[Photo/people.com.cn]

After three years of deciphering and collating, the Poya Song Book is now confirmed as a collection of 81 separate but inter-related love songs of a total 762 lines. The Ethnic Publishing House published it in 2009 as part of a series on China’s ethnic minority languages.

The songs are aligned in the order of conventional Zhuang antiphonal singing. They start with the first meeting song, proceed to the inquiry song, the courting song, the oath song, and more. In addition to lovers’ chat, the lines also depict many facts and facets of Zhuang life. For instance, one song tells how to distinguish single from married women by their hair styles. Another depicts Zhuang farmers following the growth cycle of maple trees to plant crops – "sowing seed in the first lunar month, when maple trees sprout, and transplanting the seedlings in the paddy field the next month when the maple turns green."

Liang Tingwang, a professor at Minzu University of China, praises the Poya Song Book for its ingenious figures of speech. For instance, bamboo is a metaphor for slim girls; the affection between lovers is compared with the bond between water and embankment, cattle and grassland; and the reluctance to part from a loved one is as strong as the affinity between two skeins of thread that tightly intertwine to form rope.

Zhao Liming, director of the Committee of Women’s Script (Nüshu) of the Chinese Folk Literature and Art Society, holds the view that Poya writing is older than the Dongba script, another pictographic language of the Naxi ethnic group. From the literary perspective, it bears strong similarity to the Book of Songs.