CNMAIN-003 - ethnographic attestation
Lanzhou wooden-plaque niuhou
China - Gansu - Lanzhou, upper Yellow River - East Asia
Play / practical
Source term: 木牌式的“牛吼” / wooden-plaque niuhou (ox-bellow)
牛吼 (niuhou), “ox-bellow”: the Chinese word Long Fei uses for the bullroarer, taken from translated accounts of the Aranda and Hopi; the Lanzhou plaque’s own name is not recorded.
A boy in Lanzhou in the 1950s swung a flat wooden plaque on a cord until it roared. He grew up to be the music historian Niu Longfei, and it was that plaything he reached for when he tried to explain the horned Thunder Duke painted in the Dunhuang caves, spinning a ring of linked drums around himself. Drums are struck, not spun, he reasoned; the whirling must be older than the drum. The god who ruled thunder in the earliest texts was an ox, and the ox-bellow, niuhou, was the voice of his spirit-tablet whirled on a cord. The plaque Niu had held as a child had lost its name and its story. It kept its voice into the 1960s.
我在幼时，也曾在兰州亲见并玩弄过木牌式的“牛吼”。看来，“牛吼”一器，直至本世纪五六十年代，仍存于中国西北之地。
In my childhood I too saw with my own eyes, and played with, a wooden-plaque “niuhou” in Lanzhou. It seems the niuhou survived in north-west China right down to the fifties and sixties of this century.
陇菲 [Long Fei], 《雷公电母考》, 中国文化研究集刊 3 (1986), pp. 237-249 per the volume table of contents; online witness passage beginning 我在幼时, with notes 8-9.
- Object
- A flat wooden plaque whirled on a cord, remembered by the music historian Niu Longfei from his Lanzhou childhood; no dimensions, decoration or surviving specimen.
- Function
- A child’s plaything in mid-twentieth-century Lanzhou; no ritual use recorded, and the author says its name and lore were already lost.
- Source
- 陇菲 [Long Fei, pen name of 牛龙菲 Niu Longfei], 《雷公电母考》 [An Examination of the Thunder Duke and the Lightning Mother], 中国文化研究集刊 3 (Shanghai: Fudan University Press, Nov. 1986), pp. 237-249 according to the volume table of contents (the online reprint's colophon says pp. 231-249); written 1983-04-05, revised 1984-01-25, supplemented 2001-01-07; full-text…
- Source location
Page references
中国文化研究集刊 3:237-249 per the volume table of contents (online reprint postscript: 231-249); witness passage beginning 我在幼时 (niuhou section of the online reprint); author's notes 8-9.
- Source confidence
- medium Lanzhou city anchor (Chengguan District, upper Yellow River). The author names the city only; no district or street.
- Toy / secular survival