Performer keeps ancient Shaanxi art alive

For blind performers, Shaanbei Shuoshu was a lifeline for centuries — a musical storytelling tradition from Northwest China's Shaanxi province that brought food and shelter in exchange for tales sung at weddings and funerals.

For Qiao Yangwen, a sighted 48-year-old who has performed the art for 32 years, it is now a duty.

He has watched the art — believed to date back 2,000 years — fade to near extinction, rise again as a State-honored heritage, and now face a new threat: too few young successors.

Yet when he lifts his sanxian — a three-stringed lute — and straps on the wooden clappers, he personifies its improbable arc from the Loess Plateau's dusty margins to a national treasure.

Qiao was born into a poor farming family in rural Yan'an, in northern Shaanxi, during the early years of China's reform and opening-up in the late 1970s.

His parents worked a small plot of marginal land and raised a couple of goats. The family struggled to make ends meet, and Qiao had to drop out of school when they could no longer afford the tuition.

He cannot recall the first time he saw Shaanbei Shuoshu.

"I was too young," he said.

But he remembers vividly that blind troupes visited his village twice a year. With little else to entertain him, Qiao would sit through every performance from start to finish, curious why the performers were mostly blind.

Before taking up Shuoshu, Qiao spent a year with an opera troupe in neighboring Shanxi province.

His parents had modest ambitions: they hoped he would learn a trade — anything but Shuoshu — to earn a living and, one day, start a family.

But Qiao was too captivated by the tradition to heed their wishes.

"I'm stubborn — once I set my mind on something, I stick with it. That obsession never left me," he said.

What drew him was an art built on a rich repertoire of historical epics, folk legends, and moral fables — tales that, in an era before television and widespread literacy, served as the primary source of news, history, and entertainment for isolated communities across the Loess Plateau.

A single performer, armed with only his voice, a sanxian, and wooden clappers strapped to his leg, could hold a crowd spellbound for hours.

So essential was the tradition that no wedding, funeral, or major festival was complete without hiring a storyteller.

When Qiao began learning the art at 15, sighted performers had only recently been permitted to join a tradition that, for centuries, had been the exclusive domain of impoverished blind artists.

He turned to his older cousin, a sighted farmer who had briefly studied Shuoshu himself before giving it up to marry.

The apprenticeship began humbly. In the autumn of 1995, Qiao arrived at his cousin's home with nothing but a pig's trotter as a gift and studied under him for two years.

"I couldn't even afford a bottle of liquor," he recalled.

Once his apprenticeship ended, performance invitations flowed, sending him from village to village with a packed schedule. But before long, the spread of television eroded his audience.

"I was still young then, and I didn't think much about what the future might hold," he said.

The decline was even starker for older artists. He Si, a fellow performer in his 60s, still remembers the sting.

"People asking me to perform decreased a lot," he said. "Everyone around me who quit Shuoshu and went into business seemed to be getting rich."

Today, Qiao is an official "inheritor" — a government-appointed guardian of intangible cultural heritage — and no longer frets about his livelihood. The title is part of a broader State push to preserve China's fading traditions.

Shaanbei Shuoshu was among the first traditions added to a national protection list in 2006.

Local authorities have built dedicated venues, including the Shaanbei Shuoshu Center in the ancient city of Yulin, which hosts regular performances and interactive cultural experiences.

The government also organizes annual events such as the Shaanbei Shuoshu Convention to promote the art and encourage exchanges among performers.

"The government has done a lot to support us," Qiao said. "But official recognition alone isn't enough."

His deeper concern is the future of art.

"What troubles me most is that I don't see enough young performers emerging," he said. "They need to be able to make a living."

The dilemma is embodied in his apprentice, Fu Mei. At a rehearsal room in a performing arts center in Yan'an, she practices the sanxian daily. She began for the money but has since grown to love the art.

"I've thought about giving up," she said. "I don't know whether I'll be able to make a living from it in the future, but some things are worth more than money."

On a recent workday at the center, young artists chatted between rehearsals at one end of the hallway. At the other end, Qiao packed away his old cassette tapes — relics of his own training, now used to teach the next generation.

"The tape recorder was my teacher when I started," he said.

"Now I am the teacher, and these tapes are the bridge. I want to see a new generation of performers I trained myself, active across the land of northern Shaanxi. Let this treasure of our region be passed on healthily, sustainably, and for the long term," he added.

Naziyeerke Bahetinuer, Wu Jiawei, Tao Jiayi, Ju Yiping and Wang Sihan contributed to this story.