The styles

One root, many labels

Every southern lion in this guide descends from the Pearl River Delta awakened lion (醒獅, Cant. sing2 si1, Mand. xǐngshī) that Chapter 3 follows through Qing and Republican Guangdong. Inside Guangdong it had already divided once by the late nineteenth century, into a Foshan type and a Heshan type. Almost everything else in this chapter is the same animal meeting a different place, a different kung fu school or a different set of contest rules.

The sources point to a few forces behind the later branches. Emigrants carried the lion of their home district: Heshan clansmen and coolies took the Heshan lion to Singapore, and a Heshan society in Cholon (Saigon's Chinatown) registered as the Heshan natives' association in 1943.¹ Hong Kong paper-craft shops, busy from the late 1940s to the 1970s, supplied heads to overseas Chinese associations, American Chinatowns included, that could not buy from the mainland during the embargo.² Governments intervened at different times: Indonesia banned open Chinese customs from 1967 to 2000,³ Malaysia restricted lion dance for about two decades after 1969,⁴ and Hong Kong added a police-permit section to its law in 1981.⁵ Contests then rewrote the rules: Malaysia's first lion contest (1983) and its metal poles produced the high-pole lion, a lighter head and a shorter body.⁴⁶ Chapters 12, 13 and 14 tell those stories; this chapter sorts out what the resulting styles look like and how to tell them apart.

What "style" actually means

When a coach says "Fut San" or "Hok San" the word can mean four different things, and they do not always travel together.

• The head. The shape of the forehead, mouth and horn, and how heavy the head is. This is the most visible meaning, and the one head makers and sellers in Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore and Malaysia use.⁷⁸
• The movement. Heavy, low, kung fu stances (Fut San) against light cat-like steps (Hok San). Sources describe this as the biggest difference between the two.⁹
• The drum system. Named patterns and the way the drum cues the lion. Heshan sources claim a drum tradition of their own, but the evidence for it is mixed (see the seven-star aside below). Lo Leung drumming from Macau and Hong Kong is a further system, and a Zhongshan Daily feature of 21 December 2024 traces its fast tempo to a television director's 1980s demand that a routine be cut from about thirty minutes to five.¹⁰
• The team's culture. The kung fu school, clan hall or sports club behind it, and the contests it enters.

A Hok San head can be danced with Fut San footwork, and a Fut San head can be danced to Sar Ping drumming. A practitioner blog from Australia lists the beats now heard side by side at events as Hok San, Fut San (Hong Kong style or variations), Vietnamese and Lo Leung (Macau) beats, and adds that there is no good or bad, only evolution.¹¹ A team that mixes these traditions is combining things the sources treat as separate, a combination that Chapter 13 documents in the United States.

Fut San (Foshan)

Fut San (佛山, Cant. fat6 saan1, Mand. Fóshān, "Buddha Mountain"; also spelled Fat San, Fo Shan or Futsan; Vietnamese Phật Sơn) is the older of the two Cantonese schools and the one most closely tied to kung fu halls.¹²⁹ Foshan and Nanhai local pride is strong: the Xiqiao town authorities describe themselves as the source of the awakened lion and repeat the saying that every awakened lion in the world comes from Nanhai.¹³ The detailed history is in Chapter 6; here is how the style looks and moves.

Movement and character

The characteristic term is 硬橋硬馬 (Cant. ngaang6 kiu4 ngaang6 maa5, "hard bridge, hard horse"): strong arms and a strong, low horse stance. A Heshan government feature, which has every reason to stress the contrast, calls the Foshan lion imposing and the Heshan lion nimble.⁹ Others agree. A Japanese explainer says Foshan movement is modelled on the tiger and Heshan on the cat.¹⁴ A Hanoi television documentary calls Phật Sơn "tiger-leopard form" (hổ báo hình), strong and suited to ground work, and Hạc Sơn quick and light, suited to height.¹⁵ Paris practitioners describe Fat San as the more aggressive fighting lion and Hok San as somewhat friendlier, and the same inventory says the structured dance first appears around Foshan, built on eight movements drawn from eight basic kung fu principles.¹⁶ A Hong Kong newspaper sums the two up the same way, Fut San as mainly kung fu and Hok San as more playful and expressive.¹⁷

