Sea of Songs

Singing is a favorite pastime for the Zhuang people of Guangxi. Folk songs must follow a strict rhyming scheme of waist and foot rhymes in four-line stanzas. The Zhuang language is tonal, and there are even strict rules for which tones are allowed to rhyme with which tones. Traditionally groups of young men and women from different villages showed their cleverness and their prowess through extemporaneous singing, and in this way courtships began. Nowadays people still gather in public areas, and when at least two men and two women are present, a song market is formed and the singing can start. The double entendres and word plays provide much amusement for all who gather round.

  

For more than a thousand years the Zhuang have used their own writing system, called Sawndip, to write their folk songs, operas, poems and scriptures. (Sawndip is literally “raw writing,” meaning it is a non-standardized folk writing system.) At song markets men often bring very small handwritten chapter books with their songs written in Sawndip.

This is part of one page of a manuscript as an example of this writing system.