Chinese Prayer Chant to the Goddess of Fertility

The article examines the prayer chant to the Goddess of Fertility performed by a blind singer and accompanied by the stringed instrument banghu and foot castanets in the temple of the Spirit of the Tanshan Dong Yue mountain, in Puxian county Shangxi province of the Republic of China. The video of the chant was recorded in April 2011, during the days before the Temple festival in honor of Dong Yue, a tradition that has been revived in the modern China. We publish the text of the chant not only in the Russian translation but also in Chinese. There are three graphic variants of the Chinese text presented — in Chinese characters, in standardized Pinyin, and in transcribed Pinyin that gives an idea of the actual pronunciation and allows the reader to trace dialectical specificity of the song. The article includes the music of both the chant and the instrumental accompaniment together with their ethno-musicological characteristics. The musical structure of the instrument and the modal specificity attribute this piece to the musical style of Northern China. The Authors analyze the verse and the strafica of the chant. They argue that its metrical structure consists of couplets (except for the last three line stanza), with instrumental wagering played in between that is characteristic of the ancient Chinese lyrics. The analysis of the text’s contents and imagery reveals that it reflects popular notions of Songzi nannan, the Goddess of Fertility. It also shows that the chant dates back to the feudal China: it predicts the fate of the future son of the young couple that ordered the chant by describing his future life of the “official” and the “noble man,” the image that has been developed on the basis of Confucian canons within the two millennia of Chinese history