Mandarin song

凤阳花鼓

Fèngyáng huāgǔ

The Fengyang Flower-Drum Song

Lyrics

第一段

凤fèng阳yáng,凤fèng阳yáng,

凤fèng阳yáng,

朱zhū皇huáng帝dì,

荒huāng。

第二段

户hù羊yáng,

户hù郎láng,

奴nú郎láng,

鼓gǔ。

副歌

咚dōng隆lóng咚dōng锵qiāng,咚dōng隆lóng咚dōng锵qiāng。

第三段

锣luó,鼓gǔ,

锣luó鼓gǔ。

,

凤fèng阳yáng。

Comprehension drill

4 questions on what you just read. Get one wrong and the story will show you where it says otherwise.

Anonymous Anhui folk song of the Ming and Qing dynasties, first attested in print in the Qianlong-era drama anthology Zhuibaiqiu; the flower-drum genre is entry V-36 in China's national intangible cultural heritage register. Modern celebrity arrangements are separately protected; the underlying words and tune are not. Source text. Translation ours.

A beggar's street song with the nerve to blame the emperor by name. Fengyang, in Anhui, was the home town of Zhu Yuanzhang, founder of the Ming dynasty - and the song says that since the place produced Emperor Zhu, nine years in ten have brought famine, so she straps a flower-drum on her back and roams the four corners singing for coins. People have been singing this complaint since his own dynasty. He never managed to stop them.

For the learner the treasure is the parallel lines: 大户人家卖牛羊, 小户人家卖儿郎 - the big households sold their oxen and sheep, the small households sold their sons. Identical frames with two words swapped, which is how Chinese builds rhetoric and how you should drill it. The same trick returns gently in 左手锣,右手鼓 - gong in the left hand, drum in the right.

And then the refrain: 咚得隆咚锵 (dōng de lōng dōng qiāng) is not vocabulary at all - it is the drum and gong written down. Percussion carries no tones, so for once you can sing a Mandarin refrain with nothing to get wrong.