Put On the Mask and You Are a God

Craft · Nuo

In Shiyou, a village in Jiangxi, eight farmers called “bo” dance Nuo for sixteen days a year. On the first day of the New Year the drum sounds, the wooden masks go on, and they stop being themselves.

The Nuo temple is small — under two hundred square metres — and it sits at the centre of the village. Nuo is the old exorcism: a masked dance performed to drive out sickness and bring luck. In Nanfeng it is traced back to the Han dynasty, two thousand years ago. Over the door hangs a couplet in stone: this is near theatre but not true theatre; this is Nuo, and Nuo is the great exorcism.

On the morning of the first day of the first lunar month, eight men go in, change their clothes, wash their hands, and lift the masks down from the altar. The drum sounds and the dancing begins. On the sixteenth night comes sou nuo, the house-to-house search, and before dawn the closing rite; the masks go back into their box and the year is over. For the rest of the year, dancing is forbidden.

IOne block of camphor, one face

The masks are not carved in Shiyou. In Yaopu village, in the same county, a row of chisels lies on a wooden bench in the workshop of Luo Chunming and his son Luo Xiancong, every blade facing the same way.

Luo Xiancong was born in 1990, grew up among his father's piles of timber, and came home after university to take up the craft. The wood is camphor, he says: it resists rot, it is aromatic, and insects leave it alone. The block is sawn to roughly the size of the mask, the outline drawn in pencil, the rough form cut and shaped, and then the fine work — the lines, the openwork, the eyes, nose and mouth, one at a time.

A mask runs through a dozen steps: a week for a simple one, months for a hard one. Nanfeng has more than a hundred and eighty kinds of Nuo mask — plague gods, household gods, Buddhist and Taoist immortals, heroes out of legend, animals and spirits, and ordinary people. Each has one fixed face.

IITwo kinds of face

Nanfeng makes two sorts of mask. One is worn for dancing; it has to survive sweat and decades. The other sits on a shelf or hangs on a wall, and is there to be looked at.

Luo Xiancong makes both. A ritual mask cannot be changed, he says — what a god looks like was settled by the ancestors. A decorative one can: he has designed a dozen new ones, with something of the place worked into them.

Across traditional Chinese woodcraft, turning raw timber into objects that withstand decades requires the same patience with the chisel, reverence for natural grain, and protective coating of natural sap. The same spirit that guides the carving of seasoned camphorwood shapes our solid wood pieces in the natural lacquerware collection, where lathe-turned timber meets hand-wiped tree resin.

Living Heritage · Natural Lacquer Woodcraft

Natural Lacquer Zelkova Wood Teacup

Lathe-turned from solid seasoned zelkova wood and hand-wiped with multiple coats of wild tree lacquer. A smooth, heat-retaining daily vessel celebrating authentic Chinese timbercraft.

$439.00 View Details →

IIIThe Wus keep the temple; others dance

Shiyou sits in Sanxi township, Nanfeng County, Jiangxi: a village of more than a thousand years and three hundred-odd households, known as the first village of Nuo culture in China.

In the Xuande years of the Ming, in the 1430s, the seventeenth-generation ancestor of the village's Wu family, Wu Chaozong, was magistrate of Haiyang in Chaozhou, Guangdong. Plague broke out in his district. He had men put on fierce masks and carry the Nuo god through the villages, and wherever they went the sickness stopped. When he retired and came home, he brought an eight-man Nuo troupe and its masks with him, and built the temple.

From then on Shiyou Nuo was the Wu clan's own rite. The Wu family paid for it, kept the temple, and appointed a headman to run the troupe — but no Wu ever danced. The dancers are from the village's other surnames: eight men, ranked by seniority as bo — uncle. First uncle, second uncle, down to the eighth. A place opens only when a man leaves, and only the top three may take pupils.

The programme is fixed: Opening the Mountain, Paper Money, Thunder God, Old Man Nuo and Old Woman Nuo, Zhong Kui Gets Drunk, the Two Young Lords, Guan Yu Consecrates His Blade. The steps may not be changed. Nor may the route the troupe walks from door to door.

IVWhen the drum sounds

Ye Genming is the troupe's third uncle. In 1984, aged sixteen, he thought the dancing looked like fun and began learning from Luo Huiyou and Luo Huiwu. Luo Huiwu, the troupe's previous first uncle, was a national-level inheritor; he has since died.

Shiyou Nuo is not like Nuo elsewhere. Elsewhere the steps are many and fine. Here there is one drum and one gong, and “when the drum sounds, you dance”.

What it feels like inside the mask, he puts plainly:

“When you put the mask on, you forget everything outside. All you remember is that you are dancing Nuo.”

Ye Genming

Villagers explain it with an old saying, and he borrows it: take off the mask and you are a man; put it on and you are a god. Which gives him a way to describe his own job —

“We are the ones who carry messages between people and gods.”

Ye Genming

The difficulty is what comes after. The boys who learned from him in 2006 are men with families now. He asked one of them whether he would come back into the troupe. The answer was honest: he has a business outside; he cannot spend half a month at home and lose it.

VThe small troupe

So the village started a children's troupe, and the children learn the gestures early. The drumbeat is the same drumbeat, the masks are the same masks. Only the faces under them get younger every year.

A mask, well cut, lasts decades. A man who learns the dance can perform for life. But the craft is alive for sixteen days a year. For the other three hundred and fifty they are farmers, carpenters, men working away from home.

To explore how other ancient Chinese crafts survive through generational devotion, read our stories on three generations of Fuzhou lacquer masters and Gao Fenglian's paper-cut Yellow River. You can also explore living heritage pieces in our Handmade Lacquerware collection and Miao Silver collection.

Craft

Nuo dance (Nanfeng Nuo) · Nanfeng Nuo mask carving

Listing

China's first national list of intangible cultural heritage, 2006 (No. Ⅲ-7; Nanfeng County, Jiangxi)

Place

Shiyou village, Sanxi township, Nanfeng County, Fuzhou, Jiangxi · Yaopu village (mask carving)

Troupe

Eight men, ranked as uncles; the Wu clan keeps the temple, other surnames dance

Season

From the first day of the New Year to the sixteenth night; dancing is forbidden otherwise

Masks

More than 180 types, carved in camphor, a dozen steps, a week to several months each

Carvers

Luo Chunming (provincial-level inheritor) · Luo Xiancong