The initial title of the epic Hua Bao-Shan was Justice Troop (Gong Dao Jun), in which the content mainly retells the uprising of Justice Troop at Roar Hill in Wuxi during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. After the fall of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the Qing Empire, especially during the reign of Tongzhi Emperor, strictly prohibited this song. Those who violated the order of this forbidden song were imposed with the punishment of nine familial exterminations or decapitation. As a result, this song was passed down via “verbal conveyance and inner perception” - namely, the melody was fine-tuned and the tempo was changed using two fixed melody backbones under the premise of the existence of lyric rhymes.
This study selected the existing text of Hua Bao-Shan collected and arranged by Hai-rong Chu and sung by Tzu-rong Hua as the static text and chose the video recording file of the fourth generation of singer, Chian-chin Tang, as the dynamic text. Chapters 2 to 4 outline the research foundation of Hua Bao-Shan; “Chapter 5 Sentence Structure and Rhythm” and “Chapter 6 Investigation on Musicality” extend the research foundation to perform an in-depth investigation on the music part and deduce that the “Chiang Ju” - where number of words exceeds seven Chinese characters, the melody is strong, and the change in tempo is significant - is the key to the harmony between literature and music. Therefore, this investigation into the epic Hua Bao-Shan breaks through the framework of past studies on folk songs.