Vernacular Study－Paul Serruys’s folklore research in China－

For many years, the study of Chinese folklore by foreign scholars has been deeply interactive with the folklore of Chinese scholars. Therefore, it is necessary to define Chinese folklore as a science of Chinese folkway’s study. In the modern Chinese Folklore Movement, Paul Serruys, who lived in north China from 1936 to 1949, was such an important Chinese folklorist. As a missionary, he regarded academic research as a kind of worship to God and pursued the scientific nature of academic research. In the vernacular investigation of the rural area in the south of Datong City, oral riddles, children’s songs, folk stories and so on being increasingly important to him, and he carried out in-depth research on many folk matters in dozens of villages along the Sanggan river. In accordance with the basic law that human language acquisition starts from sound, his studies on local marriage customs, riddles, children’s songs and stories not only attached importance to dialects, but also marked the international phonetic symbols of local sounds one by one, made grammatical annotations, and then translated them into English or French for comparison and interpretation. He not only saw the difference between children’s riddles and adult’s riddles, children’s stories and adult’s stories, but also gained insight into the mutual influence and intertextuality of these genres. He saw not only the necessity and contingency of the rhymes like nicknames in the children, but also the association between the rhyme stories and children’s stories. The strong dialect color of his folklore makes it reasonable to regard it as “local accent folklore” or “vernacular study” as mentioned by Kunio Yanagita. Not only that, Paul Serruys’s studies also prompts us to reflect on what folklore is, and helps us to confront the folklore of Intangible Cultural Heritage in East Asian which are obviously full of anxiety but also like “distinguished discipline”.