[Photo/people.com.cn]

Each icon represents a Zhuang love song, and the entire 81 tell of the love affair of a young Zhuang man and woman, from the moment they meet to their oath of lifelong companionship. The icons are objects mentioned in their expression of devotion to each other in the corresponding songs. Relatively abstract and fixed, they serve to remind the singer of the songs’ lyrics. Songs are performed as a musical dialogue between the young man and woman in the dialect spoken in the northern part of the Zhuang community. The length of each song varies from just four to dozens of sentences that mostly consist of five words. Their melodies are local folk tunes.

This song book was not known to the public until 2006, when the Funing County authorities conducted a survey on indigenous culture. When those engaged in the survey asked a Poya villager to sing some folk songs, he forgot the lyrics, and could continue only after consulting a script of unintelligible characters. He told the survey workers it was a copy of the song book owned by fellow villager Nong Fengmei. This precious cultural heritage thus came to the attention of cultural officials.

The song book has been passed down through generations of Nong’s family. "When I learnt singing from my grandma, she would draw these icons to help me remember the songs. As time went by I could recite a whole piece whenever I saw the related painting, and whenever I sang, a picture flashed through my mind," Nong recalled. The book was later named the Poya Song Book of the Zhuang Ethnic Group in Funing County.

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