Lion dance
A dance in which two performers inside a lion costume, one working the head and one the body, bring the lion to life to drums, gongs and cymbals. At Lunar New Year troupes visit homes and shops to bring luck and drive off harm.
Meaning
A lion has a head and a body, worked by two performers who move to the rhythm of the music, as Hong Kong’s intangible cultural heritage inventory describes it. In Chinese the dance is wushi (舞狮) or shizi wu, and the lion is an auspicious beast; China’s national register of intangible heritage says the dance carries people’s wishes to drive out disaster and harm and to call in good fortune. It is danced at the New Year and on other festive days, and Hong Kong lists festivals, gods’ birthdays, ceremonies and weddings. At Lunar New Year, the Library of Congress notes, troupes visit houses and shops to bring good luck and are given lettuce, because cài (菜, vegetable) sounds like cái (财, fortune), and red envelopes of money for the dancers. There are many forms, but two main families: the southern lion and the northern lion. Chinese communities have carried the dance abroad. The southern lion of Guangdong is danced among overseas Chinese across Southeast Asia, the register says, and Al Jazeera described the Cantonese style “on streets from Hong Kong to London”; Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore have troupes and styles of their own.
Origin and history
China’s national register traces the lion dance to the xiangren (象人) recorded in the Book of Han, which it takes to be the dance’s forerunner, and notes that Tang and Song poems describe lion dances vividly. One of those poems is Bai Juyi’s “Xiliang ji” (“The Xiliang performers”), from his New Music Bureau ballads. It describes masked foreigners and a pretend lion with a head carved from wood and a tail of silk, gilded eyes and teeth plated with silver, shaking its coat and flapping its ears “as if it had come ten thousand li from the shifting sands.”
The southern lion, xingshi (醒狮), grew out of the Tang court lion dance, the register says. After the Five Dynasties, settlers from the Central Plains brought lion dancing south to Lingnan, and the xingshi appeared in Guangdong under the Ming, in Nanhai county. It is martial art, dance and music together: the dancers open with a round of southern boxing, two dancers then play the lion, and a third, in the smiling mask of the Big-head Buddha with a palm-leaf fan, leads it on. The heart of the performance is cai qing, “picking the green”. Since the 1980s, the register adds, almost every township in Guangdong has had its own troupe.
The dance travelled with Chinese migrants and came back changed. When it was banned in China during the Cultural Revolution, Al Jazeera reported in 2022, overseas Chinese and Taiwanese kept it alive. Malaysians are widely credited with the stunt of leaping between high, narrow poles, which is now performed in competitions around the world and has made its way back to China.
Northern lion and southern lion
China’s register divides the surviving dances into two families. The southern lion has more martial skill and difficult technique and looks fierce and vigorous; the northern lion is endearing and its performance is mostly play. Al Jazeera, watching students at National Taiwan Sport University in 2022, described the more acrobatic northern or Beijing style, in which a pair of performers jump together on and off stacked platforms like an agile big cat, and the Cantonese southern style with its furry, full-headed mask, whose dancers make the lion blink, open its mouth and flirt with the crowd to the drums and cymbals. Competitions divide performances into northern and southern to standardise the judging, but the variations by place and by master are huge, the Taiwanese musician and scholar Tsun-Hui Hung told the network: “Chinese culture is not just one big culture, it’s more like an umbrella term.” The register itself names more than twenty local lion dances, from the Baizhifang lions of Beijing and the lions of Xushui in Hebei to the xingshi of Guangzhou, Foshan and Suixi.
The lion dance and the dragon dance
Count the dancers. A lion is a head and a body worked by two people. A dragon has a head, several body sections and a tail, each held up on a bamboo pole, and Hong Kong’s inventory describes a golden dragon about ten metres long that takes hundreds of performers to work; Britannica describes the dragon carried through the streets by numerous dancers. Hong Kong also has other two-person beasts that are easy to take for lions: the pixiu, an imaginary beast danced at gods’ birthdays and the openings of some mahjong schools, and the unicorn (qilin), danced in Punti, Hakka and Hoklo versions. In 2021 Hongkong Post put the lion, pixiu, unicorn and dragon dances on one set of stamps.
The lion of Bukcheong in Korea
Korea has a lion of its own, danced not at the New Year but at the first full moon. In Bukcheong, in Hamgyeongnam-do (now in North Korea), villagers put on lion masks on the night of the 15th day of the first lunar month, believing that a lion, a powerful animal, could drive away evil spirits, Korea’s Cultural Heritage Administration records. The play began with young men carrying torches on the night of the 14th; on the 16th the troupe visited the houses that had invited it, where the lion went into the inner room and the kitchen, made a show of eating someone alive, and bowed to the household gods. Parents set their children on its back, believing it would make them live longer. Performers from the North have kept the play up, mostly in Seoul, and it was designated a National Intangible Cultural Heritage in 1967.
Read next
- Next in Lunar New Year symbolsRed lanternsRed lanterns hung at doors and over streets for the Lunar New Year. The season ends on the 15th day of the first month with the Lantern Festival (Yuanxiao), the first full moon of the year, when lanterns are lit, carried and admired.
- In Chinese mythology and symbolsGuardian lions (foo dogs)A pair of stone or bronze lions guarding a gate in China: the male with a paw on a ball, the female with a paw on a cub. In English they are often called foo dogs or fu dogs, but they are lions.
See also
Red envelope (hongbao), Upside-down fu (福), Firecrackers.
Sources
- Intangible Cultural Heritage Inventory of Hong Kong (2024), Intangible Cultural Heritage Office, Intangible Cultural Heritage Inventory of Hong Kong, 2024 edition, Intangible Cultural Heritage Office, Leisure and Cultural Services Department, HKSAR, items 2.1–2.4, 3.5, 3.5.18, 3.60
- 狮舞（广东醒狮） (中国非物质文化遗产网), 国家级非物质文化遗产代表性项目名录, 项目编号 Ⅲ-5, 2006 (第一批), China Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection Center, Chinese National Academy of Arts, project page and related projects list
- Celebrating Lunar New Year with the Library of Congress’s Collections, Dianne Choie, Minerva’s Kaleidoscope (Library of Congress blog), February 2024, Library of Congress, blog post
- How the 1,000-year-old lion dance has moved with the times (Al Jazeera), Erin Hale, Al Jazeera, 1 February 2022, Al Jazeera, article text
- 西涼伎 (白居易), 白居易 (Bai Juyi), 西涼伎, 新樂府, Wikisource transcription, Wikisource, poem text
- Bukcheong Saja Noreum (Lion Mask Dance of Bukcheong) (Cultural Heritage Administration), Heritage Search, National Intangible Cultural Heritage, Cultural Heritage Administration (Korea Heritage Service), heritage record
- Hongkong Post to issue “Intangible Cultural Heritage - Dragon and Lion Dance” special stamps, HKSAR Government press release, 10 February 2021, Government of the Hong Kong SAR, press release
- Chinese New Year (Encyclopaedia Britannica), Tamanna Nangia and the Editors, “Chinese New Year”, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, article text
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research
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