National heritage-portal articles on Guangdong lion dance, which draw on Foshan-region practice, describe an opening set of Southern boxing (開樁, "opening the stake"), footwork based on Southern-fist horse stances, head actions such as opening the eyes, washing the whiskers, licking the body and shaking the fur, and the 採青 (cai qing, the green) as the essence of the awakened lion.¹⁸

The Foshan tutorial series (from a Huang Feihong lion association in Foshan, with burned-in Chinese subtitles) shows what this means in practice, as paraphrased here. The base posture is the "three bends" (legs, waist, arms), and the four-level horse stance (四平馬, sei3 ping4 maa5) is home base, to which the lion returns after every transition. The qilin step (麒麟步) is done low, and the teacher names standing up as the common fault. The hanging horse (吊馬, "golden rooster", one leg raised) is how the lion tests the green with a foot. Training is martial arts first, then months of holding the stance. Before raising the lion the player gives a martial salute, here the Hung Kuen salute. Old lions had tails of three to five metres, so the head could not lean on the tail, and the old double-yin grip carried the head below shoulder height.¹⁹

The Fut San head

Chinese Wikipedia describes the Foshan head as larger and rounder, with a broad, commanding forehead and a wider mouth.²⁰ Singapore's Chinese Cultural Centre adds more pom-poms, visible upper teeth, a horn on a large round forehead, and a fierce look that personifies Guan Yu and Zhang Fei.²¹ A US practitioner demonstration notes that the forehead is so high that, seen from the front, it almost covers the horn, and that older heads carry many small balls and sometimes eagles around the brow.²² A kung fu school site adds fin- and gill-like ornaments of varying shapes and numbers.²³

A peer-reviewed study of heads made at Suixi measured the profile. The Foshan mouth opens wide, about 99 degrees, with the upper lip raised; the nose tilts up; and the pointed horn bends forward and uses stiff horsehair. The study calls the distinctive front view an upward-triangle mouth with a garlic-shaped nose.²⁴ English Wikipedia says traditional Fo Shan heads had pop-up teeth and tongue, swivelling eyes, gilt rims, bristles instead of fur, and a very long tail with a white underside, bells and a square diamond pattern, all heavier than modern heads, which use fur, shorter tails, fixed eyes and no bells.¹²

The national heritage register classes Foshan heads into three types: the civil lion (文獅, Liu Bei and Guan Yu faces, gentle), the martial lion (武獅, Zhang Fei's face, fierce) and the youth lion (少獅, a mask-type for children's play).²⁵ No source consulted measures head weights side by side. A Foshan family workshop gives about 3 kg for a ground-dancing head and says heads for poles must be lighter, with fewer paper layers.²⁶ Colours and the Three Kingdoms characters are in Chapter 11; head making is in Chapter 6.

Suixi and the "new-school" Foshan lion

Chinese Wikipedia sorts southern lions into the Heshan, Foshan and Suixi awakened lions, calling Suixi a "new-school Foshan lion".²⁰ Suixi is in Zhanjiang, in western Guangdong. Its heads use fewer tassels, and wool, rabbit hair or plush instead of horsehair, which cuts cost and weight, and its dancers developed the progression from ground lion to bench, high-platform, high-pole and pile lions, with stakes near three metres.²⁴¹⁸ A provincial inheritor says the Suixi museum's head proportions have become the worldwide standard; that is a self-report.²⁴

Hok San (Heshan)

Hok San (鶴山, Cant. hok6 saan1, Mand. Hèshān, "Crane Mountain"; Vietnamese Hạc Sơn) is a county-level city under Jiangmen in the Wuyi emigrant region of Guangdong. Its seat is Shaping (沙坪, Cant. saa1 ping4), the "Sar Ping" of the drum lineage taught in your sessions.⁹ Chapter 5 covers the founder, the lineage and the 18 drum patterns in full. This section covers the style.

