by Jim Goodman
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| White Pagoda in Gengma |
Coming from Baoshan into the
northern part of Lincang Prefecture, the scenery was a drab landscape of
largely denuded hills and concrete towns.
The road was not very good and it took all day to reach Yunxian. But halfway from there down to Gengma,
on yet another slow road in dire need of improvement, the landscape
changes. The hills are more
forested, the higher mountains closer, villages further apart and mostly Dai
instead of Han, with pagodas gracing small hills next to the settlements. Sugarcane is the dominant
crop in the fields, supplying the sugar mill in Gengma city, mustard and rice
also grown.
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| Dai women in Gengma |
Gengma sits on a small knoll
in one of the shallow valleys amongst the low, surrounding hills. Ethnic Dai dominate the city’s
population. Each neighborhood has
its own name and these are signposted at all the intersections in the
residential zone. A large painted
stone sculpture of a peacock, the Dai mascot, stands in front of an old and
sprawling banyan tree in the middle of the city and two Han-style ornamental
gates mark both ends of the commercial district.
Dai women, from adolescence
up, both in Gengma and the rural villages, dress in old-fashioned Dai
style. The traditional everyday
outfit consists of a black sarong, usually velvet but sometimes cotton or silk,
a white terry cloth turban and a side-fastened, long-sleeved jacket with
rounded hems front and rear.
Jewelry they generally save for special occasions, but most wear small
gold, barrel-shaped ear plugs about one cm diameter. Many wear shoes that are embroidered with cross stitch
designs or appliquéd with cutouts coincidentally resembling Sani Yi patterns
east of Kunming.
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| lessons at Mangkang Temple |
Buildings within the city are
uninspired concrete structures, but Gengma does have two outstanding old
Buddhist monuments. One is the
lone white pagoda on a slope above the middle school, built in 1472. It is in a style similar to those in
Dehong, a tall central spire surrounded by smaller spires on two levels. The other is the Zongfo Buddhist temple
next to the pond in the city park.
First constructed a year later, it is a long and attractive building
with prayer banners hanging down from the rafters at the entrance and scenes
from Journey to the West carved on
its doors.
With its wide, slightly
sloping, tiered roofs with upturned corners, the temple reflects the Mahayana
Buddhist style of its Han neighbors rather than that of Dai temples in
Xishuangbanna, with their tall, steeply sloping roofs. Gengma’s Dai are Theravada Buddhists,
though, as in Banna and Dehong.
Their monks and novices dress in orange robes and the lay folk follow
the same ritual Buddhist calendar as their counterparts in Southeast Asia.
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| Zongfo Temple |
Not every Dai village has a
temple, though. A few might have a
pagoda in the vicinity, but usually the village has a central sacred spot,
marked by a specially carved post and altar. The nearest temple beyond Gengma was at Mangkang,
about seven km south, in a similar style as at Zongfo Temple. About a dozen monks and novices resided
there when I visited, arriving at a moment when an older monk, prayers tattooed
on his arms, was instructing the boy novices on reading and reciting the Dai
language prayer books. He used a
long pointer to indicate which words the boys mispronounced (though not to hit
them with when they did so). In
another corner of the hall boys were studying texts, while outside the teenage
novices were at leisure, whittling or riding roller skates.
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| monk at leisure, Mangkang Temple |
For a city of such modest size
(you could walk from one end to the other in less than an hour) the market day
area was quite large, comprising three large adjoining squares in the city center
and a number of lanes branching out to the main street, Gengmadajie, between
the entry gates. The squares and
adjoining lanes, even Gengmadajie, fill up with so many stands and stalls that
there is just barely enough room for the customers and passers-by.
Every sort of local product is
on sale: straw for roofing, ropes,
jungle herbs, all kinds of edibles both raw and prepared, spices and
seasonings, stools, cloth, wood, thread, brooms, tools, sugarcane, tea,
molasses and even rabbits.
Local Dai dominate the food markets, hawking noodles, fruits, hot and
sour salads, pickled delicacies and bean gelatin. In slacker moments some of them work on embroidering or
appliqué for their next pair of shoes.
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| market day iGengma |
One of the squares is allotted
to animals, mainly pigs and buffaloes.
While it doesn’t take long for a buyer to decide whether a pig is worth
buying, those purchasing buffaloes were more particular and closely examined
both the feet and the teeth before making up their minds.
As I expected, many Wa women
came down to Gengma from hills to the east and south. They were easy
to recognize with their darker skin tone, red and black sarongs, ear studs
three times bigger than those worn by the Dai women, sometimes augmented by
diamond-shaped silver pendants. And
they all seemed to be addicted to tobacco, smoking ii constantly in long silver
pipes. As elsewhere in Yunnan, the
Wa women in Gengma for market day were quite friendly and I wanted to visit one
of their villages on any return trip to Gengma.
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| examining a buffalo |
Of course, since Gengma was a
Dai and Wa Autonomous County I expected Wa to show up on market day. But they were not the only non-Dai
minority in the market. Two kinds
of Lahu showed up in their traditional outfits, as well as Lisu from the same
sub-group as western Dehong and a few Jingpo, in modern clothes but
recognizable by the silver-studded Jingpo shoulder bag common in Dehong. None of the maps I had on ethnic
distribution in Yunnan indicated there were any Lisu or Lahu at all anywhere
near Gengma, so there were discoveries to pursue someday in the county.
