Inside and Outside the Genealogy: A South China Lineage’s Ancestral Narratives and the Tensions of Cultural Heritage Safeguarding
Inside and Outside the Genealogy: A South China Lineage’s Ancestral Narratives and the Tensions of Cultural Heritage Safeguarding

Summary/Abstract: The Qiuxi Chen Lineage and its Bishan Chen Branch form a long-established family lineage in South China. In the Chaoshan region, widely circulated narratives from the popular legend of Chen San and Wuniang have resulted in negative portrayals of people in the lineage and the branch. This paper traces the evolution of this legend from a Ming Dynasty opera The Tale of the Lychee Mirror to a contemporary piece of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH). It reveals that there are notable similarities between the local versions of the legend and the lineage’s own ancestral narrative. Rather than passively suffer the negative repute derived from the legend, the lineage actively reshaped the legend through genealogical writing, demonstrating its agency in maintaining collective identity, especially as lineage members migrated to Thailand. From the 1950s to the 1990s, opera reforms indirectly helped rehabilitate the lineage’s reputation. However, the legend’s early 21st-century ICH form reflected a cognitive gap between others’ and the lineage’s understandings of cultural heritage concerning the status of oral sources of certain negative narratives. Moreover, in the digital age, the lineage members’ defensive counterattacks, amplified by algorithms, have fueled the spread of negative narratives. This study reveals the “lifecycle” of lineage folk knowledge – why it is needed, how it is (re)shaped, how it “dies”, and how it is reactivated by cultural heritage safeguarding – offering a case for the study of South Chinese lineages under the ICH framework.

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