What is "pinghua"

Pinghua (; sometimes disambiguated as /, ) is a group of related varieties of Chinese spoken mainly in parts of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, with some speakers in Yunnan province. Pinghua is a trade language in some areas of Guangxi, where it is spoken as a second language by speakers of Zhuang languages. Some speakers of Pinghua are officially classified as Zhuang, and many are genetically distinct from the Han majority of Chinese speakers. The northern subgroup of Pinghua is centered on Guilin and the southern subgroup around Nanning. Southern Pinghua has several notable features such as having four distinct checked tones, and using various loanwords from Zhuang, such as the final particle wei for imperative sentences.

Pinghua (評話 or 平話) (plain tales) are Chinese popular stories, which originated in the Tang and Song dynasties. Some antecedents are found in the texts found at Dunhuang, and clearly relied on the conventions of oral literature.

There were many stories in this form, such as Sanguozhi Pinghua (三國志平話 or 三國誌評話).