Luchun: the Hani Majority County

 

                                                               by Jim Goodman

 

       Southern Yunnan’s Honghe is a Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefecture, wherein the Hani and Yi minority nationalities comprise a majority of the population or occupy over 50% of the land.  Usually the latter is the case, especially north of the Red River, where Han immigrants have long been settled in both rural and urban areas.  South of the Red River the land is much hillier, farmed by using the ancient and famous water-filled terraces, and Han residence is confined to the cities.  Even there, employed by the government bureaucracy or as shopkeepers or involved in other urban services, they are in competition with local minorities.

       Luchun County, in the southwest and bordering northwest Vietnam, attracted but a handful of Han immigrants after 1949.  Much of its territory is mountainous and still heavily forested and it has always been relatively isolated, off the main trade routes and mainly accessible via Yuanyang County to its east.  As a result, Luchun County’s population is 80% Hani, nearly all of whom can trace their residence back many generations.

       Entering from Yuanyang County, after 15 km the traveler comes to Luchun city, the county capital, lying on a long, high, narrow, east-west ridge.  Its modern buildings, largely whitewashed cement, line the ridge, with Hani villages and rice terraces immediately below on each side.  The bus station, central market and public park are in a four-block stretch in the city center.  From the park and from glimpses between the buildings are good views of the terraces and mountain scenery.

       Most urban residents are Hani.  Most shop signboards are bilingual—in Chinese characters and the English letters used to write the Hani language.  The Hani call the city Donya and their language is used more often here than Chinese. 

       The main Hani sub-group call themselves Awo Hani.  Females of all ages still prefer their traditional clothing, consisting of a very Chinese-style, long-sleeved jacket over trousers and a round decorated turban.  Most jackets fasten on the right side, with a few buttoned down the front.  The style is relatively uniform, but they could be any color.  Some prefer black or dark blue, and not just the older women.  Others choose a variety of soft pastel colors, often patterned, no two alike.  The trousers are usually plain or else black with a blue stripe around the shins.     

       On their heads they wear a round cloth turban shaped like a pillbox hat with a tassel hanging over the side.  Women from Sanmeng to the south can be identified by the huge woolen tassel draping over the right ear.  The turban could be plain or decorated with silver studs or cultured pearls.

       Every horse and rat day in the 12-day animal cycle Luchun stages its market day.  Villagers swarm into the city bearing a variety of products to sell or empty pack-baskets to fill with goods to take home.  They set up stalls to offer rice, various vegetables, spices, forest goods, medicinal herbs, baby frogs caught in the terraces, honeycombs, edible insects or clothing.  Some may even just stand somewhere on the street holding a single item, like a cooked bird or a newly made traditional jacket. 

       Market day also attracts Hani from other parts of the county, mostly the south, like Sanmeng and areas closer to the Vietnam border.  Some groups from the far south wear fancier turbans with decorative flaps and tassels and a jacket festooned with several triangles of silver studs.  The crowd may also include a sprinkling of other minority nationalities in the county, like Yi, Dai and Yao.

       A few Yi are migrants from the Nisu sub-group in Yuanyang County, who run small shops and businesses.  Their women wear brightly colored, side-fastened jackets with bands of appliqué on the hems, sides and cuffs, and a belt with long, wide, decorated ends hanging over the buttocks.  Younger Nisu girls may also wear a silver-studded, chicken-shaped hat.

       The county’s indigenous Yi belong to another sub-group from four villages near Niukong, 37 km west of Luchun.  The road winds down from the high ridge and runs along the Niukong River, passing many Hani villages, mostly on the south side, with mud-brick houses and thatched or more often tiled roofs—the typical rural Yunnan style, though not enclosed by compound walls.  After passing a few bamboo bridges the road reaches Niukong town beside the river.  Market day here takes place a day before Luchun, on snake and pig days, drawing local Yi as well as a few Hani sub-groups.

       The Yi villages are up above the town and consist of houses similar to those of the Hani.  Yi women here wear a long-tailed coat, sometimes shorter in the front, side-fastened, over plain black trousers.  Older women wear white, younger ones prefer indigo or black with red, light blue or magenta sleeves and shoulders.  They appliqué stylized patterns of dragons, phoenixes, fish, butterflies, birds and peonies below the neck, front and back, around the shoulders and on the cuffs and elbows.  Most wrap their hair in a simple kerchief, but some don a silver-studded “chicken hat” and tie a hair braid over it to keep it in place.   

