Yizhou was a land of "Xi 'ou" and "Luoyue" in ancient times, where the Zhuang ethnic group lived, created and enjoyed the customs and culture of the Zhuang ethnic group. Since the Tang and Song Dynasties, a large number of Han people and the Central Plains culture moved in, Yizhou became the political, economic and cultural center of northwest Guangxi. Especially in the Song, Ming and Qing Dynasties, convenient land and water transportation promoted the prosperity of local commerce and economy. Merchants from all over the country gathered in Qingyuan, Huaiyuan and Sancha, and some tourists and craftsmen also stopped at Desheng, Longtou, Beiya, Beishan and Luoxi. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, social changes have changed, social customs have become increasingly civilized, foreign customs have entered Yizhou, local festivals and customs have become more diverse and activities have become more colorful.

First, the custom of New Year Festival

The local custom of New Year Festival in Yizhou, Zhuang, Han and other ethnic minorities mostly celebrate the agricultural festivals, such as the fifteenth day of the first month, the February Society, the Qingming Festival in March (March 3rd), April 8th, May 5th, June 6th, July 7th (July 14th), August 15th and September. Although there is a festival every month, it is different in weight and nationality. Zhuang people celebrate New Year's Eve, the fifteenth day of the first month, the third day of March, the Qingming Festival, the seventh day of July and the fifteenth day of August. Han people emphasize New Year's Eve, Lantern Festival, Qingming Festival, July 14th, August 15th, Double Ninth Festival and Winter Solstice. The Shui people who live in Longtou Township have their Shui People's Festival, and Beiya and Fulong Yao People's Township have their Yao Wang Festival. Among them, New Year's Eve to the fifteenth day of the first month is the New Year in Yizhou.

Chinese New Year's Eve is commonly known as New Year's Eve. On this day, every household will finish the housework that must be completed. As the saying goes, "Thirty things should be done in thirty nights". Then, couplets and door gods will be posted. Some families will post poems, banners, figures or landscape pictures (New Year pictures) in the main room (hall). In the afternoon, set up incense tables and put three fruits to worship ancestors; After everything is finished, the family members arrive and start a sumptuous dinner for the reunion dinner; After dinner, we began to "keep the old age", and when the rooster crows in the early morning, thousands of families will set off firecrackers to welcome the new year.

The first to fifteenth day of the first month is the time for Chinese New Year leisure, greeting each other, visiting relatives and friends, and singing folk songs at Gewei. On the first day of the first month, every family has a draft in the morning (tangyuan); Don't sweep the floor, don't sweep the house, don't move the knife, don't lead to the disaster of the prison, don't dump the residual tea waste water, and don't dump the food. People pay attention to clothes, and children must wear new clothes, hats and shoes. Children (children and grandchildren) pay New Year greetings to the elderly, and the elderly give red envelopes to their children and grandchildren. On the second day of the lunar new year, the married daughter takes her uncle and nephew home to pay New Year's greetings, and the daughter's uncle will "pack" (including fresh pork or bacon and tofu balls), and uncles and cousins will also be given a "pack". Brothers in the family will take turns to invite their brothers and uncles to dinner (one meal for each family), and each adult will give the children of other families a red envelope at a profit. From the second day of junior high school, there are dragons and lions in the streets of the county, and urban and rural residents can visit relatives and friends, catch up with songs and sing folk songs.

Lantern Festival is held on the fifteenth day of the first month. In the streets of Qingyuan, Huaiyuan and Sancha, there are dragon dances, lion dances, pavilions, top horses, lanterns and other festivals in the streets during the day, and lions rob the green at night. The Lantern Festival in Qingyuan City has a beautiful saying: "The cannon of Lion South Street in the east gate and the dragon of West Gate with a sign lamp in the north gate", that is, the Guangdong lion who dances in the east of the city (now Wenchang community) has superb skills, while the south street is mostly the mansion of rich gentry and tycoons. The fireworks and firecrackers set off by the dragon and lion team during the New Year's greetings last for a long time and are particularly powerful. The residents living in North Gate Street are good at making sign lamps, and the sign lamps perform wonderfully. Huaiyuan, a thousand-year-old commercial port town, is celebrated for its Lantern Festival custom. The custom of dragon dance is to dance the dragon. The dragon body is generally 9 knots (9 meters) and the longest is 21 knots (21 meters). Before the dragon travels, it will go to the Sanjiaozui Grand Pier (the pier where Longjiang River meets Zhongzhou River) to "light up" (uncover the red silk cloth covering dzi). When the dragon travels, it will be accompanied by paper-bound herring, carp, mandarin fish, shrimp, crab, screws and other aquarium soldiers. Huaiyuan Lion Dance is also a big lion in Guangdong, and it is performed by two people dancing. When the lion team travels, drums and music are everywhere, accompanied by martial arts teams and boxers, and the "monkey" with a paper shell mask and the "Lohan" who always smiles are also around. Taige, topping horses and playing cards for money are even more wonderful activities in Huaiyuan Lantern Festival. Taige is decorated with male and female drama characters sitting on open-door sedan chairs decorated with colorful paper flowers, birds and insects, which are carried by four or eight people. Topping horses are children dressed as drama characters riding on beautiful horses. Taige's topping horses are accompanied by gongs and drums and playing cards. Playing cards for money is to hang whiskers with copper coins strung in the middle of bamboo poles, and beat the jaws and wrists with bamboo poles respectively. Dragon dances, lion dances and lion dances (commonly known as cat lions) are also held in villages such as Longtou, Qingtan and Luoxi, while the Hakka people in villages such as Lingjiao, Jiulong, Cunwei and Qiaotou in Luoxi Town, especially dance grass on the 15th night of the first month to make families in Longyou Village pray for the New Year.