Cat step and eight emotions

Heshan and Singapore sources credit Feng Gengchang (馮庚長, b. 1852 in Dalang village, Shaping) with creating the style after training in Foshan, by keeping and studying cats. The result is the "lion form, cat step" (獅型貓步), eight emotions (joy, anger, alarm, happiness, doubt, drunkenness, sleep and waking), seven "musts" (the lion is suspicious of objects, glad at greens, startled by red, bites posts, pulls wood, plays at water and probes steps), and a seven-star drum method.⁹²⁷ The government portal names three characteristics of Heshan lion art: the cat step, the eight emotions and the seven-star drum.²⁷ The footwork system is called 五馬十八步 ("five stances, eighteen steps"); no written source found names the five or lists the eighteen. Sar Ping teaching materials organise the foundation as eighteen drum patterns, each danced with its own lion actions and steps, together with seven stances of footwork, eight lion expressions, the raising of the lion (Hei Si) and a set routine (toulo). Read that way, the eighteen steps follow the eighteen drum routes, though no written source says so, and those materials count seven stances rather than five (see Chapter 5 and Chapter 8).⁹

Still as a clever cat waiting for a mouse to leave its hole; moving as nimbly as a cat pouncing. (靜如靈貓伺鼠出穴，動如靈貓捕鼠敏捷)

Heshan lion motto, quoted in a Singapore Hok San Association essay and a Heshan government feature

The Hok San head

Singapore's Chinese Cultural Centre describes a flatter head with a mouth like a duck's beak that does not show the upper teeth, a gentler, more reserved look and the Liu Bei personification.²¹ Chinese Wikipedia describes it as flatter and longer, with a mouth flat and protruding like a duck's bill, hence the insider name "duck-bill lion" (鴨嘴獅, aap3 zeoi2 si1).²⁰ Heshan sources prefer the term "frog-mouth lion" (蛤乸嘴獅, gap3 naa2 zeoi2 si1) and list the full set of features: blue-green nose, upright eyes, carp forehead, fist-shaped horn, lotus-pod eye tops, cat-whisker face, ragged ears and a "five-bat back" (五蝠背, bats being a pun on blessing, 福). The main colours are blue-green and yellow, and the Liu Bei lion (yellow with a green nose) is the signature and most popular model.⁹ The Suixi study measured the Heshan mouth at only about 22 degrees open, with a flatter nose and a fist-shaped horn of soft, dense sheep wool.²⁴ A Jiangmen newspaper credits Feng and a collaborator, Chen Dou (陳斗), with building the head from a cat-head image, which is why it is also called the "Chan Dou lion" (a single-source report).²⁹

The San Francisco lion historian David Lei describes the Hok San head as the duck-bill lion with a very narrow mouth, lighter and narrower than the Fut San head and the type now used mainly for competition, with fewer pom-poms because a dropped pom-pom costs points.³⁰ Paris practitioners likewise say the lighter Hok San head suits the most acrobatic dancing.¹⁶ In Singapore, Hok San elders in the 1950s softened the fierce lion with white eyebrows instead of black and a body cut from about 12 feet to 6 feet, according to a 2023 book review.³¹ Hok San Association teachers describe fluid, cat-like movement with the lion standing on its hind legs, and students who had to master drum, cymbals and gong before touching the costume.³²

Hok San drumming

Heshan authorities present the seven-star method (七星鼓法, cat1 sing1 gu2 faat3) as a major innovation in southern lion drumming.⁹ A 2011 practitioner blog says Hok San drumming is almost completely different from Fut San drumming and keeps returning to a "doong doong" beat that stands for a heartbeat, with the drummer circling the arms; a Singapore polytechnic exhibition repeats this.³⁴³⁵ Malaysia's national heritage register lists three-star, five-star and seven-star rhythms, the seven-star rhythm having four beats of which the first three are each divided into six shorter beats.³⁶ Chapter 7 works through the drumming.

How Hok San travelled

The Singapore story has several dates that probably describe different things: an 1888 inscription, quoted second-hand in a Hok San Association essay, mentioning Heshan villagers dancing the lion at seasonal rites; a coolie troupe, Yi Yi Tong, in 1919 or 1920; and the clan association with its lion troupe in 1939.¹²¹ In the United States, Lei says he saw no Hok San lion in San Francisco until 1973, when the Yau Kung Moon troupe introduced it, and that the older Chinatown lion was Fut San.³⁰ Chapter 13 follows the later spread of Sar Ping drumming and Malaysian-made heads.