       West of Niukong the road rises into the hills and away from the river to a turnoff about 15 km later that runs south for 65 km to Qimaba, a large Dai settlement of over 200 houses almost exactly in the center of the county.  Hani villages sprinkle the hills in the beginning, but soon the environment is heavily forested until Qimaba, which lies on a gentle slope above its terraces. Irrigated by streams that also run through the residential area, reinforced by stone walls on their sides, the terraces stretch out like a fan in front of the village and end at the cliffs above the Chama River. 

       The Dai inhabitants belong to an animist sub-group that migrated from Shiping County to this isolated venue in the 19^th century.   They have the same mud-brick, tile-roofed, two-story houses as elsewhere in the county, but with an open section in the center without roof, over a slightly sunken square pit next to a water tank, where they do their washing, while a drain carries the waste water into the stream along the path outside.  Thus, in Qimaba, water engineering is not just for their agriculture; it extends to the settled area as well.

       Most of the women prefer their traditional outfits:  blue or black tubular skirt, side-fastened, long-sleeved top with embroidered front, hems and cuffs and sometimes the entire back of the jacket.  They wear these basic components all day, even when working in the fields.  For social occasions or going to the market they may also wear a tall, elaborate head piece lined with coins and silver studs above the brim, with a long black flap hanging down the back.

       Most of the area north of Qimaba is part of the Huanglianshan Reserved Forest, a mountainous wooded zone around the Huanglian Mountain peak of 2637 meters.  A few stray Hani and Yao villages lie tucked away in the forest, but the Yao are more accessible in Shangpinghe, a large village just west of Pinghe in the southeast.  The houses are mud-brick or whitewashed concrete, closely placed in rows on a slope above their rice terraces.

       The Yao here are members of the Landian sub-group, also found in Yuanyang and Jinping Counties.  Both sexes usually dress in their traditional plain black clothing, the women in bulky, side-fastened jackets with tails in the back, the men in knee-length jackets buttoning vertically in front.  Women also wear a skein of magenta woolen threads draping across the jacket front and don a tall black headdress over a coil of black braids.  Men wear a round cap with silver disks around the bottom.

       The turn-off south to Pinghe is just before entering Luchun County from the east.  The road skirts the eastern side of the county for 47 km to Pinghe, overlooking valleys cut by tributary streams of the Mengman River.  This is the most heavily populated part of Luchun County and Hani villages lie all along the slopes, with their water-filled terraces climbing up to cover over 80% of the hills flanking the streams.  

       A branch road just after the Pinghe turnoff winds for 37 km up and down hills to Sanmeng, a Hani town directly south of Luchun geographically.  The bus stops at the bottom of the hill, from which it is a steep hike to the village itself.  The reward is the splendid scenery visible all around, accented in winter by low-lying, wispy morning cloudlets.   

       Compared to the eastern and northern sectors of Luchun County, the rest of it is rather sparsely settled and very forested.  Not many roads link the isolated villages with main thoroughfares.  After the Qimaba turnoff the main highway continues to Dashuigou, a nondescript town itself, but interesting for the different sub-groups of Hani.  The women of one dress in similar style as Hani around Luchun, but with a fancier head-covering, knee-length trousers and colored cloth wrappers around the calves.  Another group wears long jackets and very tall black cloth headdresses with a rectangular top, along with big round silver earrings.  Both sub-groups are spillovers from Mojiang County to the west.

       From Dashuigou the main road runs through the hills south to Daheishan, a town about the same size and look.  Then it turns southwest and soon enters Jiangcheng County.  The Hani in this part of the county dress more like those in Luchun, but their dialect differs considerably, being more like the Hani dialect of Pu’er Prefecture.

       The Hani language is a member of the Yi branch of the Tibeto-Burman linguistic family.  It is related to Yi, Lahu and Lisu, and like them has several dialects.  The basic grammar and syntax for all Tibeto-Burman languages is the same, with a subject-object-verb word order.  When the Chinese government decided to devise writing systems for those languages without them, the dialect spoken in Dazhai, just beyond the western outskirts of Luchun city, became the standard for the Hani language and the one used to make a Hani-English dictionary.  It is the one spoken over most of Luchun County, as well as, with a few vocabulary differences, Jinping, Yuanyang, Honghe, Hekou and northwest Vietnam. 

