The "Peasant Poetry Cultural Festival" of Shitun Town was founded in 1991. The Party Committee and Government of Shitun Town sets the Double Ninth Festival as the grand day of the cultural festival every year. With the theme of prospering local poetry culture and promoting the construction of two civilizations, this cultural festival vigorously promotes traditional folk culture, establishes a peasant poetry creation team and a peasant poetry cultural activity position, and relies on culture to set up a stage and perform operas economically.
The emergence and development of Shitun peasant poetry has rich cultural and historical heritage and accumulation. Since the Song Dynasty, there have been nearly a hundred well-documented local poets. They have written hundreds of poems praising the landscape of their hometown, chanting about the secular customs of the people, and criticizing the evil rule. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, especially in the 1970s, as a large number of educated youth joined the ranks and local high school graduates returned to their hometowns to work in agriculture, a new generation of educated farmers grew up rapidly, providing objective conditions for the creation of farmers' poetry.
In the summer of 1984, seven people including Huang Yunfeng, a farmer poetry enthusiast in Shitun Town, spontaneously established the "Farmer Poetry Society" and founded the mimeographed poetry magazine "Shitun Literature and Art". In July of the same year, Shitun Tun Town held the first "Shitun Farmers Poetry Competition", with more than 600 people participating, and achieved good results. In the spring of 1991, based on the development trend of Shitun folk poetry, the town party committee and government decided to edit the original "Shitun Literature and Art" into a poetry magazine "Little Stone Pile", "Peasant Poetry" to activate the cultural life of rural people and promote the construction of two civilizations. Hence the name "Peasant Poetry Culture Festival" was born.
After more than ten years of development, the "Peasant Poetry Culture Festival" has grown in scale and influence, and its creative team has also grown. In the early 1980s, the poetry creation team only had more than 20 people. Now it has more than 240 folk poetry creation backbones. Poetry interest groups or folk poetry association branches have been established in every village, primary and secondary school, and have attracted more than 3,000 poetry lovers. The Shitun Town Folk Poetry Association was established, the Shitun Town Folk Poetry Creation Room and Exhibition Hall were established, and poetry salons and exhibitions were often held; the number of its works increased and the quality improved. Nowadays, more than 1,000 poems are created in the town every year, and the quality has also been greatly improved. They are full of rich local flavor and characteristics of the times. So far, more than 600 works have been selected into the "Little Stone Pile" poetry magazine, a national More than 60 poems have been published in periodicals, more than 90 poems have been developed in provincial newspapers and periodicals, and more than 200 poems have been published in municipal newspapers and periodicals. Liu Liquan, a peasant poet from Songyuan Village in this town, won an award for his poems and was honored to be invited to Beijing to attend the commendation ceremony held by the China Prose Poetry Association.
For more than ten years, the Shitun Town Cultural Festival has become more and more prosperous. Activities such as poetry were mainly carried out, supplemented by Spring Festival couplets, dragon dances, puppet shows, literary evenings, art, calligraphy, photography exhibitions, colorful streets, lantern riddles, and creation and posting of couplets in every household. Its content is rich and diverse. The cultural festival reaches thousands of households and spreads throughout the land of Fujian.