The masks of Qinghai

Huangxi Village of Datong, Qinghai performs Four Tiles, a sacrificial dance featuring frog totem worship, in a drama show season each year. This facial makeup dance imitating frogs is developed from a legend passed down for generations in the village. It serves actually as a living fossil of the area whose ancestors take frog totem as worship. It reminds us that in the primitive society of undeveloped productivity, beasts and pests endangered people’s agricultural production. It was quite natural for the ancestors to choose frogs as totem and take frogs as a guardian, praying for harvests.

The third type is the drama season folk dance mask of Han nationality integrating masks and facial makeup. During the Yuan and Ming dynasties, the Hehuang valley of Qinghai received a great deal of migrants and troops exploiting virgin lands in the border area from the Central Plain. The Han culture gradually flourished in this multi-ethnic group area. The Judge Troubled by Five Little Devils, a play in the January drama season in Ledu County of Qinghai, was of great local characteristics. It was a fragment of a full-length local drama of Qing Dynasty to celebrate harvests. In the dramatic form, the protagonists were expanded from one little devil in the Song Dynasty drama Dance Judge to five little devils in Qing Dynasty. It was a main component in the performances of the local Dark Drama Season, which meant programs performed at night. The judge wore a mask, while the five little devils wearing red, yellow, blue, white and black facial makeup, respectively. The monstrous molding, of high research values, is a good example showing how the hinterland drama art integrates with local cultures.

Today, all these elements will no longer inspire any witchcraft consciousness or religious passions to men of basic scientific knowledge. But they will arouse special aesthetic affections. The aforesaid tiger and leopard grains drawn on the face and body of the Wu Tu dancers, the frog lines painted on the face of the Four Tile dancers, and the eerie patterns of good fortune, high salary, longevity, happiness and wealth on the faces of the five little devils in the Dance Judge are both facial makeup and masks. They show beauty from decorations and symbols, and thus generate unique artistic beauty. We are safe to say that facial makeup are masks drawn in the face, and masks are facial makeup hanged in the face. It shows that ever since the earliest religious culture was established in the barbaric age of humanity, the facial makeup art had sprouted in totems. They were not fettered by religions, and have developed fairly perfect up to the present.

The Chinese academic circle started to study the facial makeup in the mid 1980s. At that time, the Nuo (exorcising dance) masks of Guizhou were exhibited in Beijing and Shanghai, and subsequently in the United States, France and Germany. They aroused wide interests and concerns in the academic circle. The academic studies of masks, initiated with the Nuo culture, became active. Some academic books associated with masks were published successively. For a long period, the Qinghai academic circle did nothing in the field of mask researches. The present survey and researches have disclosed the facial makeup culture in the folk customs and Tibetan Buddhism ceremonies in Qinghai. They have unveiled the humanistic spirits, history, culture, folk customs, and religious art in the Qinghai Plateau. They reflect the characters, temperament and mentalities of the plateau, and the mystery beauty of the West. In particular, these masks have presented sufficient aesthetics that are also projected in sculptures, paintings, patterns and decorations, admitting readers to enter a gorgeous and magical world of facial makeup.