During the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in 1958, dragon dances, lion dances to celebrate the New Year, outings in Taiwan Pavilion, auspicious words of "congratulations on making a fortune" and folk songs sung by the masses were all resisted and criticized as "four modernizations" and "bourgeoisie", and they were gradually restored in 198 after the reform and opening up.

Sacrifice to the Spring Festival in February and Autumn Festival in August are traditional folk festivals in Yizhou's urban and rural areas. Before liberation, all the streets in the county town and villages in the countryside had their own social kings. The social kings were carved with stones, and placed in the community altar at the edge of the village or at the head of the village to enjoy the sacrifices of the villagers in the Spring and Autumn Festival and peacetime. The social king is the god who protects the peace of the village (street) and has the authority to arbitrate right and wrong. Therefore, there is a saying that "the social king doesn't speak, the tiger dares not enter the village", and when the farmland suffers from disasters such as drought, floods and diseases, the villagers worship and pray for the disaster to ensure the harvest. Another example is that there are disputes between the neighbors in the village street, and they also swear in front of the social king to prove their innocence. Spring and autumn festival society, more meaning is that in the spring, the harvest of crops and the prosperity of six livestock are plentiful, and in the autumn, the king of Thanksgiving society blesses and blesses, and the year is safe. The activities of the Spring and Autumn Sacrificial Society are organized by the "head of the society", that is, all households in the village (street) are called to raise funds to buy three sacrificial offerings, kill pigs or cattle, and then the whole village or one person from each household goes to the social altar to "eat the society" (have a dinner), and besides "eat the society", the pork is equally distributed to each household. On the Day of Sacrifice to the Society, everyone from other villages is invited to "eat the Society" to celebrate the Society Day. Sacrificial activities were banned during the "Cultural Revolution". After the reform and opening up, many villages gradually resumed. Its main significance is to gather feelings and celebrate the harvest, but this practice is no longer in cities and towns.

Qingming Festival is a traditional family education festival to remember the ancestors, teach the younger generation and carry forward the family style. The most important activity in Tomb-Sweeping Day is grave-sweeping. The significance of grave-sweeping lies in pursuing the distance carefully, drinking water and thinking about the source, and appreciating the kindness of ancestors. During the period of Tomb-Sweeping Day, Yizhou, Zhuang, Han and other ethnic minorities all visited graves on selected days, cleared weeds and added soil to the whole grave, lit incense and candles, placed pork, chicken, wine, meals and fruits, paid homage to their deceased relatives, burned paper money and set off firecrackers. This process is called Qingming.

For Qingming Festival, most Han people go to the graves in the form of families (great-grandfathers or below), and when they come back from the graves, each family will worship their own incense tablets, and then they will either have dinner or eat by themselves. Most of the Zhuang people go to the grave to sweep graves, and there is also the custom of doing Qingming, that is, all the families of the same family share the money or take turns to be the host to pay for Qingming activities. When the Zhuang people do tomb sweeping in Qingming, they have the custom of having a picnic with their relatives and friends in front of the tomb when they worship the last tomb, that is, cutting some pork with a small knife to send wine, and eating glutinous rice and steamed buns. Be a tomb-sweeping Zhuang family, and come back from the grave to have a dinner to celebrate.

On March 3rd, Yizhou is a place where Zhuang, Han and other ethnic groups live together. However, due to the different traditional customs, in the traditional festival of March 3rd, there are also differences in commemorative forms and folk activities.

