009 fell on 26 January. For the Qiang New Year’s Day is the first day of the tenth lunar month; for the Han Chinese, and generally for China, New Year’s Day is the first day of the first month in the Lunar Calendar.

7. Statutes, Principles, Recommendations and Guidelines of ISCARSAH 2003, available at: https://www.google.com.au/#q=iscarsah+principles; See also the Nara Document, (Articles 8, 12 and 13), which is now included in the Operational Guidelines to the UNESCO Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. There are a considerable number of buildings on the World Heritage List conforming to these standards.