Yidu has a superior geographical position and is known as "the throat of Chu and Shu" and "the throat of Jing and Yi". The discovery of the North Stream Cultural Site in Honghuatao, China, confirmed that there were human activities in Yidu more than 7,500 years ago. The Yangtze River and Qingjiang River meet in the city, which endows Yidu with profound cultural heritage and rich cultural nutrients.
As a local folk art form in Yidu, folk stories are famous for their rich local style, rich cultural connotation, broad mass base and rich forms of expression, and are known as "the best in the county". Yidu folk stories originated from the people, rooted in tradition and expressed in Yidu dialect. There are three types of traditional Yidu folk story activities: one is to tell the past of Japan; The second is to tell stories; The third is to sing filial piety and tell good books. These forms provide rich nutrients and good reference for the innovation, maturity and perfection of Yidu stories.
After liberation, everything in Yidu prospered, and folk stories, as the most popular folk art form, became the most important content of people's cultural life. In order to be close to the times and sing praises to the new society, a group of full-time and amateur literary and art workers have deeply sorted out and innovated the traditional Yidu stories, removing dross and weeds, retaining the essence, paying attention to vividness, highlighting its local accent, nostalgia and interest, and gradually maturing one by one. The folk stories in Xinyidu inherit the popular, flexible and popular cultural characteristics of traditional folk stories, sublimate the drama of story plot, the action of performance and the distinctiveness of theme, and complete the historic transformation from oral circulation to written creation.
1995 Yidu won the title of "Hometown of Folk Stories in Hubei Province" in the naming activities of the first batch of folk art towns in Hubei Province. A stable story team is the basis for the survival and development of Yidu folk stories. For a long time, Yidu City regards the story team as the "propaganda team" for the construction of socialist spiritual civilization in rural areas, which has been firmly grasped and constantly cultivated and consolidated.
1996, Yidu Story Society was formally established. Villages and towns in the city have also set up story branches, and the president of the branch is the cultural stationmaster. Story Society has trained thousands of amateur storytellers, and the story team in the countryside composed of a group of excellent storytellers has been persisting for 14 years. With humor and wisdom, a group of excellent storytellers reappeared the legend of the new era in the streets, corners, factories and campuses, and set off the climax of story activities.
At present, there are 568 members of story societies at all levels in the city, and 26 training courses on story creation and speech have been held continuously. The city has basically formed a four-level story network with the city story club as the core, the township story branch as the hub, the village story team and storytellers as the foundation, and the majority of story lovers as the supplement. Story activities are stepping into a systematic and scientific development track. The spring breeze is elegant and can hold things, and the autumn water is not stained with dust.
Yidu Municipal Party Committee and Municipal Government attach great importance to the prosperity and development of folk stories. Yidu folk stories, as one of the "excellent projects" of local culture, have been included in the long-term planning of spiritual civilization construction in the city. /kloc-in the past 0/0 years, Yidu folk stories have been rushing out of the province and heading for the whole country. Story writers in Yidu have published more than 300 stories in national professional story newspapers such as story meeting, Quyi, China story, folk story, folk literature and ancient and modern story newspaper, among which 58 stories have been approved by the Ministry of Culture, China Quxie and Provincial Department of Culture. Edited and arranged by Yidu Cultural Bureau and Yidu Story Society, stories such as Yidu Folk Tales, New Stories, Yiyuan New Rhyme, The Voice of Midnight-Yidu Children's Stories, Yang Shoujing Stories and Yidu Place Names Stories have also been published one after another, with more than 2 million words so far. CCTV reported Yidu Story twice, Hubei TV filmed Yidu Story in 1998, and Yang Zijiang Audio-visual Publishing House and Yichang Three Gorges TV Station successively released Yidu Excellent Storyteller Album.
Xu Rongyao, a Yidu storyteller who is known as the "king of stories", told Yidu folk stories about Laoshe Teahouse in Beijing, and was cordially received by party and state leaders and encouraged by inscriptions from leaders of the Ministry of Culture. In May, 2000, Yidu was named as "the hometown of folk art (story) in China" by the Department of Social Culture and Graphics of the Ministry of Culture.