“Awakened Lion” is a traditional Han Chinese folk culture that seamlessly blends martial arts, dance, music, and more, often performed with the accompaniment of drums, large gongs, small gongs, cymbals, and suona horns. Its origins can be traced back to the lion dances of the Tang Dynasty court; after the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, as Central Plains migrants moved southward, lion-dancing traditions spread into the Lingnan region. By the Ming Dynasty, the Awakened Lion had emerged in Guangdong, taking root inNanhai (present-dayFoshan City), where, during the Qing Dynasty, Southern-style martial arts were further integrated into the lion’s movements, giving rise to the concept of “martial arts and lion dancing united.” After 1900, with the spread of the “China Sleeps First, Then Awakens” theory, the “Auspicious Lion” gradually came to be known as the “Awakened Lion.” In 2006, the Awakened Lion was designated as one of the first batch of National Intangible Cultural Heritage items. However, despite scouring the entire internet, I couldn’t find any long-tailed Awakened Lions—so I decided to give it a try and created my own long-tailed version, which turned out quite well.