Shrimp Lantern Dance

Item name and level

The Shrimp Lantern Dance appears in Appendix 2, the district-level ICH list, of the third batch of district-level ICH material, which states that the list contains 22 items in total; the name given there is "New Village Shrimp Lantern Dance". The body of the third-batch notice issued by the General Office of the Lishui District People's Government also cites the New Village Shrimp Lantern Dance as one of its examples, alongside malt sugar making and bamboo weaving.

According to a reply of 28 November 2023 from the Lishui District Culture and Tourism Bureau, eight projects were reported as entering the municipal-level representative ICH list in January 2023, among them Tiger-head Shoes, Hand-torn Chicken, Mingjue Pickled Greens, Helinfang Twin Dragons, Shrimp Lantern Dance and Shiqiu Fishing Songs. In the reply the project is written as the Shrimp Lantern Dance.

The fifth batch of the list of representative items of intangible cultural heritage of Nanjing, published on 20 January 2023 by the Nanjing Municipal People's Government under Ning Zheng Fa [2023] No. 11, carries the entry "Shrimp Lantern Dance", number NJ-III-33, serial number 14, in the category of traditional dance, with Lishui District as the applying area or unit. This entry records the level as municipal and the item type as traditional dance, with the fifth batch and the publication date of January 2023, and the project number is verifiable; the formal project name given at municipal level is "Shrimp Lantern Dance", without the words "New Village".

Points in doubt

The same project is written differently in two places: Appendix 2 of the third-batch district list and the body of the third-batch notice both give "New Village Shrimp Lantern Dance", while the published fifth municipal batch gives "Shrimp Lantern Dance". Both wordings are reproduced here without being merged or rewritten; the formal project name follows the published municipal and district documents, and whether "New Village" is a district-level alias of the project has no source in this library and is not inferred.

The municipal list gives only the project name, number, category and applying area or unit; it gives no introduction, no bearers and no guardian unit, so the guardian unit is still to be verified.

To be added

The materials and working steps of the lantern, the dimensions and structure of the shrimp-shaped lantern, the form of performance and the make-up of the team, the town or subdistrict to which the "new village" in the name belongs, the bearers and the guardian unit are all absent from the cited sources.