      

After long campaigns to Sinicize minority nationalities and eradicate traditional culture, after the Reform Era began the government reversed that policy and encouraged ethnic identity.  Not every old custom was revived, but certainly ethnic pride returned.  As part of that manifestation, in 1994 the primary school in Guangma village, on the slope across the stream on the south side of Luchun, began instructing in the Hani language and teaching students how to read and write in Hani, using English letters.

  

   For the first three years instruction is given in both Hani and Chinese and afterwards mainly in Chinese.  Up through the fifth grade students also have twice weekly Hani language lessons.  The Honghe Prefecture government sponsored the publishing of books in Hani, generally folk tales, Hani proverbs and seasonal work songs. 

       Revivalism has also meant an active role once again for the Hani ritual specialist.  The Hani are animist and employ the specialist to perform the proper traditional rites to appease potentially troublesome spirits, protect the fields and the people’s health, and be able to read portents in the liver of the sacrificial animal. 

       Hani festivals like the Long Table Feast are back in vogue.  For this one all the village men dine together with all the tables lined up on a single village lane and crammed with a great variety of dishes, from meat cooked myriad ways to different edible insects, with each family’s women bringing a tray full for the collective feast.  Liberally punctuated by toasting and drinking, the meal takes all afternoon.  The men then retire and it’s the women’s turn, though not including the drinks.

       Some villages have the traditional gates at the main entrance.  Consisting of a wooden beam aid across two upright poles, it has carved swords or other warning symbols to keep evil spirits from visiting.  When villagers sicken and no medicine seems to work they will call on a shaman to go into a trance to find out what the afflicting spirit demands in order to recuperate and then follow the shaman’s advice afterwards.  They claim it always works.

       For the Lunar New Year villages erect swings and teeter boards for the youth to enjoy.  The swing consists of four long tree limbs lashed upright together with a pair of ropes suspended from the top and joined by a plank at the bottom.  The teeter board is a long beam inserted into hole in a tree stump.  A rider sits on each side, steering the board both up and down and around in a circle.

       For adults, the main activity is family visits and banquets.  And the Hani women will put on their fanciest traditional jacket and turban and whatever jewelry they have.  New Year is always a time of hope and it’s better to dress in your finest to welcome it.  

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               For more on Hani culture, see my e-book The Terrace Builders    

Ethnic Territory—the Honghe Borderlands

                                    by Jim Goodman

Flowery Miao stall in Mengla

       Yunnan can boast of a great range of scenic wonders, but its unique ethnic diversity inspired my own extensive exploration.  The province is home to 24 ethnic minorities, comprising one-third of the population and occupying two-thirds of the land.  Some of then consist of two dozen or more separate sub-groups, with their own distinctive clothing and customs.  An aspiring ethnologist in Yunnan could never run out of places to go, people to meet and cultures to record.

       The fact that many of the ethnic minorities live in areas of great natural beauty was just a bonus.  The appreciation of scenery depends on weather conditions, with sunny skies critically important; not so when the focus is on ethnic minority encounters.  One can have a memorable time among them even when clouds obscure the mountains, fog envelops the valleys and sunlight fails to illuminate the landscape.  This is especially true where ethnic traditions remain strong and the women still dress in their traditional clothing.

Hai  with shoulder board, Jinshuihe

Sha Yao in the Jinshuihe market 

       The greatest ethnic variety is in Honghe, a Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefecture.  Yi sub-groups are present all over the prefecture, while numerous Hani sub-groups mainly reside in the southern counties.  Honghe’s minorities also include different kinds of Miao, Yao, Dai, Zhuang and Lahu.  Together they dominate the mountainous counties south of the Red River—Honghe, Luchun, Yuanyang and Jinping.  Here the Han are the minority, basically restricted to urban centers, along with some Hui.