The "March 3rd" festival activities of the Han people mainly include offering sacrifices to commemorate Fuxi's intercourse with Nu Wa, which created the ancestor of mankind. By offering sacrifices to the gods and praying for the birth of children, the healthy growth of children can be guaranteed. The Hakka sacrificial activity is called "Worship the Bedside Woman". Sacrifice activities are usually undertaken by housewives. After offering sacrifices in the incense hall, the offerings are brought to the married couple's bed for sacrifice. The sacrificial offerings are five-color glutinous rice, boiled eggs dyed red and scented paper candles. Nowadays, the Han people's awareness of the "March 3" festival has faded, and only some families still keep the custom of eating five-color glutinous rice and giving children red eggs.

The main activities of the Zhuang people's "March 3rd" festival are to catch a song fair and hold a song party, where young men and women sing songs and love each other. However, on this day, it is also necessary to steam colored glutinous rice, boil red eggs and offer sacrifices to ancestors.

Yizhou's singing folk songs and catching up with the song fair can be traced back to the Tang Dynasty. In the Qing Dynasty, Shang Pan, a Qingyuan magistrate in Qianlong Jian, also praised the Zhuang people's song fair in "Yi Yang Xing Chun Ci", saying that "the children of Mancun came out in groups and sang without swinging". In the 196s, a cultural person once said, "When you arrive in Yishan on the third day of March, there are duet fields everywhere", which shows the prosperity of folk songs in Yizhou Zhuangxiang. Gexu is more common in Liuhe, Xiangbei, Anma and other villages in the northern region. The protagonists of the Song Fair are young men and women of Zhuang nationality. They go to folk songs, meet old friends, find new friends, talk about love, find their favorite people and sow the seeds of love. This is the ultimate goal of young men and women to catch up with the song fair and sing folk songs.

The villages in Liuhe, Xiangbei, Anma and other areas in northern Yizhou belong to mountainous areas, and are almost all Zhuang Zhuang languages. The folk songs sung here are pure Zhuang songs, and the folk songs are called "Gu Huan". In Gexu, the content of "Gu Huan" is instant, immediate and emotional, and it is sung with the compilation. In Qingyuan, Luoxi, Luodong, Aishan, Lali and other places in the central, eastern and southwestern regions, even Zhuang people sing folk songs in Yizhou local Guiliu dialect, which is a Chinese folk song.

In 1984, the People's Government of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region officially designated the "March 3rd" Song Fair as a national festival of the Zhuang nationality. Yizhou made full use of the "March 3rd" National Festival of the Zhuang nationality to hold various folk song festivals (competitions), widely publicized the Party's principles and policies, and received good social effects. Today, the "March 3" song fair spontaneously formed by Yizhou folk still shows the extremely strong folk characteristics of Zhuang people's "Valentine's Day".

April 8th is a festival for the Zhuang and Han people in rural areas of Yizhou for Niu Qingsheng, commonly known as Cow Worship Festival or Off-yoke Festival. In the Records of Qingyuan Prefecture, it is recorded that "On April 8th, colored rice in rural areas was wrapped in loquat leaves and fed to cows". On that day, farmers of Zhuang and Han nationalities did not serve, ride or beat cows, cleaned the cowshed, took the cows to the river to wash and rub their bodies, and then took them to the lawn to meet with many cows, which was called "cattle sex". When Petunia came home in the evening, the Zhuang people held a ceremony to respect the cows in front of the door: the elders wrapped a pack of five-color glutinous rice and inserted three sticks of incense. The family walked around the cows in sequence according to their seniority, chanting the song "Cow, cow, plow, rake you as a pledge, and rely on you all the year round." Then they fed the cows with five-color glutinous rice, and each person touched the cows. After Petunia entered the fence, the whole family * *. Today, some people in the village often joke that "your birthday is April 8", insinuating that this person is as dull or stubborn as an ox. From the Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China, on April 8th every year, the county town had the custom of carrying three masters and bodhisattvas for a trip, which was intended to pray for local peace. Nowadays, agricultural production is basically mechanized, and there are few cows in rural areas. It is no longer the case that Niu Qingsheng is on April 8, but people need to enjoy the "five-color glutinous rice" food.

