The masks of Qinghai
The above dance masks, of different types and cultural heritages, are handed down over the years. They are closely linked to the lives and existence of local residents. To date, they remain penetrating into people’s material and spiritual lives. In the farming regions in particular, people expect agricultural harvests, flourishing livestock, happy families, prosperous country, and peaceful lives. The implications of the masks are closely joined with people’s happy lives.
Folk dance masks are separated into the three types of deities, heroes and seculars. The deity type masks borrow images largely from folklores and temple gods. They bring with them rich imagination elements of the people. They express people’s aesthetic judgment of all sorts of deities, particularly sharp contrasts in depicting witches and demons. The judge image in the Five Ghosts Troubling Judge in Ledu County is an example of this type.
The hero type presents the most sublime and greatest images of heroes in people’s minds. Therefore, there are a lot of masks to display heroes. They are represented by the masks of Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei in the Nadun school, which are delicately and vividly engraved in fresh colors, impressing people with chivalry and loyalty.
The secular type is best known for the lifelike image. The masks barely show any celestial or ghost senses. They largely have delicate features in proportion, smile, and impress people as honest and tolerant. In the Nadun Plant Dance, all the family members of the farmer wear such type of masks.
Each June, Langjia Village, a home of art in Regong, Tongren County, will present a dragon dance show. The masks used in the dance show look like a piece of old fashioned blue tile, in the shape of Bodhisattva painted in grottoes. The two sharp ears tower above the top of the head, leaving a unique image. They are thus known as tile-shaped masks. Such masks are exclusively owned by the village. No other places in Qinghai Tibetan areas have ever presented them. Local villagers say “Wearing the masks, we are deities. Picking down the masks, we return to humans.” As Qinghai is opened to the outside world and launches cultural exchanges, tile-shaped masks have attracted growingly more people, particularly in the June event each year.
Mask dances are shown at the Nadun event in Sanchuan, Minhe County of Qinghai, an annual large-scale folk custom celebration of the Tu ethnic group. The masks are known for primitive simplicity. The dances largely reveal stories of the Three Kingdoms period, such as the Three Generals, Five Generals, and Zhuang Jia Qi that persuades people to go farming. They show respect to heroes and also cherish common lives. The masks of Liu Bei, Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, farmers, farm cattle, present features of the Central Plain area, as well as local native charms. These are seldom in Qinghai area. As recorded in some local family tree charts, some Han nationality people migrated successively from Gansu, Shaanxi, Shanxi and Nanjing to Sanchuan, cultivating and guarding the border areas, during the Ming and Qing periods. Step by step, they are mingled with the Tu nationality. Therefore, Nadun is heavily influenced by Han culture.
The second type is the facial makeup art of the Tu and Han nationalities. Facial makeup and mask are actually two sides of a same thing. Facial makeup is simply drawn upon a person’s face directly. Facial makeup originates from masks and continues to play an important part in folk sacrifice dances and dramas. Facial makeup inherits the primitive culture, while mask materializes the spirits. They remain presenting great vitality these days. Facial makeup is an indispensable part of the forms of masks. They are of inheritance relations. In a certain sense, they are one thing shown in two aspects. In this sense, we have to mention the facial makeup art when discussing the mask art.
The Nianduhu Tu Nationality Village of Tongren County, Qinghai remains to present the witch sacrificial activity featuring tiger totem facial makeup. On November 20, lunar calendar, each year, a traditional ceremony will be held to offer sacrifice to the mountain god. People would dance tiger dances to drive away demons and pestilence and seek auspiciousness, known as Wu Tu to local residents. A sorcerer would lead seven men painted with tiger and leopard patterns on the face and body to dance the mysterious and yet simple dances. They career through streets and lanes to exorcise demons for every household. Folk custom experts say this tiger totem-based exorcising dance discloses a chaos of people’s mind that while tigers bring about disasters to mankind, people expect to lustrate calamities by dint of the invincible power of tigers.
Huangxi Village of Datong, Qinghai performs Four Tiles, a sacrificial dance featuring frog totem worship, in a drama show season each year. This facial makeup dance imitating frogs is developed from a legend passed down for generations in the village. It serves actually as a living fossil of the area whose ancestors take frog totem as worship. It reminds us that in the primitive society of undeveloped productivity, beasts and pests endangered people’s agricultural production. It was quite natural for the ancestors to choose frogs as totem and take frogs as a guardian, praying for harvests.
The third type is the drama season folk dance mask of Han nationality integrating masks and facial makeup. During the Yuan and Ming dynasties, the Hehuang valley of Qinghai received a great deal of migrants and troops exploiting virgin lands in the border area from the Central Plain. The Han culture gradually flourished in this multi-ethnic group area. The Judge Troubled by Five Little Devils, a play in the January drama season in Ledu County of Qinghai, was of great local characteristics. It was a fragment of a full-length local drama of Qing Dynasty to celebrate harvests. In the dramatic form, the protagonists were expanded from one little devil in the Song Dynasty drama Dance Judge to five little devils in Qing Dynasty. It was a main component in the performances of the local Dark Drama Season, which meant programs performed at night. The judge wore a mask, while the five little devils wearing red, yellow, blue, white and black facial makeup, respectively. The monstrous molding, of high research values, is a good example showing how the hinterland drama art integrates with local cultures.
Today, all these elements will no longer inspire any witchcraft consciousness or religious passions to men of basic scientific knowledge. But they will arouse special aesthetic affections. The aforesaid tiger and leopard grains drawn on the face and body of the Wu Tu dancers, the frog lines painted on the face of the Four Tile dancers, and the eerie patterns of good fortune, high salary, longevity, happiness and wealth on the faces of the five little devils in the Dance Judge are both facial makeup and masks. They show beauty from decorations and symbols, and thus generate unique artistic beauty. We are safe to say that facial makeup are masks drawn in the face, and masks are facial makeup hanged in the face. It shows that ever since the earliest religious culture was established in the barbaric age of humanity, the facial makeup art had sprouted in totems. They were not fettered by religions, and have developed fairly perfect up to the present.
The Chinese academic circle started to study the facial makeup in the mid 1980s. At that time, the Nuo (exorcising dance) masks of Guizhou were exhibited in Beijing and Shanghai, and subsequently in the United States, France and Germany. They aroused wide interests and concerns in the academic circle. The academic studies of masks, initiated with the Nuo culture, became active. Some academic books associated with masks were published successively. For a long period, the Qinghai academic circle did nothing in the field of mask researches. The present survey and researches have disclosed the facial makeup culture in the folk customs and Tibetan Buddhism ceremonies in Qinghai. They have unveiled the humanistic spirits, history, culture, folk customs, and religious art in the Qinghai Plateau. They reflect the characters, temperament and mentalities of the plateau, and the mystery beauty of the West. In particular, these masks have presented sufficient aesthetics that are also projected in sculptures, paintings, patterns and decorations, admitting readers to enter a gorgeous and magical world of facial makeup.
Editor: Shi Liwei