       Of the southern counties, Jinping is a Miao, Yao and Dai Autonomous County.  Together they outnumber the Hani and Yi, though Jinping has plenty of Hani and Yi villages as well.  On market day in Jinping city the local Hani are as numerous as the Yao.  The women wear loose, side-fastened dark jackets over trousers and coil their hair on their heads in a braid that is lengthened by the addition of black woolen yarn.  They also show up at market day in Adebo, north of Jinping, but rarely at markets south of Jinping,

Flowery Miao girl in Jinshuihe

White Miao girl, Jinshuihe

       Market days in the county are fixed according to the 12-day animal cycle, held every sic days.  Ethnic minorities form the overwhelming majority of participants and so to observe, photograph and meet them the easiest program is to follow the market day schedule.  Having witnessed the action in Jinping, which holds it on horse and rat days, the next day, sheep or ox day, the venue was Jinshuihe, 25 km south of Jinping.   Mengla holds it the following days—monkey and tiger days.  Next, on rabbit and chicken days, it is the turn of Sanguocun, about halfway between Mengla and Zhemi, while the latter stages it dragon and dog days.

Guozuo Hani in the Mengla market

Dai Lu young women in Mengla

       Jinshuihe, which local people more often refer to as Nafa, is a small border town of basically two long streets.  Tropical shade trees—banyans and royal palms—line the upper street, which starts at a riverbank and ends by meeting the lower street at a roundabout with lotus-shaped street lamps.  A street branches here to the bridge on the Laomeng River and the international boundary.  Only a border post stands on the Vietnamese side, backed by hills, with villages barely visible in the distance.

bathing pool at the Xinmeng hot springs

       Not much cross-border trade happens here, so Jinshuihe is ordinarily a sleepy and boring town.  But on market days the lower street and the plaza at the western end fill with stalls and ethnic minorities from the district and even from Vietnam.  When I witnessed it, Yao, Miao and Hani sub-groups made up the bulk of those in attendance, most of them women and all the females, young and old, dressed in traditional attire.

       Among the Yao, some were from the Hongtou (Red Head) Yao prominent in Jingping, selling cloth as they did the day before in jinping’s market day.  Their name comes from the pointed red cap married women wear. They also wear long-tailed coats and shin-length trousers that they heavily embroider with cross-stitched patterns.   A few others were Landian Yao, who dress mainly in plain black, with a skein of magenta woolen thread suspended vertically along the front of the jacket.

 

Guozuo Hani  village above Xinmeng

      The largest contingent was the Sha Yao sub-group, who live in villages in the hills between Jinping and Jinshuihe and over the border in Vietnam.  Their women wear black jackets and trousers and a skein of pink woolen thread down the front, but also long white aprons and a bulky cap with a bill and pink trimming.  Silver neck rings and arrow earrings, like those of the other Yao, were the most popular ornaments.  Unlike the Miao and Hani, who often wandered the market alone, the Sha Yao walked around in groups of four to eight. 

       Two Miao sub-groups turned up.  Flowery Miao women dressed in bulky, pleated, indigo-dyed skirts, the lower half covered in bright red or orange embroidery and appliqué and V-neck black jackets.  The White Miao wore nothing white, but long black coats and black trousers.  The coat lapels were heavily embroidered, as were their caps.  Besides the vegetable displays, the Miao took most interest in stalls selling thread and Miao clothing components.  Miao men also wore their traditional black jackets and blue trousers

Hani woman spinning thread in Sanguocun

Laowo  Yi woman in Sanguocun

       A few Hani from Jinping came down to run stalls, but most were from the Guozuo sub-group prominent around Jinshuihe and Mengla.  The women and girls wore long blue-black coats, fastened on the right side, shin-length trousers and leg wrappers.  Patches of embroidery and silver studs decorated the jacket along the lapel and above the left breast.  The headgear consisted of three red rattan strips across the front, pink tassels dangling on each side, colored cloth strips across the top and a black flap over the back, festooned with buttons or silver threads.  Many of them carried pack-baskets attached to a wooden shoulder board to more evenly distribute the weight.

Hani women in Sanguocun

       The crowds began dissipating after one p.m. and I headed west for Mengla, a much larger town of mainly White Dai, on the north side of the Laomeng River, in a broad plain with several Dai villages around it.  Market day began early next morning, attended by Hongtou and Sha Yao, White and Flowery Miao, Guozuo Hani and a few down for the day from Jinping and, of course, the Dai.

       Most of the latter around Mengla are White Dai and animist.  Their women wear plain black sarongs and long-sleeved blouses, in dark colors for the older women and bright ones for the younger, with twin rows of silver clasps down the front.  They live in villages of stilted wood and bamboo houses with thatched roofs with one area reserved for their simple ancestral altars.

