**6. Conclusions**

It can be concluded that the three types of willow narratives in Yuan *zaju* were not an original creation of Yuan playwrights but a product of ancient Chinese folk beliefs about the willow tree. In other words, the narratives of the willow shooting ritual originated from the shamanic belief that the willow is a sacred object; the stories of deities delivering willows came from the belief that willows are spirits or creatures; the rhetoric of willows as references to females originated from the belief about the fertility of willows. The three kinds of willow narratives do not play the same role in Yuan *zaju*. The narratives of willow shooting rituals provide backgrounds and plots for the development of the stories in the plays, the narratives of deities delivering willows form motifs, and the rhetorical use of willows as references to females are a means to depict the tenderness of females. While the narrative of the willow shooting rituals is a motif is unique to Yuan *zaju*, the narratives about deities delivering willows and about female beauty are the continuation of the grea<sup>t</sup> literary tradition of the *Shijing*. Moreover, the narratives of willow shooting and deities delivering willows are direct narratives based on folk beliefs about the willow, whereas using the willow to describe beautiful women is an indirect narrative based on the belief about the fertility of the willow and filtered through literary aesthetics. Although these three kinds of narratives have different roles in Yuan *zaju*, they all represent, in different ways, the beliefs about the willow that had existed before the Yuan dynasty. This was a conversion process, not only from beliefs about the willow to willow narratives but also from collective common perceptions to individual narratives. In this process, folk beliefs about the willow had a conceptual role in shaping narratives in Yuan *zaju*. The beliefs shaped some *zaju* plots about willows as well as the choice of the object in the willow narratives in *zaju*. Therefore, the folk beliefs about the willow were the source, and the willow narratives of Yuan *zaju* were the offspring. This was also a conversion of folk beliefs

about the willow from collective cognition to individual cognition, or, in other words, a process of folk beliefs in the oral tradition shaping the literary works that were written.

Indeed, this paper shows that the three narratives about willow beliefs were depicted for the first time simultaneously in Yuan *zaju*. Specifically, the three types of narratives on beliefs about the sacred willow, about willow spirits, and about the willow's fertility never coexisted in the same literary genre before the Yuan dynasty. Since the *Shijing*, there have been numerous expressions of beliefs about willows in Chinese literature, for example, the descriptions of *liumei* and *liuyao* in Tang and Song poetry mentioned above. However, these cases from the Tang and Song dynasties represented the belief about the willow from a given perspective. The coexistence of these narratives of willow beliefs in Yuan *zaju* was largely because of the multiethnic interactions and exchanges of the time. The diversified representation of willow beliefs in Yuan *zaju* is not a simple transformation from folk beliefs about the willow to literary narratives of willows. It is actually a rare literary phenomenon created by the combined forces of religion, history, and culture under a specific background.

**Author Contributions:** Writing—original draft preparation, Q.W.; writing—review, translation and editing, Q.Y. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Data Availability Statement:** Data available in a publicly accessible repository.

**Acknowledgments:** The authors would like to thank Xiaohuan Zhao of the University of Sydney, Shouhua Qi of Western Connecticut State University, and Zheng Wang of Huaibei Normal University for their generous help with the writing of this paper.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
