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Spring Cattle Festival

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Spring Cattle Festival

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Country/Region: Mainland China

Release Year: 2020

Publish Date: 30 June 2023 00:00:00 UTC

Story:

This film records this folk custom in 2017. Every year around the Beginning of Spring in the lunar calendar, Zhang clan of Xinquan organizes Spring Cattle Festival in Fang as the unit. The most important night is on the Beginning of Spring. Cattls were decorated and led by villagers who acted as farmers, followed by fishermen, woodcutters and readers. Carp lights, gongs and drums, plaque lights were also in the team. With pine branches and torches, this spring cattle team walked through Xinquan village. When the moment of the Beginning of Spring came, villagers erected bamboo poles with canola flowers tied on the top to welcome the arrival of spring.

Casts & Crews:

Guishuzhong
Directors

Runtime: 52 minutes

Language: Minsi Hakka

Subtitles: Chinese, English

Douban: https://movie.douban.com/subject/35274814/

Festivals & Awards:
2020 Film and Television Anthropology Academy of Chinese Society of Ethnology - Excellent Film Award, China

Tags: #Hakka-Culture, #Solarterm, #Costums

Director‘s Statement:
"Spring Cattle Festival" is a spring agricultural custom, related to the ancient custom of "welcoming spring" on the Beginning of Spring, which was popular in China. The folk custom in Xinquan reveals that Hakka culture is one part of Chinese traditional culture. Xinquan village is a single surname village, most male villagers there belong to the surname Zhang. This village used to be an important water transport transfer center in the upper reaches of the Tingjiang River. Wood cut in the dense forest flows along Tingjiang river from upper villages to Xinquan, then transported southward to Chaozhou, Guangdong Province. During the Ming and Qing Dynasty, the Zhang clan accumulated a lot of wealth through wood business and transportation, that helped them establish a complete and strict clan system which has been preserved up to now. There were dozens of ancestral halls in this village, most of them were persevered well. Those main ancestral halls were the important sites where the spring cattle team must go through. In the traditional era, the teams were organized in the unit of Fang (branches of a clan). After the foundation of the P.R.C., they were organized in Villager Groups (units under administrative village), but now the tradition comes back. According to oral history, this custom can be traced back to the Ming Dynasty. It not only witnessed the settlement, cultivation and development of Hakka people, but also witnessed the establishment, decline and revival of the Hakka clan system.