New fishing season starts at Erjiegou, Panjin with grand ceremony

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The Fourth China Panjin Erjiegou Start-Fishing Festival kicked off Monday with a grand ceremony at Erejiegou's Yu Yan Town, marking the lift of the winter fishing moratorium and the start of a new fishing season in Erjiegou, a fishing village on China's northmost coastline.

Before the sea sacrificial ceremony began, a series of art performances featuring Panjin's intangible cultural heritages were staged to illustrate the past and present of Erjiegou's long-standing Yu Yan culture for tourists. Yu Yan is the generic term for local sea fishers who do not settle in one place because of their fishing trade.

Then accompanied by people who played traditional musical instrument like suona horn, a woodwind instrument, who performed Yangko, a popular rural folk dance, and who sang the Da Qiang Hao Zi, a kind of work song of local villagers, the person who dressed up as the sacrificial ceremonial head made the sacrificial oration and performed sacrificial rites to the sea and the dragon king, the water and weather god. Local villagers piously bowed, burned incenses and prostrated themselves to pray for safe sea journey and fishing harvest.

Immediately after, as several hundred fishers with burning incenses in their hands devoutly prostrated themselves and the gong and drum played loud, nearly a hundred fishing ships set sail together from the wharf toward the heartland of the Liaodong Bay. Fishers threw the sacrificial offerings to the sea and cast their first fishing net this fishing season. Ashore, their families set off firecrackers to pray for good luck.

The Start-Fishing Festival was also a market fair where Erjiegou's seafood was available as well as more than 40 other kinds of local food, all of which are intangible cultural heritages like the Hu Family Roast Chicken and the Feng Qiao Wine. Besides, tourist could also choose among over 20 kinds of handicrafts like straw plaited articles, reed painting, paper-cutting, clay pottery and Manchurian embroidery if they want to buy souvenirs.