Sanyuesan: Guangxi's Zhuang Song Festival and the Legend of Liu Sanjie

There is one region of China where the third day of the third lunar month is an official public holiday, where schools close, and where the government expects its citizens to spend the day singing. In the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Sanyuesan, literally March the Third, is the grand festival of the Zhuang people, China's largest ethnic minority with some 19 million members. Since 2014 the regional government has granted the entire autonomous region two days off for it, making Guangxi the envy of workers everywhere else in the country each spring.

From Ancient Shangsi to Zhuang New Song

The date itself is ancient. In early China, the third day of the third month was the Shangsi Festival, when people gathered by rivers to bathe away ill fortune, a custom already recorded in the Book of Songs and immortalized in 353 CE when the calligrapher Wang Xizhi wrote the Orchid Pavilion Preface at a Shangsi gathering. While the holiday faded among the Han majority after the Song dynasty, it flourished among the Zhuang and other southern peoples, absorbing ancestor worship, spring courtship and above all antiphonal singing until it became something distinctly their own.

For the Zhuang, the festival's heart is the gexu, the song fair. Villages gather on hillsides or riverbanks, and teams of young men and women sing improvised verses back and forth for hours, testing each other's wit. A singer who cannot answer a verse loses face; one who answers brilliantly may gain a spouse. Historical records suggest organized song fairs in Guangxi date back over a thousand years, and researchers have counted hundreds of traditional gexu sites across the region.

The Singing Fairy Liu Sanjie

No figure looms larger over Sanyuesan than Liu Sanjie, Third Sister Liu, the legendary song goddess of the Zhuang. According to the folk tale, she was a Tang dynasty girl of dazzling verbal talent who used song to mock greedy landlords. One landlord hired three scholars to defeat her in a singing contest; she demolished them verse by verse. When persecution followed, she did not die but transformed, in most versions ascending to heaven on a carp or turning into stone by the Liujiang River, becoming an immortal of song.

Mountain songs are like spring river water, no reef or shoal can hold them back. — attributed to Liu Sanjie in Zhuang folk tradition

The 1961 musical film Liu Sanjie, shot amid the karst peaks of Guilin, carried her story across China and Southeast Asia, and today the Impression Liu Sanjie outdoor spectacle on the Li River at Yangshuo, directed by Zhang Yimou, performs her legend nightly on the water itself.

Five-Color Rice and Festival Foods

The festival's signature dish is wusefan, five-color glutinous rice, steamed in black, red, yellow, purple and white. The colors are entirely natural, achieved by soaking rice in plant extracts that Zhuang families gather themselves.

• Black comes from the leaves of the maple tree, pounded and steeped.
• Red and purple come from two varieties of a local herb the Zhuang call red-blue grass.
• Yellow comes from turmeric or a wild gardenia fruit.
• White is the rice itself, standing for purity.

The five colors honor the five directions and are said to please the ancestors, who receive the first portion at family altars. Colored eggs also appear everywhere: a young man and woman who crack their painted eggs together at a song fair have, by old custom, announced an interest in each other. Households also hang mugwort and calamus by the door, a purification habit inherited from the ancient Shangsi rite.

Embroidered Balls and Bamboo Dancing

Sanyuesan gatherings feature a courtship game found nowhere else in China: the throwing of xiuqiu, embroidered silk balls trailing colored ribbons. A Zhuang woman throws the ball she has stitched herself toward the man whose singing has impressed her; catching it is the beginning of a courtship. Museums in Nanning display Song dynasty bronze drum images that some scholars link to early forms of the custom, and the town of Jiuzhou in Baise has become famous as the home of professional xiuqiu embroiderers.

Around the singing grounds, crowds join bamboo-pole dancing, leaping between clapping poles in accelerating rhythm, and watch bronze drum performances that connect the festival to artifacts over two thousand years old. The bronze drum remains the Zhuang people's most sacred instrument, and Guangxi holds more ancient bronze drums than anywhere else on earth.

A Festival for Many Peoples

Although Sanyuesan is identified with the Zhuang, the holiday in Guangxi is deliberately shared. The Yao, Miao, Dong and Mulao peoples all hold their own third-month observances, from ancestor sacrifices to firecracker-grabbing contests, and the official celebration in Nanning stages performances from every community. China Daily reported that recent editions of the festival have blended heritage with modernity, with song fairs held on construction sites, in universities and even on high-speed trains, while online gexu livestreams draw millions of viewers.

The festival was added to China's national intangible cultural heritage list in 2014 under the name Zhuangzu Sanyuesan. Its modern revival is often cited as a model of how a minority tradition can become a regional identity: a holiday where the measure of celebration is not what you spend but how well you can answer a verse in song.

Sources: China Daily, China.org.cn, Xinhua News Agency, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region government announcements, China's National Intangible Cultural Heritage List.