Dancing in the street

To make the dragon head, the master carefully winds firm rice straw around the stick or pole that will later be held by the main performer, and gradually makes the shape. The last step is to tie colorful cloth strips around the head to make the dragon's features more distinct.

In the past, people used to burn the rice-straw dragon after three performances, and villagers would burn incense and paper resembling money as offerings.

Nowadays, however, this ritual has been gradually abandoned due to the shortage of fresh rice straw and the intense skill and effort it takes to make such a dragon.

Guo Qing, former deputy head of Qianjiang's agriculture bureau, says that, in 2005, the rate of mechanized agriculture in the city was 70 percent and is about 85 percent now.

A combine harvester can separate the husks from the rice straw more effectively, cutting the straw short. Local farmers use this straw to feed crayfish that they keep, leave it in the field as fertilizer or sell it to factories to make paper.

In the fall, Li and his teammates will help others to harvest rice, but they adopt the traditional manner of employing sickles so that they can still use the precious rice straw.

"To perform a dragon dance well, you need to learn and develop different sets of movements. For instance, a dragon will enter a villager's house and make a circle and then exit," Li says.

During the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, when the dragon dances were temporarily suspended, he spent his time developing new moves.

"Practice makes perfect. It needs lots of skill to control the dragon head, and you need to hold it to face and embrace the audience and sometimes the dragon tail."

During the Spring Festival of 1988, Li Guangfu, who was then head of Longwan town's cultural station, organized a 13-person rice-straw dragon team to climb around a 12-meter-high pillar, which looked like the creature had wrapped around it.

When he passed away in 2007, his daughter Li Hong followed in her father's footsteps to promote the folk activity in the town and she learned how to make rice-straw dragons. She organizes masters to teach the skills to other villagers, and they can, in turn, teach others.

She says Longwan town has nine dragon dance teams, with the ages of members ranging from their 40s to their 60s, with some only being formed and trained as recently as last year.

"It's difficult to organize villagers to perform rice-straw dragon dances, as it needs as many as 22 people for a team. Sometimes I have to use my personal relationships with people to persuade villagers to join the dragon dance teams," says Li Hong, 51, deputy head of Longwan town's cultural station.

It's popular for women to join daily square dances to exercise. She has persuaded her fellow dancers to organize a female dragon dance team.

In 2018 and 2019, Longwan Middle School invited masters to teach students to do rice-straw dragon dance twice a week, but the project was suspended last year due to the outbreak of COVID-19.

Li Hong says that, due to a shortage of funds, all members of the dragon teams perform mainly out of their love of the folk activity. The problem, however, is that it's hard to arouse the enthusiasm of young people.

She hopes that more of the art form's masters will be enlisted as city-level intangible cultural heritage inheritors, as not only does the title come with an annual allowance, but the honor will encourage them to continue pursuing the tradition.