Free books about the Zhuang

Fortunately for the lovers of the Zhuang nationality culture and language, there are some books, freely available to all the interested readers. Here, there is a list of the books we know are in this moment free to read and/or download. Notices about other books freely available will be welcome.

Tales and myths:

A Digital Selection of Zhuang Poetry. Selections from: “The Nong People Sing of Ancient Times,” The Song of the Origins of the Nong People.  By Huang Changli, Wang Mingfu, Zhang Tinghui, Wang Qingze, Eric C. Johnson, Cho Induk.  The Zhuang Studies, Development & Research Association of Wenshan Prefecture, Yunnan Province & SIL International.

“The NongPeople Sing of Ancient Times.” Is a poem part of the invaluable cultural heritage of the Nong branch of the Zhuang people of Wenshan, and has been registered in the prefecture’s listing of intangible cultural heritage. Portions of this epic poem continue to be passed on orally by Zhuang folk artists in every Nong Zhuang district and township. This present selection includes three thousand lines from the more than ten thousand lines of the epic. Translated is the Creation of the word as well as the myths of the origins of animals and things. The book is trilingual in Nong-Zhuang, Chinese and English.

Yunnan Zhuang Folktales Collection. by Huang Changli, Wang Mingfu, Wang Qingze, Cho Induk, Susanne Johnson, Eric Johnson. Yunnan Nationalities Press, 2016.

This book is in Zhuang, Chinese and English. The book contains 20 folktales of the Zhuang living in Wenshan Prefecture, Yunnan Province. As they are linguistic and culturally divided in three branches, the book contributes to clarify the cultural landscape of the Zhuang with 15 tales of Nong Branch of the Zhuang and 5 of the Sha Branch.

– A brocade of the Zhuang nationality:

A Mother weaves a magic brocade cloth for her son which flies away. The son rescues the cloth from fairies in a distant land. They return him home and everyone copies the pattern from the boy’s mother.

Culture

Zhuang Cultural and Linguistic Heritage. by Wang Mingfu and Eric Johnson, 2008

In the course of carrying out their research project, the authors noticed that the rate of disappearance of the traditional culture of the Yunnan Zhuang was increasing. Because the majority of young people in rural areas are now going to urban areas seeking work, few have the opportunity to study their own fascinating culture. This work covers a broad range of topics, from cultural practices to history to language varieties, and its wealth of photographic documentation will prove useful for researchers.

Yearning for Zaan or Home: Gender, development and home in Zhuang Women’s narratives on Migration on a Southwest Chinese village. By Xiang Rong. Hong Kong Polytechnic University. 2006

Migration is widely practised by the Zhuang, and this migration occurs in myriad of gendered forms. The narratives of women unfold a wide range of meanings attached to various forms of migrations.

Linguistics

A sociolinguistic survey of the Dejing Zhuang sub-dialect area. Eric M. Jackson, Ph.D., Emily H.S. Jackson and Shuh Huey Lau. SIL. 2010

This report presents the results of a dialect intelligibility survey carried out in 2008 in the southwestern part of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China–what Zhang et al (1999) describe as the Dejing sub-dialect area of Southern Zhuang.

 A Sociolinguistic Introduction to the Central Taic Languages of Wenshan Prefecture, China. By Eric C. Johnson and Mingfu Wang.

Relatively few works focused on Central Tai languages are available. The aim of this work is to provide sociolinguistic data from the several Central Taic Zhuang languages of Wenshan prefecture, resulting from sociolinguistic field research conducted from 2005 to 2007.

Hongshui He Zhuang dialect intelligibility survey. By Andy Castro and Bruce Hansen SIL. 2010

The Hongshui He region is home to around 2.5 million Zhuang speakers. In conducting the survey, the primary tools used were Recorded Text Tests and wordlist comparisons. The results of this survey show that Hongshui He Zhuang can be divided into three dialects.

Nong Zhuang – Chinese – English Lexicon

The first and only available trilingual lexicon of the Nong Zhuang language.

In Chinese

A Pictorial Collection of the Traditional Art of the Yunnan Zhuang. By Wang Mingfu and Jin Hong, editors. Nationalities Publishing House of Yunnan. 2013

As the Wenshan Zhuang Language & Culture Archive Created by Eric C. Johnson is the main publisher of materials about Wenshan Zhuang language, myths and culture, readers who want to check for new publications can regularly visit their homepage.