Heshan lion art itself is a Guangdong provincial heritage item (county, Jiangmen and provincial second batch, all 2007). This guide found no national listing under its own name; the national awakened-lion item (2006) names Foshan, Suixi and Guangzhou.⁹³⁸ Heshan lion-head making was listed at county level in 2017 and at Jiangmen level in 2022.²⁹

Fut-Hok, the hybrid

Fut-Hok (佛鶴, Cant. fat6 hok6, Mand. Fóhè, "Fo He"; Vietnamese Phật Hạc) combines features of both schools. Singapore's Chinese Cultural Centre says it originated in the lion troupe of the Kong Chow Wui Koon (岡州會館, gong1 zau1 wui6 gun2), a Xinhui clan association, where veterans of both styles learned from each other.²¹ A Singapore centre official told a Straits Times syndication that the Fo He lion is unique to Singapore.³⁹ Yet Ho Chi Minh City workshops sell Phật Hạc heads as a third model alongside Phật Sơn and Hạc Sơn, and a Neidan Academy video says some modern teams still use a combination of the two lions that can be called Fut Hok.⁷⁴⁰

The look is a mix, and two sources that describe it do not match. A US practitioner demonstration says the Fut-Hok has the Fut San pop-out forehead and curved mouth with the rounded Hok San horn.²² A Vietnamese head maker says the mouth is only slightly curved, the forehead sits between the two, the horn is round like Hok San, and the quickest tell is eyes longer than on either parent.³³ The Singapore craftsman Henry Ng makes Hok San, Fut San and Fut Hock heads of 80 to 86 cm and specialises in the lightest heads.⁸ A Singapore exhibition on local lion heritage gave separate sections to the Foshan, Heshan and Fut-Hok lions, the Zhou-family lion, the northern lion, the Hakka green lion, the Hainan lion and the Fujian green lion, which shows how local the classification is.⁴¹

Telling the heads apart on the table

This quick key combines the sources above. Check several features together, because modern heads blur them and individual makers vary.

Sources for the key: ^2122332416. The Vietnamese maker's walk-through of the three heads on real examples is at Phân biệt các mẫu lân Phật Sơn - Hạc Sơn - Phật Hạc - Mengkok - Ngũ Tổ @ 02:05 (Fut San), @ 03:36 (Hok San) and @ 05:52 (Fut-Hok); the audio is Vietnamese.

The big comparison table

Cells say "not documented" where this guide found no source. The rows below the first three are labels in use, not single designs; their entries are explained in the sections that follow.

Hung Gar, Choy Li Fut and other school lions

Hung Gar (洪家, Cant. hung4 gaa1, also Hung Kuen), Choy Li Fut (蔡李佛, coi3 lei5 fat6) and Jow Ga (周家) are kung fu systems, not head types. Their lions are almost always Fut San-pattern lions, and the differences sit in salutes, stances, drum names and team habits. The sources are thin here, and none describes a Hung Gar head or a Choy Li Fut head as a distinct design.

• Foshan halls. A 2021 study of Foshan's lion tradition says Chan Heung of Xinhui opened a Choy Li Fut branch in Foshan in 1850, that it was renamed the Hung Sing Kwoon (鴻勝館) after Zhang Yan took over in 1851 (dates conflict with other accounts), and that members were mostly workers in dyed paper, copper foil, bamboo, weaving and portering.⁴⁹
• School notes on who dances what. A kung fu school's teaching notes, whose web address could not be recovered, say the Heshan lion is danced by the Jow Ga and Pak Mei (白眉) schools and the Foshan lion, with its broad face, big mouth and stable waist and horse, by Hung Gar and Choy Li Fut.⁵⁰ Singapore's Chinese Cultural Centre is recorded as describing a Jow Ga hybrid lion with a Foshan-like round forehead and a Heshan duck-bill mouth.²¹ A "Zhou-family lion" from Shafu village in Xinhui (yellow base, white beard, duck-bill mouth, rounded horn) appears in a kung fu school article; no source consulted confirms it is the same lion as the Jow Ga hybrid.²⁸⁴¹
• Drums. The 2011 Lion Blogs post says Choy Li Fut lion beats are somewhat different from traditional Fut San beats and that Hung Ga and Jow Ga have their own variants.³⁴ Hong Kong videos show a Hung Gar seven-star drum and Choy Li Fut drum showpieces, but their patterns have not been studied for this guide.³⁷
• Salutes. The Foshan tutorial series says each school opens with its own fist salute; its teacher uses the Hung Kuen salute.¹⁹
• Abroad. Seattle's Mak Fai association (established 1974) teaches Hung Sing Choy Lay Fut kung fu and lion dance, and Massachusetts has a Hung Gar school whose lion drumming is published as "Futsan Lion Dance Drumming" (Yee's Southern Lions, Quincy).⁵¹⁵² In Vietnam, the Chợ Lớn hall Thắng Nghĩa Đường is a Choy Li Fut (Thái Lý Phật) lineage, the clearest Vietnamese link to the Fut San family of arts.⁵³ Chapter 13 has more on school-based American troupes.

