Hucun Rolling Dragon

Name and place of transmission

The public notice of January 2024 lists the Hucun Rolling Dragon under traditional dance in the extended projects of the recommended list for the fourth batch of district-level representative items of intangible cultural heritage; the applying area or unit is Honglan Subdistrict and the recommended guardian unit is the Honglan Subdistrict Culture and Sports Station. The title carries the place name Hucun, a village within Honglan Subdistrict.

Dragon lanterns in the Lishui area are grouped by the press into types such as the taiti-lifted dragon, the ban-pan dragon, the gun-roll dragon, the cloth dragon and the hand dragon, the rolling dragon being one of them. This fivefold division is a generalisation made by the press, not an official classification. The "rolling dragon" in the present title shares its name with one of those types.

How the name arose

An encyclopedia entry on Hucun village states that the village already held "dragon-lantern gatherings" in the Ming dynasty, dancing the dragon lantern in the neighbouring villages at festivals; that, judging by the way the dragon swims and rolls, the lantern resembles a real dragon tumbling as it is danced, hence the name "rolling dragon", and that the practice has continued for several centuries. The same entry states that the activity was banned for twenty or thirty years during the Cultural Revolution and that the gatherings and dragon dances were restored in the past twenty years.

This account rests on that entry alone. It is a weak source, not verified against a gazetteer or official material, and both the "Ming dynasty" and "several centuries" are the entry's own generalisations, with no exact year. The third-batch district-level list held in this library carries, among its dance entries, the Xisong, Yunheshan, Jiutang, Dongquan, Helinfang, Ruijiatang and Yanjia dragon- and horse-lantern items and the Yangshushan dragon-boat item; the Hucun Rolling Dragon does not appear among them. The gathering described in that entry has no corresponding item in the first two district batches, and its starting date and its periods of interruption remain to be checked against the Lishui county gazetteer, the Honglan town gazetteer or the application materials.

Performances

A report in the Nanjing Daily of 15 February 2026 and a report by Xinhua Jiangsu of the same date both record that during the Spring Festival the Hucun Rolling Dragon travelled among the villages and industrial parks of Honglan Subdistrict. An annual schedule compiled by a local information service sets out performances from the second day of the first lunar month through neighbouring villages, with performances at Hucun itself from the fourteenth to the sixteenth day, each evening from 18:30 to 22:30. This library cites only the 2025 notice from Lishui Release, which gives 11 to 13 February, at Hucun, Huatang, the Honglan market town and Zhai village, as confirming that the item still performs around the Lantern Festival; the number of performances and the route differ from year to year, and no yearly practice is inferred here from a single year's schedule.

The form of the dragon prop, the materials used, the light source inside, the accompanying instruments and the size of the team have no source in this library.

Transmission and safeguarding

The public notice lists no representative bearer for this project, and the third-batch district-level list of bearers (2017) records none for it either.

Uncertainties

First, this is an extended project, which means it expands the reach or the content of an item already on the list. The public notice does not name the main project on which it depends, and no inference is drawn here.

Second, the origin of the name and the history of the village gathering rest on a single encyclopedia entry, a weak source; its references to the Ming dynasty and to several centuries have no corroboration and must be checked against a gazetteer or the application materials.

Third, the title here reads Hucun Rolling Dragon, while reports and official accounts of 2025 and 2026 mostly read Hucun Rolling Dragon Lantern. The two forms are reproduced as they stand and not merged.

Fourth, the recommended guardian unit is the Honglan Subdistrict Culture and Sports Station and the applying area or unit is Honglan Subdistrict. These are two different columns of the notice's table and must not be used interchangeably.