A Nose Flute with Six Holes

On 24 March 2020, Binglang Valley in Baoting hosted an online presentation of Hainan's intangible cultural heritage with a San Yue San theme. The event combined demonstrations on site with online sharing. As the melody of the Li firewood-gathering dance sounded among the betel-nut groves, Huang Zhao'an played a six-hole nose flute he had made himself. He also brought a dingdong, a mouth bow and other traditional bamboo-and-wood instruments, moving between different ways of playing them. The presentation brought these sounds to audiences beyond the grove.

Huang told the reporter that he began field visits in 1988, collecting and researching Li bamboo-and-wood music. The phrase matters because the instruments did not arrive as a finished museum set: his work involved going into villages, locating objects and songs, then learning how they could be played and made. The article says he had by then made more than 50 kinds of instruments, including dingdong, kougong, kobai and zhuoba. It describes the six-hole nose flute as an adaptation of an older form, and notes that the improved instruments received national patents. The patents belong to his work adapting instruments; his collecting, making and teaching kept the sounds in circulation.

The national intangible-heritage registry identifies Huang as a Li musician born in Baoting and names Li bamboo-and-wood instruments as his representative project. It records that he first learned instruments such as the erhu and suona in the bayin ensemble organized by his father, then turned toward instruments of his own community as he grew older. That sequence joins a family beginning to a county-level cultural record without flattening the instruments into a single generic category. The registry also says he collected and arranged instruments and melodies while travelling between villages, then developed the techniques to perform them fluently.

The 2020 report says Huang taught traditional Li instrument performance at schools in Baoting, including Sandao Middle School. His undated national registry profile also records long-term teaching in primary and secondary schools and government-organized training classes. Binglang Valley was one setting in which his playing was presented to the public. Lessons in Baoting schools carried the work into another setting, where students could learn the instruments beyond a festival presentation.