A Survey Of Top Activity Of The Yao Nationality In Guizhou Province

the Yao Nationality is a minority with a long history. It has created rich and colorful cultural arts during its development of national characteristics and accumulation of culture. The Yao people also perform and compete all kinds of ethnic sports activities besides basic production during their long-time social life, such as long-drum dance, bronze drum dance, whipping spinning top. They not only reflect production and life but also possess bright ethnic feature. That embodies Yao’s characteristics of ceaseless self-improvement. They also strive all the hard, have positive and optimistic attitude and are good at singing and dancing. Among them, whipping top which has been listed in the National Material Cultural Heritage List is one of the most distinguishing traditional sports activities of the Yao nationality. It incorporates competition, fitness and entertainment and has thoroughly blended in Yao’s national culture. The Yao nationality’s culture is indispensable to Chinese culture. The inheritance and development of Yao’s traditional sports is also an important part of protecting traditional ethnic sports.This paper adopts many methods to investigate and study whipping activity in Guizhou Province, such as documents, field investigation, observation and so on. Through a thorough grasp of the history and origin of the Yao nationality and whipping top, the craftsmanship and regulation of whipping top as well as the cultural evolution of whipping top. This paper has found some reasons which influence the development of whipping top in the process of modernization, including the corollary of social transformation, the competitive inhibition of Chinese traditional ethnic sports from western sports, less financial support from the government, imperfect competition mechanism, the big fluidity of top players. In light of these reasons, some suggestions will be put forward in this paper: the government’s support of finance and policy, the combination of school education and after-school training, training excellent athletes and discovering successors, the echo between media involvement and vigorous propaganda, the development and innovation of traditional ethnic sports resources, actively participating in international communication and carrying forward traditional ethnic sports culture. Through the survey of this paper, I hope it can afford lessons to inherit and develop the whipping top of the Yao nationality and make contributions to the prosperity and development of Yao’s culture.