The Dragon Boat Festival is commonly known as the fifth day of May in Yizhou. The main contents of the festival are exorcism, making zongzi and dragon boat racing.

ward off evil spirits. Before the festival, households went to the market to buy Chinese herbal medicines such as Acorus calamus, Folium Artemisiae Argyi, Rhizoma Atractylodis and Realgar to ward off evil spirits. On the fifth day of the fifth day, calamus and mugwort leaves were inserted in the front door of the house, and children hung incense bags to ward off evil spirits. At home, Atractylodes lancea was burned, realgar wine was sprinkled, and water was boiled with maple leaves, wall climbing wind and grapefruit leaves to take a bath. After the ancestor worship, the whole family has dinner, and everyone drinks some realgar wine to ward off evil spirits.

go to the magic. Rural people in Yizhou have the custom of taking medicine on the fifth day of May to get rid of the evil spirits. "Customs of Qingyuan Prefecture" states: "Poisoning is only for strong women and livestock. According to legend, on May 5th, people went to the mountain stream, covered the floor with new cloth and jewelry silver hairpin, and filled a basin of water beside it. Women sang and danced naked to bring down the king of medicine, and once the lizard poisonous insect came into the bathtub, it became a magic trick. The wife of the animal method was commonly known as the "medicine woman". Anyone who is enchanted by a "medicine woman" will "die of heart cramps in a few days or years". On May 5th (Dragon Boat Festival), the folk Han people in Yizhou mashed Yaowang (a kind of herbal medicine) and mixed glutinous rice to make medicinal steamed buns, while the medicinal steamed buns cooked by the folk Zhuang people in Desheng were made of Chinese herbal medicines such as mugwort leaves, shite vines and carp tails. It is a custom that medicinal steamed buns can avoid being caught in the middle, especially the Hakka people believe that this custom has been passed down to this day.

make zongzi. On the third and fourth day of May, people began to make zongzi. The raw material of zongzi is glutinous rice, and the dumplings are filled with pork belly, ribs, chestnuts, mung beans, peanuts, sesame seeds, etc. According to the shape and size, there are triangle dumplings, big dumplings and pillow dumplings; According to taste, there are hot dumplings and cold dumplings. Zhuang people like to make big dumplings and pillow dumplings. Each big dumpling is made of 1-2 kg glutinous rice, and the stuffing is pork belly strips and chestnuts. They are wrapped and tied with winter leaves or bamboo leaves, and boiled for an hour. Each pillow dumpling is made of 5-6 kg glutinous rice, and the stuffing is the same as the big dumpling. They are wrapped and tied with bamboo leaves or awn leaves, and boiled for 3-4 hours. Most of the rice dumplings and pillow dumplings are cold ones. The glutinous rice must be soaked in plant ash water (alkaline water) for several hours before being wrapped, so the rice dumplings can stay for a long time without deterioration. Generally speaking, people in the city pack triangular zongzi, which is delicious, easy to pack and cook, extremely convenient and does not need to stay long; Rural farmers like to pack big dumplings and pillow dumplings. Big dumplings are good gifts, and pillow dumplings can stay for a long time and can be enjoyed slowly. After the reform and opening up, the custom of avoiding evil spirits has faded, and the principle of "gourmet" is increasingly emphasized in making and eating zongzi.

dragon boat race. The historical dragon boat race started in memory of Qu Yuan, and has been circulating in China for more than 2, years. Most of the Han people hold dragon boat races on the Dragon Boat Festival every year. Since the Song Dynasty, a large number of Han people have moved to Yizhou, and many Chinese cultures have also spread and influenced Yizhou. Of course, the dragon boat race is based in Yizhou without exception. From the Ming and Qing Dynasties to the Republic of China, local government or private chambers of commerce held dragon boat races in Huaiyuan during the Dragon Boat Festival. Qingyuan, Huaiyuan, Lalang, Xiaolong and even Liucheng, Liujiang and Rongxian (now Rongshui County) all teamed up to participate. After liberation, dragon boat races gradually decreased.

July Festival, the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, is a festival for the Zhuang people in Yizhou to welcome their ancestors. From this day to the 14th, married daughters have to buy scented paper candles and a live duck to return to their parents' homes for ancestors.

July 14th is the Mid-Yuan Festival, commonly known as Ghost Festival, in which both Zhuang and Han people in Yizhou celebrate the "Mid-Yuan Festival". This day is the day when Zhuang people send their ancestors back to the underworld. The festival is very grand: they buy meat to kill chickens and ducks, prepare three kinds of fruits, set up incense tables to offer sacrifices to their ancestors, burn paper money, paper clothes and paper gold ingots and silver ingots after the sacrifices, then wrap the burnt objects with lotus leaves, insert three sticks of incense, and take them to the river to float on the water, so that they can go downstream, indicating that they will send their ancestors back by water, such as wrapping lotus leaves. On the 14th, the Han people set up a sacrifice, burning incense candles and offering three kinds of fruits to welcome ancestors home for the holidays. After the sacrifice, they burned paper money, paper clothes, paper gold ingots and silver ingots, and sprinkled wine on paper ashes to show their gratitude.