*Chenghai Lantern Riddles

4.*Chenghai Lantern Riddles

Nominating Unit: Chenghai District, City of Shantou

Chenghai District in City of Shantou used to be called Chenghai County. Located at the mouth of Hanjiang River to the sea in Chaoshan Plain, Chenghai gains its fame because of its lantern riddles which are mainly distributed inside the territory of Chenghai County. According to Records of Chenghai County written during the Reign of Emperor Kangxi in the Qing Dynasty, there were accounts of “People fond of verses composing elliptical verse lines and gathering crowds to work out riddles, called lantern riddles”. This shows that the tradition enjoys a history of more than 300 years and has now spread to overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia.

At the beginning, Chenghai Riddles are confined to the county due to the local dialect. It is not until the introduction of “Authentic Riddles” from the Central Plain of China and its integration with the local dialects and riddles that Chenghai Riddles form their own characteristics.

Chenghai Riddles cover a wide range of topics from literary history to classical works, from verses and crambo to rustic songs and vernaculars, and from contemporaries to historical figures. All of them, rich in cultural connotations, are closely connected with social life. The Riddles represent themselves in various ways. For example, in terms of genres, they have associative compounds, acrostics, pictographics, pictophonetics, and phonetic loan characters. In terms of writing style, they have over 20 methods including simple and straightforward portrait, and enlightenment. In terms of rules, they are of more than forty different types, with “rolling blind” included. In terms of category, they have more than 20 types such as stamp and seal, rebus, enigma, and physical one, to name just a few. Furthermore, Chenghai Riddles claim to have about one hundred kinds. All these varieties form a universal but yet unique system of riddle writing.(https://www.daowen.com)

When it comes to ways of answering, Chenghai Riddles, while carrying on the tradition like“rataplan” from the Song Dynasty, has its own innovations, too, for example, suspension and handwriting. Since China begin to implement the policy of reform and opening-up, many new media are added, including newspaper and magazine, computer, mobile phone message, the Internet and radio broadcasting.

Chenghai Riddles have been integrated into folk customs of Lantern Festival and Mid-Autumn Festival, in large part thanks to its nature of knowledge transmission and enlightenment, and therefore becomes a popular as well as a long-lasting entertaining event among the folks. In this way, Chenghai is crowned as “Homeland for Folk Art in China” by Ministry of Culture. In 2008, Chenghai Riddles was selected into the list of the second batch of state-level intangible cultural heritage.

With the passage of time, while people’s ways of entertaining themselves become more diversified, lantern riddles are losing its glamor and cultural status. On top of that, other factors like economic factors have brought the Riddles to its low ebb. In the light of this, protection measures are urgently called for so that the tradition can survive and thrive.