1. Home
2. Top City Guide > Changsha >

Tanci  Art is a famous folk art brand from Changsha of Hunan province. Originated in Changsha, it is an urban folk art used to express emotion. As it is about talking and singing in the Changsha dialect, it is also called Changsha Dao Qing. Changsha Tanci is popular in counties and cities surrounding Changsha City.

The resonance box of Yueqin used for Changsha Tanci is made of wood. It is round and flat with both sides equipped with Paulownia board and has four strings, all of which are the same with that for “Ruan Cheng”, only that the neck is a bit shorter than that of “Ruan Qi”. This is to say, the Yueqin used for Changsha Tanci is inherited from the “Ruan Cheng” used in the West Jin Dynasty 1700 years ago.

Changsha Tanci boasts abundant traditional tones. Only the copy of Changsha Tanci owned by Peng Yankun, an old blind artist who is still alive, has more than 2000 dialects. Quite a lot of them do not have any scripts and are simply passed down by the generations of artists through oral teaching that inspires true understanding.

Changsha Tanci is an individual epic telling art featuring “uttering holy words with Yueqin in arms”. Yueqin (four-stringed plucked instrument with a full-moon-shaped sound box), the musical instrument used for the art, as recorded in Ci Hai (The Grand Dictionary of Chinese Language), “looks like Ruan Cheng, but with shorter neck”. Thus it was named “Ruan Cheng”.