Hong Kong style

"Hong Kong style" is a working label with no agreed definition. The sources show what Hong Kong people say about their own lion, who made the heads, and which drum and contest culture the label points to.

The Hong Kong Chinese Martial Arts Dragon and Lion Dance Association says lion art came from China and was developed in Singapore and Malaysia, and that in the 1980s those countries first fused the southern and northern lions, shortened the lion cloth, and danced the southern lion with northern movements (南獅北舞, naam4 si1 bak1 mou5), creating harder cheng and contests.⁴⁴ (The cheng, 青, is the lettuce and red envelope the lion takes; see Chapter 10.) The association also says the Urban Council made lion art a sport in 1991 and that it ran five world lion dance invitationals.⁴⁴

On heads, the Hong Kong paper-craft trade matters more than any design label. It boomed from the late 1940s to the 1970s, and because of the embargo overseas Chinese groups bought lion heads, dragons and lanterns from Hong Kong shops.² The master Hui Ka-hung (許嘉雄, workshop 雄獅樓) says a Hong Kong head fetched about HK$15,000 in the 1970s and 1980s, equal to six or seven taels of gold, until mainland makers undercut prices by about 75 percent; only three or four craftsmen can still make a head from start to finish, and he designs light, agile heads because modern lion dance is a sport.⁵⁴ The sources give no description of a Hong Kong head type, only that Hong Kong makers built Foshan and Heshan patterns.

The drum label most tied to Hong Kong is Lo Leung (羅梁, lo4 loeng4), a fast, dense, rim-heavy style named for the sworn brothers Lo Yuet Sing and Leung Kwok Wing, who ran martial halls in Guangdong in the 1930s and then moved to Macau, where the Lo Leung Athletic Association dates from 1938 (renamed in 1948).⁵⁵¹⁰ A Zhongshan newspaper interview says the team represented Macau at a 1984 international lion competition run by TVB and the Hilton, and that television directors kept asking for more danger each year, which unintentionally produced the fast Lo Leung lion and drum style; that causal account is the interviewee's.¹⁰ Practitioner text, seen only in search-result summaries, equates Lo Leung with the 遍地金錢鼓 ("money all over the ground" drum).

Your Hong Kong playlist ("HK Drumming", 18 items) points to the same culture. From titles and metadata alone, it holds two videos titled 罗梁鼓 (Lo Leung drum), several Hong Kong traditional contests that appear to be ground-cheng rather than high-pole events (the 2017 Hung Hei-gun memorial cup, the 雄獅樓盃 of 2019 and 2023, the 2019 荃城盃 and 濟眾堂杯), a routine called "Oath of the Peach Garden" from a Chau Hon-hing association troupe, and an Australian team's "Hong Kong drunken" routine.⁵⁶ Those videos were not watched for this guide. Hong Kong's traditional contests use set ground cheng such as the snake, crab, plate and drunk cheng, vocabulary that also appears in Teochew lion dance (see below).⁵⁷⁵⁸

