Table Of ContentLong Narrative Songs from the
Mongghul of Northeast Tibet
Texts in Mongghul, Chinese, and English
LI DECHUN (李得春, LIMUSISHIDEN) AND GERALD ROCHE
LONG NARRATIVE SONGS
FROM NORTHEAST TIBET
Long Narrative Songs from the
Mongghul of Northeast Tibet
Texts in Mongghul, Chinese, and English
Translated by Limusishiden
Edited and with an Introduction by Gerald Roche
https://www.openbookpublishers.com
© 2017 Li Dechun ( , Limusishiden) and Gerald Roche; Preface © 2017 Mark Turin
李得春
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Li Dechun ( , Limusishiden) and Gerald Roche, Long Narrative Songs from the
李得春
Mongghul of Northeast Tibet: Texts in Mongghul, Chinese, and English. Cambridge, UK: Open
Book Publishers, 2017, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0124
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World Oral Literature Series, vol. 8 | ISSN: 2050-7933 (Print); 2054-362X (Online)
ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-383-4
ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-384-1
ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-385-8
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-386-5
ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-387-2
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0124
Cover image: Golden Field (Nyingchi, Tibet, 2013) by Momo, CC BY 2.0, Flickr, http://bit.
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Authors’ biographies viii
Preface ix
Mark Turin
Introduction: Translanguaging in Song– Orature and Plurilingualism 1
in Northeast Tibet
Gerald Roche
1. The Ballad of Taipinggoor 27
2. The Ballad of Marshal Qi 97
3. Laarimbu and Qiimunso 151
4. The Song of the Dildima Bird 195
5. The Song of the Calf 223
6. The Crop-Planting Song 235
7. The Song of the Sheep 291
About the Texts 443
References 447
Selected Non-English Terms 449
Acknowledgements
Limusishiden would like to thank Jugui for her invaluable assistance in
preparing the manuscript by typing the Chinese and Mongghul texts.
Gerald Roche acknowledges the financial support of the Australian
Research Council for the Discovery Early Career Research Award project
DE150100388 (Ethnicity and Assimilation in China: The Case of the
Monguor in Tibet), which supported him while writing the introduction
and editing this book. He also thanks Timothy Thurston for reading and
commenting on a draft of the Introduction.
Authors’ Biographies
Li Dechun ( , Limusishiden) is a native Mongghul from Huzhu
李得春
Tu (Mongghul) Nationality Autonomous County. He currently works
in Qinghai University Affiliated Hospital, Qinghai Province, as a
chief surgeon. He has been researching and writing about Mongghul
traditional culture since 1989.
Gerald Roche is currently a Discovery Early Career Research Award
Fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Asia Institute. He is an
anthropologist, and researches linguistic and cultural diversity in
Tibet. Gerald’s publications include Introduction: The Transformation
of Tibet’s Language Ecology in the Twenty-first Century. International
Journal of the Sociology of Language, 245 (2017): 1–35. The Mangghuer
Nadun: Village Ritual and Frontier History on the Northeast Tibetan
Plateau, in The Silk Road: Interwoven History, Vol. 1: Long-distance Trade,
Culture, and Society, ed. by M. N. Walter and J. P. Ito-Adler (Cambridge:
Cambridge Institutes Press, 2015), pp. 310–47.
Preface
Mark Turin
The World Oral Literature Series was established to serve two primary
goals. First, by publishing original research through a range of innovative
digital platforms, the series is changing the shape, format and reach of
academic publishing in the fast-growing disciplines of anthropology
and linguistics, and connecting this important scholarship with a
distributed global readership. Launched in 2012 with a new edition of
Ruth Finnegan’s remarkable Oral Literature in Africa,1 and celebrating
its eighth volume with this publication, the breadth and quality of
the scholarship in this series has made the study of oral literature
more accessible. Second, a welcome consequence of the approach to
knowledge distribution taken by the World Oral Literature Series
and our partners at Open Book is the amplification of collaborative
publishing partnerships between Indigenous intellectuals and outside
scholars that more traditional academic imprints have been less able to
support. The cooperation between Dr. Li Dechun—a Mongghul surgeon
and established scholar—and anthropologist Gerald Roche is a case in
point; and these trilingual texts in Mongghul, Chinese, and English, in
the form of Long Narrative Songs from the Mongghul of Northeast Tibet,
offer a rich lesson in the lasting value of respectful collaboration.
Through Limusishiden and Roche’s partnership, the reader is
treated to a selection of songs collected on the northeast Tibetan Plateau
1 Freely available at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0025
© 2017 Mark Turin, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0124.08
