Culture of Hunan
[1][2] The mountainous terrain of Hunan separates it from the surrounding Chinese provinces, resulting in its own distinct characteristics.
The Guangxi Autonomous Region is outside the southwestern boundary of Hunan, while the surrounding provinces include Guangdong in the southeast, Jiangxi in the east and Hubei in the north.
In the past, the wide-ranging influence of Mandarin from the southwest, north, and west made it difficult to classify Xiang.
[7] Qu Yuan (339-278 BCE), a poet and thinker who drowned himself after hearing the news that the capital of Chu had fallen to the Qin (state), and who is commemorated each year during the Duanwu Festival.
He wrote poems in his exile including “Li Sao” (“Encountering Sorrow”) and “Tian Wen” (“Questioning Heaven”), which are included in the collection Chu ci (first collected in first century BCE, material added second century CE; Chu Tz’u: The songs of the South, 1959).
The patriotic passion in Qu Yuan's poems is not only the beginning of Huxiang culture, but also the origin of Chinese romantic literature.
Neo-Confucianism spanned four dynasties in Chinese history, namely Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing.
[10] Neo-Confucianism “can be broadly described as an attempt to integrate speculative, systematic metaphysics influenced by Buddhism and Daoism into the Confucian moral and social orientation system” (Perkins 2004, 20–21).
Archaeologists discovered fine embroidered silk in Changsha Mawangdui Han Thomas (206BC-220AD), which indicates that the Hunan embroidery work has appeared before 2000.
In the long process of development, Xiang embroidery adopted the techniques of traditional Chinese painting to form its own unique style.
There are more than 300 works in Xiang Opera, such as "Patriotic General Yue Fei", "Salute to the Moon", "The Story of the White Rabbit" and "Exploration of the Gods".
At present, due to the rise of modern culture and the lack of funds and practitioners, opera is in danger of extinction.
Flower-drum Opera is very popular with the local people in Hunan, Hubei, Anhui, Guangdong and other provinces.
As Flower-drum Opera takes rural life as the subject matter and its melody is stemmed from ballads, folk songs, hums, work songs and Taoist music, it is featured by lively melody, pithy plot and dialect-style singing.
Featuring intense rustic traits, repertoires of Flower-drum Opera mainly reflect laboring activities, love, family conflicts and other contents in folk life.
As a playlet taking root in folk life, Flower-drum Opera has been experiencing continuous improvement under the joint efforts of old and newly-arising artists.
[16] The town has more than 380 intact ancient buildings erected in the Ming and Qing dynasties, covering an area of 100,000 square meters.
[17] A large number of exquisite ceramic cookware and wine utensils unearthed from the Southern Neolithic site, as well as the remains of cereals and animals, confirmed that the ancestors of Hunan people had eaten cooked food as early as 8000–9000 years ago.
At that time, the ancestors had more than ten cooking methods, including burning, roasting, stewing, frying, and boiling.
Seasonings used in cooking include salt, soy sauce, bean paste, sugar, honey, plums, cinnamon, pepper and goji berries.
This shift of centralized command is generally considered to be the main reason leading to the final collapse of the Qing dynasty and the emergence of regional warlordism in China in the first half of the twentieth century.
