Form of gongs and drums performance

(1) The divination ceremony called "Tai Bu" in ancient times still retains "pinching divination" (following Zhuge Liang's "Six hexagrams before the horse" in the Three Kingdoms period) and "swearing"; (2) Folk belief ceremony is called "social book" by artists and "Taibao" by slang. Function is like "social drama". There are four kinds of social books, namely Waiting for Buddhist Books to reward the gods and protect Thailand, Receiving Factory when the city god visited the city in a large temple fair, Xie Bodhisattva to drive away evil spirits and epidemics for patients, and Pressing Incense Cases by witch doctors who specialize in intractable diseases. In these ceremonies, the main deities were General Liu Meng, the great god of expelling locusts, Yue Fei, the hero of resisting gold, and Yang Zhongyu, a loyal minister and good soldier. There was a passage in the ceremony about singing "social books", persuading people to be kind, romance novels, folklore and so on. (3) Folk Quyi, artists who rap "social books" in the late Qing Dynasty and early Ming Dynasty go to the teahouse bookstore to tell stories. Before the founding of the People's Republic of China, there were nearly a thousand bookstores and more than 300 artists in the suburbs and adjacent areas of Shanghai.