Safeguarding Shaanxi's melodic heritage

For centuries, Shaanbei Shuoshu, a musical storytelling tradition popular in Northwest China's Shaanxi province, served as a vital source of livelihood for blind performers who narrated tales through song at weddings and funerals in exchange for food and shelter.

Qiao Yangwen, a sighted 47-year-old who has performed the art for 32 years, has taken it upon himself to keep the traditional art form alive.

Over the years, Qiao has watched as the art — believed to date back 2,000 years — fade to near extinction, only to rise again as a national intangible cultural heritage.

However, a new threat looms: too few young successors.

Yet when he lifts his sanxian, a three-stringed lute, and straps on 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 Yulin, 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 watched a Shaanbei Shuoshu performance, but remembers the feelings it invoked.

"I was too young," he said.

He does remember 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 as to why the performers had visual impairments.

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

His parents had modest dreams for his future. They hoped he would learn a trade — anything but Shuoshu — to earn a decent living from 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 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 the presence of 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.