The modern Malaysian and competition head

Malaysia is the other great head exporter and the home of the high-pole lion. The Selangor master Siow Ho Phiew (蕭斐弘), who has made heads since 1986, uses a rattan skeleton, chosen over bamboo for flexibility and durability, with wire joints, resin paper, lacquer, fur and pom-poms, and exports to Australia, France, the US and China.⁴² Lim Meng Kok, who made his first head in 1982 when his troupe could not afford one, has made about 6,000, weighing up to 7 kg and priced from RM2,000 to RM9,000.⁵⁹ A 1991 newspaper quote relayed by an academic study says Malaysian heads are lighter than Taiwanese, mainland and Hong Kong heads, and that Malaysian dancers attempt more daring tricks at height; the same study says troupes adopted a gold-and-red head after Jackie Chan's 1980 film Young Master and used gold and silver lions in contests from the 1990s.⁶

Malaysia's 2025 heritage register names Foshan and Heshan as the two southern types in Malaysian associations.³⁶ In Penang and Medan, Tan Sooi Beng found the Fo Shan lion the more popular and aggressive, with the He Shan lion beside it, and heads of papier-mache over bamboo weighing about six kilos around 2003.⁶ The pole contest grew from the Kuala Lumpur competition of 1983; Kun Seng Keng of Muar (founded 1988) took prototype metal poles to a Hong Kong contest in 1992, and a 1993 standard set pole heights between one and three metres.⁶²⁰⁴ Kun Seng Keng won or shared 12 of the 13 Genting World Lion Dance Championships from 1994 to 2018, and Singapore's Yi Wei team won the 2023 and 2025 editions, according to Chinese Wikipedia's results table.⁶⁰ Tan describes a typical pole routine: the lion sees a valley with a plum-blossom flower, bows three times, jumps up a row of 20-foot poles (hills), crosses a rope bridge (river), jumps another pole to take the green and returns, showing fear, anger at the height and joy playing in the river.⁶ Chapter 14 covers the rules and scoring.

Regional types inside Guangdong and the southern relatives

The two big schools are not the whole of southern lion dance. This table lists the other types the sources document; it is a map of names, not a full survey.

Vietnam: múa lân, Lân Quảng Đông and the Hoa lion

In southern Vietnam the lion is a lân, a qilin (麒麟), and the dance is múa lân. English Wikipedia says múa sư tử refers to the northern style and múa lân to the southern one. A Vietnamese newspaper says the difference is regional, with the north saying múa sư tử for everything and the south saying múa lân. Both uses coexist, so "in the South the lion is the lân" is the safe summary.¹²⁴⁵ Vietnamese Wikipedia calls the southern Chinese lion Lân Quảng Đông, "Cantonese lion", and gives Feng Gengchang the title "Cantonese Lion King" (Vua Lân Quảng Đông). That page is largely machine-translated from English Wikipedia.⁶⁷

The professional lion world is the Hoa (ethnic Chinese) community of Saigon-Chợ Lớn. Cantonese groups dance the southern lion, Hokkien groups the dragon and the sacred hẩu, Teochew groups the sư, and Hakka troupes exist as well.⁶⁷¹⁵⁶⁴ Troupes are halls (đường, 堂), tied to martial schools: Nhơn Nghĩa Đường (仁義堂) is the most frequent international representative, Thắng Nghĩa Đường is Choy Li Fut, and a Hoa Vu video describes Saigon's 1950s hierarchy of beard colours.⁵³⁶⁸ The art entered Vietnam's national intangible heritage list on 30 March 2025 as the lion-qilin-dragon art of the Hoa people of Ho Chi Minh City.⁶⁹

Which head is which

Head makers in Ho Chi Minh City sell three types, Phật Sơn, Hạc Sơn and Phật Hạc, in bamboo, rattan and paper.⁷ One supplier lists Phật Sơn as curved mouth, high forehead and pointed horn, and Hạc Sơn as round mouth, small nose, low forehead and a curved, rounded horn.⁷⁰ A Hanoi television documentary divides the Nam sư into the same two schools and gives the tiger-leopard against cat contrast quoted above (Lịch sử Nghệ thuật múa Lân Sư Rồng @ 06:26).¹⁵ In the sources consulted, Vietnamese press articles about troupes describe lions by Tứ Linh features (a dragon's jaw, the lân's nose, phoenix brows, turtle and fish details) and do not use the Phật Sơn and Hạc Sơn labels; the labels live with head makers, sellers and Vietnamese Wikipedia.⁴⁵⁷⁰