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| Dai food stalls o market day |
Women of one
Lahu group wore a long, side-fastened black jacket, with thin, multi-colored
strips lining the lapel and in bands around the sleeves and cuffs, and plain
black trousers. They carried
shoulder bags of bright, thin, horizontal stripes in many colors and on their
heads wore a round red cap.
The other Lahu group wore
side-fastened jackets of medium blue and heavily embroidered or appliquéd in
the front. This they combined with
blue, knee-length shorts, embroidered around the hems, like the outfit worn in
Nanmei, over in Lincang County, where they were probably from.
Market days are essential for
a traveler to know who lives in the vicinity and might be worth a visit. I didn’t learn where all the Lahu and
Lisu lived, but found out that traditional Wa villages lay on the way east to
the snow mountain Daxueshan and Buddhist Wa lived past Mangkang. On my return to Gengma a year ad a half
later I planned a Wa village excursion in between market days in Mengsheng to
the south (smaller, less interesting) and Gengma two days later (as lively and
colorful as the first time).
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| Lahu woman in Gengma |
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| Wa woman in the market |
Unfortunately, landslides had
just blocked the way to Daxueshan and heavy rains made the route out of
Mangkang all but impassable.
Forced to turn back, my driver suggested we go instead to a Tu minority
village called Mangyou. Tu
minority? Never heard of
them. Let’s go.
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| Lisu and Dai |
The road was just as muddy as
the route to the Wa villages, but we could get to Mangyou because the villagers
had covered the last stretch with a bed of bamboo sticks. Rice, maize and sugarcane fields
surrounded the village and the hills were largely deforested to make room for farms. Most houses were stilted, with angled,
thatched roofs and adjoining open balcony, like those of the Wa. A few had corrugated iron roofs and
some were brick, but with an elevated attached balcony.
The women wore a
side-fastened, plain blue jacket for everyday use, over a black, calf-length
sarong over black leggings and on their heads a black turban with the fringed
end hanging over one side. For
special occasions they don a jacket trimmed with color bands around the cuffs
and rows of solver studs along the lapel.
Younger girls dressed in Dai-style blouses and sarongs, sometimes
matching, and many tied their hair up like Dai girls in Gengma. The men, of course, dressed in ordinary
modern clothes.
Villagers were shy upon our arrival,
but soon a local family invited us inside for a chat and a glass of local rice
liquor. And that brought a small crowd along. We entered a sparsely furnished room, with
a bed along one wall, and crouched on the floor beside the fireplace in a
slightly sunken square in the center.
An iron cooking tripod held a kettle above the coals and a split bamboo
tray hung above the hearth, to hold bamboo utensils and containers and such to
be hardened by the smoke.
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| Mangyou Yi village |
It resembled the hearths of Wa
, Lahu or Aini houses I’d visited elsewhere in Yunnan. But the large stove-oven in the kitchen
reminded me of Hani houses in Ailaoshan.
Wooden buckets and mortars and half-gourd water pitchers lay along the
wall beside it. There were no
tables, chairs or stools. Family
and guests crouched together around the hearth, guaranteeing automatic
intimacy.
While we conversed I showed
them pictures I took of people in the Gengma market my first trip. After looking through them they asked
me if I had any photos of Yi people.
I replied I didn’t know what they looked like. Well, they were Yi, as it turned out, though Gengma folks
called them Tu, their sub-group name.
This was the only Yi village in the county, though they said another Tu/Yi
village was near Mengjiao in Cangyuan County.
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| Yi woman in Mangyou |
Already familiar with Yi
culture elsewhere in Yunnan, I asked them if they had a bìmaw, the Yi ritual specialist, and celebrated the Torch
Festival. No, they celebrated
Guanmenjie and Kaimenjie, because they were Buddhist. They migrated here sometime in the Qing Dynasty and adopted
the religion of their Dai neighbors.
They didn’t have their own temple, just the sacred village center pillar
like Buddhist villages, Dai or Wa.
For festivals and important religious events they went to Mangkang Temple.
I didn’t ask whether any of
their boys went down to the temple to be novices for a while, but their claim
they followed Buddhist precepts in guiding their lives seemed genuine. They were certainly as polite and
mild-mannered as the Dai households I’d visited around Gengma.
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| sacred village post and altar |
Much of the conversation had
to be translated through one of the men who could speak Chinese. The younger generation knew more Chinese
than their elders, but it was the elders with whom I talked the most. The women knew some Dai language from
their market experience, but basically conversation among the villagers was all
in Yi.
Mangyou villagers are
Buddhist, like the Dai, and live in houses like those of the Wa, yet still proudly
identify themselves as Yi, even though they cut themselves off from other Yi
centuries ago. Within their own
community they have tenaciously retained their Yi language for everyday
usage. By now it must be
practically a separate dialect from that spoken by Yi in Dali Prefecture. They keep it alive because it is their
link with their past, exemplifying how language alone can define ethnic
identity.
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| Mangyou Yi woman dressed up for market day |
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