Zee Wong

Zedwong126@126.com

WHEN speaking of the preservation of Chinese traditional culture, seasoned folk artists and craftsmen may immediately come into our minds. Nevertheless, the taste and talent of the younger generations are indispensable hinges for the heritage to carry on. Fortunately, the popularity of “Tang Dynasty Banquet,” a dance performance from Henan TV’s Spring Festival Gala, made it clear that traditional culture is highly appreciated and valued by the youth.

Within one week after “Tang Dynasty Banquet” was shown Feb. 10, discussion exploded on the Internet. The posts with hashtag “Henan TV Spring Festival Gala Tang Dynasty Banquet” were read over 180 million times on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter; the video of the show was viewed nearly 50 million times, and was  nominated for the best performance for all Spring Festival galas across the country. The show also became a hot topic on other platforms, populated with youngsters, such as Bilibili and Zhihu.

Why did a banquet from a thousand years ago bring about such sensation in the 2021 Chinese New Year? The root lies in a resonating passion for traditional Chinese culture that transcends ages.

Following the steps of 14 female musicians in the lively show, the audience sauntered through a museum exhibiting cultural artifacts and made a way into the Tang palace to enjoy the dance by the artists. The setting within the museum drew a close connection to the famous film “Night at the Museum,” starting with a collection of Tang tri-colored glazed pottery figurines — 14 pieces of them — awakened from their stillness, each holding a folk instrument, including pipa, panpipe, tambourine, bamboo flute, konghou, and cymbal.

The projections of the cultural relics in the performance were artifacts from the Henan Museum and the Palace Museum. A memorable scene was the girls dancing and chasing about playfully in front of a backdrop of the painting “A Panorama of Rivers and Mountains,” which is a collection in the Palace Museum made well-known through the TV program “The Nation’s Greatest Treasures.” This program that first broadcasted in 2017 was trendy among young people and made its third season in 2020, accumulating 635 thousand followers on Bilibili.

According to the Henan Economic Daily, audiences flooded the Henan Museum after the Henan Spring Festival Gala, with visitors stretching in a line that was more than 200 meters long in front of the museum. Many parents brought their children to learn about the museum’s artifacts, including those that were displayed during the performance.

The wide acceptance of “Tang Dynasty Banquet” and “The Nation’s Greatest Treasures” among the young people shows that they have cultivated a taste for traditional culture. More importantly, they are not just mere consumers, but creators.

Five days after the show, hundreds of young artists entered into the painting contest titled “Tang Dynasty Banquet” on Weibo. Many said that they were impressed by the dancers’ traditional hairstyle, makeup, and costume.

During the show, when the camera zoomed in, the ingenuous designs by the stylists were brought in focus: a classic double bun, a huadian adorning the forehead, two thin slanting eyebrows, a pair of red crescents extending to temples, two red dots on the dimples, and a rosy shade of butterfly on the lips. And no one would miss those lovely flushed chubby cheeks, the performers having filled their mouths with cotton balls, as revealed by the director, in order for the Tang aesthetics — adoring plumpness — to come to life. They also inserted sponge to pump up the exquisite clothing.

To preserve such fond memories, illustrators submitted their drawings of the lovely maidens, and craftsmen made figurines using colored clay or wool, with instructional videos uploaded. The top three winners of the contest would receive a mystery box from the Henan Museum. Per request of the followers of “Tang Dynasty Banquet,” the museum is considering the manufacture of spin-off cultural products.