Troupe rank shows in the beard. A Vietnamese daily says a troupe must be 30 years old to use a silver-bearded lân: silver or white marks the chief, reddish-blond a second rank, green or black the junior troupes, and breaking the rules caused fights, especially in Saigon before 1975.⁴⁵ A recorded memoir of 1950s Saigon, one man's recollection, describes five white-beard lions tied to districts and gang bosses.⁶⁸ This guide treats this as parallel to Cantonese white-beard and black-beard rules; colours are in Chapter 11.

The figure who leads the lân is Ông Địa, a pot-bellied, fan-waving earth god who is also taken as Maitreya, the counterpart of the Cantonese big-head Buddha.⁴⁵¹² The Vietnamese lion has two seasons: Tết (Lunar New Year, with shop openings and the Chợ Lớn lantern-festival parade), which is the paid, professional season, and Mid-Autumn, the children's festival with children's street lion troupes.⁴⁵

Beyond the Hoa lion, Vietnam has other forms, such as a Huế court dance of paired qilin described on Vietnamese Wikipedia and the Tày and Nùng cat lion in the table above.⁶⁷

No source consulted records a Vietnamese Genting World title or participation. Vietnamese troupes took first and second at Singapore's 10th International Lion Dance Competition in January 2017, and two golds and a silver at the 7th Asian championship in Indonesia in 2025.⁷¹⁶⁹ The sources give no Vietnamese drum pattern names and no firm link to the Sar Ping system, though a Đà Nẵng troupe posted a Sar Ping "Tam Bou" lesson in 2015.⁷² Chapter 12 has the wider Vietnamese story.

Indonesia: barongsai

In Indonesia the Chinese lion is barongsai, from barong (the Balinese mask tradition) and sai (Hokkien for lion); the word exists only in Indonesia.³ Indonesian sources use the Fut San and Hok San labels, and "Peking sai" for the northern lion. Most Chinese Indonesians are Hokkien or Hakka (a 1982 estimate gives about 1.3 million Hokkien, 640,000 Hakka and 180,000 Cantonese), so the Cantonese-derived southern lion is a cultural import more than an ancestral dialect form.⁷³

Presidential Instruction 14/1967 barred open Chinese customs, and Decree 6/2000 of 17 January 2000 revoked it; Imlek (Chinese New Year) became an optional holiday in 2001 and a national holiday from 2003.⁷⁴ Lion dance survived in pockets: Semarang's Sam Poo Kong temple, the Bogor Cap Go Meh celebration from 1970 under a permit letter for that event only, and temple-internal troupes such as Surabaya's Boen Bio, which practised without cymbals or gongs.³⁷⁵⁷⁶ A sports federation, FOBI, formed on 9 August 2012 and came under the national sports committee (KONI) in 2013; Indonesia translated the international rules and added a drum category in 2017.⁷⁶⁷⁷³

The performers have changed. Moch. Choirul Arif found that before 2000 Surabaya performers were mostly ethnic Chinese and after 2000 mostly Muslim or Christian Javanese and Madurese, and a 2022 case study of Surabaya's Surya Naga team reports about 20 percent Chinese-descent members.⁷⁸⁴⁶ Surya Naga danced both Fo Shan and He Shan lions, moved from horse-stance-first to music-and-posture-first training after the reform era, and notes that international rules cap poles at three metres.⁴⁶ A pesantren (Islamic boarding school) troupe in Lamongan performed in 2023 with "Hosan (duck)" and "Faksan (cat)" heads.⁴⁷

The northern lion, in brief

Using this with a team

Still unresolved

• A written description of a "Malaysian-style" or "Hong Kong style" head, and what "Mengkok" means.
• When and where the Fut-Hok hybrid began.
• Whether the seven-star drum is a Heshan invention, and how the drumming of Fut San, Choy Li Fut, Hung Gar and Jow Ga differs beyond the names.
• Whether the four-school list (Nanhai, Heshan, Yingde, Leizhou) is a real classification.
• Measured weights of Fut San and Hok San heads, and Vietnamese drum pattern names.