A Survey of Lishui's Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists

National, provincial and municipal

There is one national-level item: the Luoshan Great Dragon, project serial number 107, project code III-4, entered on the second batch of the national list of intangible cultural heritage in 2008, category traditional dance, type extended item; the declaring region is Lishui District, Jiangsu, and the guardian unit is the Nanjing Lishui District Cultural Centre.

Among provincial-level items are the Putang Bridge Cishan Temple Fair and the Zhang Family Throat Clinic. The district government's "Folk Customs" page lists the Putang Bridge Cishan Temple Fair as provincial intangible cultural heritage. According to the Culture and Tourism Bureau's reply of November 2023, five items, including Honglan Yudai Cake Making, the Zhang Family Throat Clinic and Lishui Paper-cutting, entered the list of proposed provincial representative items.

The fifth batch of provincial representative items of intangible cultural heritage, 145 items, and the accompanying extension list, 99 items, were published on 3 November 2023 by the Jiangsu Provincial People's Government under Su Zheng Fa [2023] No. 100. Five items carry Lishui District, Nanjing, as the applying area or unit, and they stand in two different lists:

• One stands in the main list: "Five Strikes" (JS-V-25, narrative arts, serial number 422).
• Four stand in the extension list: "Bamboo Horse (Xisong Horse-lantern Dance)" (JS-III-6, traditional dance, serial number 29), "Paper-cutting (Lishui Paper-cutting)" (JS-VI-5, traditional fine art, serial number 61), "Cake Making (Honglan Yudai Cake Making)" (JS-VII-50, traditional techniques, serial number 202) and "Traditional Chinese Medicine Throat Therapy (Zhang Family Throat Therapy)" (JS-VIII-8, traditional medicine, serial number 284). All four are extension items sharing the numbers of their main projects.

The five items the district bureau's reply calls submitted for provincial listing broadly correspond to these five, but the reply gives neither full names nor numbers and is not used here in place of the provincial document. Since four of the five are extension items, "five items of Lishui entering the provincial list" does not mean five newly inscribed items.

Among municipal-level items are Mingjue Iron Painting Forging and Tiger-head Shoes. The Nanjing tourism portal's table for the first batch of municipal intangible cultural heritage lists "NJⅦ-19 Mingjue Iron Painting Forging, Lishui District"; the page carries no issuing body and no date and has limited authority. According to the Culture and Tourism Bureau's reply of November 2023, eight items, including Tiger-head Shoes, Hand-torn Chicken, Mingjue Pickled Greens, Helinfang Twin Dragons, Shrimp Lantern Dance and Shiqiu Fishing Songs, were successfully declared as municipal representative items in January 2023.

The fifth batch of the list of representative items of intangible cultural heritage of Nanjing, 56 items, together with an extension list of 8 items, was published on 20 January 2023 by the Nanjing Municipal People's Government under Ning Zheng Fa [2023] No. 11. Eight of them carry Lishui District as the applying area or unit, and all eight are newly inscribed: "Shijiu Fishing Songs" (NJ-II-13, traditional music), "Helinfang Twin Dragons" (NJ-III-29, traditional dance), "Lujia Great Dragon" (NJ-III-32, traditional dance), "Shrimp Lantern Dance" (NJ-III-33, traditional dance), "Tiger-head Shoes" (NJ-VI-35, traditional fine art), "Honglan Hand-torn Chicken Making" (NJ-VII-61, traditional techniques), "Mingjue Pickled Greens Making" (NJ-VII-62, traditional techniques) and "Honglan Beef Making" (NJ-VII-63, traditional techniques). The figure of eight agrees with the eight projects in the district bureau's reply, so the two statements corroborate one another; the extension list of eight items contains no item of Lishui District.

Two differences in wording should be noted: the municipal document gives "Shijiu Fishing Songs" where the district bureau's reply gives "Shiqiu Fishing Songs", and it gives "Honglan Hand-torn Chicken Making" where the district list gives "Rui Family Hand-torn Chicken Making". Each is reproduced as it stands, and the two are not merged.

District-level lists and the figures

Two batches of district-level material have been seen: the third batch, and the fourth batch, the latter a public notice.

The third batch rests on two documents whose figures differ, and each is given with its own document. The notice issued by the General Office of the Lishui District People's Government states in its body that six district-level representative items were assessed, including Malt Sugar Making, Bamboo Weaving and the new-village Shrimp Lantern Dance. The list carried on the district government's web page is headed "district-level intangible cultural heritage list, 22 items in all", with a further attachment giving 19 representative bearers. The two figures are set side by side here and are not combined.

The fourth batch is a public notice: according to the notice published in January 2024, the fourth batch of recommended district-level representative items numbers 17, of which 14 are new items and 3 are extended items, with a comment period from 24 January to 6 February 2024. The final list has not been located, and these items must not be described as already published.

There are two sets of totals, for two different dates, set out side by side:

• Reply of November 2023: as of November 2023 the district had 1 national-level item, 17 provincial and municipal items and 28 district-level items, with 1 national bearer, 4 municipal bearers and 39 district-level bearers.
• A separate reply, to Proposal No. 110 of the First Session of the Eleventh District Committee of the CPPCC in November 2022: 36 district-level protected items and 38 district-level bearers; the same reply records 10 items declared at national, provincial and municipal level.

The two sets belong to different dates; they are presented side by side and are neither combined nor converted into one another.

List-building and safeguarding work

According to the reply of November 2023, the Luoshan Great Dragon was selected on 23 February 2023 for the first batch of national typical cases of distinctive culture and art under the "one county, one brand" programme; the same reply records the organisation of the Luoshan Great Dragon cultural festival and of the "New Year at the source of the Qinhuai" series of events.

Uncertainties

First, the district-level totals and bearer counts appear as two different pairs, 28 and 36, and 39 and 38, belonging to November 2023 and November 2022 respectively; this entry sets them side by side without choosing between them.

Second, the figure of six items in the body of the third-batch notice and the figure of 22 items in its attached list come from different documents, and each is given with its own source.

Third, the Nanjing tourism portal's table has no issuing body and no date; it is a weak source, and project codes and batches should follow the municipal published documents.

Fourth, the fourth batch is a public notice, and the final list has not been located.

Fifth, the fifth-batch provincial and municipal lists give only the project name, number, category and applying area or unit; they give no introduction, no bearers and no guardian unit, so the guardian unit of many entries in this library is still to be verified. Whether bearers recorded at district level are at the same time representative bearers of the provincial or municipal item is not stated in either document, and no assumption is made here.

Sixth, a provincial extension item shares the number of its main project, as with JS-III-6 "Bamboo Horse", JS-VI-5 "Paper-cutting" and JS-VIII-8 "Traditional Chinese Medicine Throat Therapy"; in asking which batch a project belongs to, its status as an extension item has to be kept in view. The second Nanjing batch, by contrast, carries the serial numbers and codes of the original batch for its extension items, which is a different rule from the provincial one, and the two rules must not be applied interchangeably.

Seventh, the eight items of the fifth municipal batch and the figure of 17 provincial and municipal items given for various dates are counts of different scope, and must not be converted into one another or subtracted from one another.