A man of his word sees time for change

Yang Shengzhao, 67, has a mysterious and respectable position as master of Shuishu, the written language of the Sui ethnic group.

He's often invited by elderly villagers to choose an auspicious day for weddings, funerals, spring plowing or the building of a new house, and host ceremonies on such occasions.

He carefully carries an old handwritten Shuishu script with him, thumbs through it to look for hints and explains the details with a pithy formula in measured tones.

As a "living fossil" of hieroglyphic language, Shuishu is written in pictographs and symbols and deeply rooted in religious and folk traditions.

Experts have sorted only 766 Shuishu characters so far. It's a language of polyphony and polysemy to present various meanings in different contexts.

Only Shuishu masters such as Yang can read and decode old scripts copied by hand from generation to generation, combined with the oral accounts taught by their teachers. The precious books record encyclopedic knowledge about the ancient Sui ethnic group, ranging from astronomy, geography, religion to philosophy.

"Shuishu contains the Sui people's origin story, migration history and understanding of almost everything. I've been trying my best to preserve our precious culture," says Yang, from Sandu Sui autonomous county in Qiannan Bouyei and Miao autonomous prefecture, Guizhou province.

In November, the Shuishu character documents from Guizhou were added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Asia and the Pacific Regional Register. Yang did much work for the application process.

He's the fourth-generation Shuishu master in his family. Imperceptibly influenced by what he saw and heard in the family, he became interested in the ancient characters and made up his mind secretly as a child, yearning to be a master successor. His uncle told him that only a kindhearted person would be chosen as the Shuishu inheritor of the family.

At age 13, Yang started to study Shuishu characters with his uncle at night during slack farming seasons and learned by rote at first because there were too many things to remember.

"You need to do good deeds and be ready to suffer losses, with a spirit of dedication. I'm proud that I made it as the chosen one. The more I learned about the language, the more I became interested in it," Yang says.

According to Sui tradition, the learning of Shuishu should be passed on to only men within a master's family. The elderly in his family were careful to observe it. However, Yang decided to teach Shuishu to others outside his family, and in 2015, he started to teach women as well. There was opposition from some elderly Shuishu masters.

Similar to some other national intangible cultural heritage items, there are fewer potential inheritors for Shuishu, because many youngsters are leaving their hometowns to work in big cities.

The strict rules of Shuishu made it more difficult to find a suitable successor. Yang says he feels deep regret that when Shuishu masters passed away due to old age, a lot of the oral accounts and phrases were also lost.

Yang says it had been hard to pass on Shuishu because there was a tradition of burning worn-out books, so only a few well-preserved Shuishu books have survived.

"If we all followed a stereotypical routine, Shuishu would die out gradually, leaving no successors at all. That's why I broke the rule to teach it to those who're willing to learn, so as to preserve the ethnic group culture," he says.

Now, Yang has over a dozen disciples of different ages.

Besides the handwritten scripts, there are also oral accounts of Shuishu passed from masters of one generation to another.

Yang says the most difficult part of learning the language is memorizing oral accounts of Shuishu and this is subject to one's memory. He has mastered about 80 percent of his uncle's knowledge passed on through such oral accounts.

Yang was a teacher at a local primary school and started to teach students Shuishu characters in class in the 1990s, as a way to impart knowledge of the Sui people's language. After retirement in 2015, he was asked by the prefecture's research institute on Shuishu culture to guide others in translating the ancient Shuishu scripts into Chinese.

Yang plans to work with others to record the oral accounts of Shuishu via audios and videos and transcribe them via markings with phonetic symbols.

Ge Mingyi, head of the prefecture archives of Qiannan, says the prefecture has been striving to preserve Shuishu and promote the culture at home and abroad. The prefecture has 466 registered Shuishu masters and about 19,000 original Shuishu books in its archives and museums. The collected books are being digitized and academic seminars on Shuishu are being organized. The prefecture has also made a law to protect Shuishu.

In 2018, the prefecture published Shuishu textbooks for use in primary and middle schools in areas inhabited by the Sui people.

Experts have discovered that 22 Shuishu symbols are similar to those found on pottery pieces unearthed from Erlitou in today's Henan province, considered the site of the capital of the Xia Dynasty (c. 21st century-16th century BC). They also found similarity between 36 Shuishu symbols and those on the cultural relics that were unearthed from an archaeological site dated back 7,300 years at Shuangdun village, Anhui province.

"Such close relations have drawn the attention of academic circles. It needs further research," Ge says, adding that the cultural treasure of Shuishu remains significant in modern society.

"It strengthens the cultural identity of the Sui people and regulates their behavior and moral codes, and the value system of the Sui people is similar to core socialist values.

"Shuishu masters play a key role in helping local authorities in social governance because they engage in many aspects of social life," he says.

Zhao Yandi contributed to this story.