Rock Fights and Youth Culture

Despite repeated bans by officials and protests from the literati, street brawls and rock fights remained popular forms of entertainment and competitive sport in south China in the early modern period.

Unlike many other festivals and sports, rock fights were not associated with temples and temple fairs. Most took place on the outskirts of villages in open fields. While it is tempting to view rock fights as more ‘civilised' forms of inter-village and inter-lineage feuds (xiedou), they were no such thing. Judging by the printed descriptions and testimonies from oral interviews, they were basically free-for-alls, ‘sporting battles of strength', fought chiefly for the sake of displaying youthful masculine bravado in order to win honour

Figure 31.1 ‘Rock Fight during the Double-Nine Festival', Dianshizhai Pictorial, Shanghai, 1886.

and prestige. Fighting was a means of gaining respect. Rock fights were important release mechanisms for the pent-up tensions, frustrations and antagonisms that had accumulated over the previous year. They can hardly be called civilised sports because there were no apparent rules and they were brutal and bloody. It was not uncommon for participants, and sometimes even spectators who got too close, to be maimed or killed.

In most cases, rock fights were not organised or managed by local elites or powerful lineages, but rather by ordinary villagers. Most of the partici­pants came from poor and landless families. In the rural district (xiang) of Shawan in Panyu county in the Canton delta, for example, the village most famous for rock fights was named Longqiao (Dragon Bridge), which appeared to be a satellite village, one which was both economically and politically dependent on a dominant lineage.

The satellite villages were made up of tenant farmers and itinerant work­ers. The big lineages treated these client groups as outsiders, referring to them disdainfully as ‘sands people' (shamin), ‘lowly households' (xiahu), ‘trivial people' (ximin) or ‘floating twigs' (shuliu chai). The main distinctions between dominant lineages and lowly households were less geographic and more social, economic and cultural. The latter resided on the fertile polders or ‘sand fields' (shatian) in impermanent mat sheds or on boats on adjacent streams. They were poor and illiterate, lacked genealogies and had no ancestor halls of their own. The dominant lineages denied them the right to permanently settle on or own land, and members of the dominant lineages did not marry with them. Whatever social relations there were between the two groups related solely to business matters.^{[907] [908]} The sands people were looked down upon by the rest of society as being uncivilised and having depraved customs, such as rock fights, and they too were the sorts of people who had reputations for ruthlessness, violence and banditry.

The rock fighters, who were described as ‘pugnacious youths' (dazai), were mostly adolescent males in their teens to early twenties. Because boys growing up in poor, lower-class families had to be tough just to reach adulthood, learning how to fight at an early age was essential for survival in a world that was competitive and unfair.

In traditional China many children in poor and marginalised families grew up in environments that approved and encouraged violent activities. The pugnacious youths fought to the cheers of parents and elders, who regarded brawling as a lively spectator sport. Contests were held during festivals and were bacchanalian occasions. In the nineteenth century the Reverend John Henry Gray witnessed several rock fights near Canton. One involved about 700 fighters and attracted a crowd who viewed the fracas from hillsides overlooking the field where the fighting took place. In the carnivalesque atmosphere combatants took time off from the fighting to buy soup and fruit from peddlers and to mingle with the crowds. On another occasion he witnessed a rock fight on Henan (Honam) island, in the suburbs of Canton, where so many people were seriously injured that the village elders called upon the police to put a stop to the melee, but the fighters drove off the police and continued the ruckus.^[910]

For most villagers rock fights were sacred affairs.

Along these same lines we find further evidence for this bloody vernal ritual from rock fights in eighteenth-century Yangjiang, a county on the western fringe of the Canton delta. There the annual rock fights were not held during the lunar New Year but rather during the Double-Five festival (held on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month) at a place known locally as the ‘Killing Mound'. The fifth lunar month, a time of seasonal change, had always been a time of rampant pestilence and dangers, especially in the malarial south. Rock fights were held on this festival, as Wolfram Eberhard has suggested, because of the need for ‘scapegoats' to ward off the ‘overwhelm­ing dark powers' that were present at this time of year. They actually predate the now more typical dragon boat races, and in fact trace their origins to bloody fertility rites of the Dai aborigines, who inhabited much of south China before the influx of the Han Chinese. To assure the fertility of their rice fields Dai gods demanded human sacrifice, the victim often being a Chinese settler who was kidnapped and fattened for this purpose. The scapegoat was dismembered and the body parts distributed among the villagers, who then interred them in their fields to ensure good harvests. Later, Eberhard explains, with the growing influence of Chinese civilisation a substitute for human sacrifice had to be found. Thus another form of ordeal became popular, the rock fights between rival villages that lasted until someone was seriously injured or killed. Wild singing and dancing accompanied the fights, and the whole affair ended with a great sex orgy in the nearby woods.

Both the rock fights and the later dragon boat races were believed to bring good luck and protection to the winners; both had prophylactic values for warding off evil and disease.^[912]