Landian Yao woman, Saguocun

Kucong woman in the Zhemi market

       They are not the only Dai in the area, though, for a few km across the river, around the hot springs near Xinmeng, lie a few villages of Dai Lu, immigrants from Xishuangbanna.  They live in the same kind of houses, though many had been replaced by concrete modern structures when I visited, and are Buddhist.  Young Dai Lu girls in matching blouses and sarongs, in bright colors, wearing flower wreaths in their hair, stood out as an extra, unexpected attraction of Mengla’s market day. 

Kucong village near Zhei

       Following the market activity I opted for a night at the hot springs in a ramshackle guesthouse, close to the main bathing pool.  “Come here in mid-afternoon,” the proprietor told me, ‘and you’ll see women bathing without any tops.’  The pool measures about 60 m circumference, surrounded by concrete walkways.  The hot spring sits just above it, enclosed by a stone wall, its water bubbling over it into the meter-deep pool, rendering the water comfortably warm, never too hot.

       It began filling up with bathers right on schedule and yes, many females bathed topless—those over 60 and under 6.  This was the most popular pool, though other smaller ones existed in the vicinity, as well as brick bathhouses.  The main Dai village lay a short walk away from the biggest pool and a trail from there ascended into the hills, passing water-filled terraces, to reach the Guozuo Hani village of Tawmazhai.  Stilted houses of wood and bamboo prevailed, very similar to those of the Dai in the plains and very unlike the ‘mushroom houses’ of the Hani in Yuanyang County, though their dialect, lifestyle, customs and festival schedule were the same.

       Early next morning I caught a minibus headed west for Zhemi, which would hold its market the following day.  About halfway there, at a village called Sanguo, the vehicle had to stop for a couple hours to offload a passenger’s merchandise, probably for what turned out to be market day in Sanguo.  I found this scene just as colorful as other county market days.  The Yao here were of the black-clad Landian sub-group and the Flowery Miao of the same branch I saw in Mengla.  They differed from those in Nafa by their side-fastened black jackets with wide rows of embroidered strips along the lapel and around the upper arms and neck, plus the plain black tubular turbans.

White Dai village near Zhemi

Alu Yi girl in Zhemi

       The Hani were of a different sub-group.  The women wore a shorter, side-fastened, indigo-dyed cotton jacket over plain trousers and leg warmers, with two Yao-style silver buckles.  The lapel was lined with colored strips and coin-pendants and most women also sewed a large silver French colonial piaster over the left breast.  Many Hani women spun thread while they roamed the market or ran stalls.  Hani houses on the edge of the village had dyed yarn hanging out to dry in their yards.

       The Laowo branch of the Yi were also present.  Their women wore long black coats trimmed with colored strips and a big black turban embellished with very large colored pompoms on either side.  This sub-group also lives in Laomeng district to the northwest, where they dress in brighter colors.

Shangpinghe Yao village

       As a town, my next stop Zhemi, was not very pretty, for all the buildings were newly made concrete structures.  But the area was attractive, surrounded by hills and old-fashioned White Dai villages nearby.  Zhemi is a Lahu Autonomous District, for the main community here is the Kucong branch of the Lahu.  Looking south from a hill above Zhemi I could spot Kucong villages, lying in cleared areas of forested knolls, about 40-50 houses per settlement, single story, mud-brick, with corrugated iron roofs.  Houses lined up almost like military barracks, in neat rows, spaced evenly apart.

       Though they are the most numerous ethnic minority in the district, they were the smallest group coming for market day.  The women wore long black, shin-length, right side-fastened coats, usually with multi-colored striped sleeves, over plain trousers and a tight cap liberally festooned with colored pompoms.  The outfit closely resembled that worn by Lahu women over the border in Mường Tè, Vietnam though very different from that of the Kucong in Xishuangbanna or Laos.

       Others in town for the affair included local White Dai, the Alu Yi from the mountains northeast, the Goho Hani, the same sub-group living around Huangcaoling, directly north in Yuanyang County, and the Landian Yao.  The Alu, running layouts selling vegetables jungle herbs and edible insects, were quite shy, as they were in Laojizhai, their main concentration.  The Hani, managing cloth stalls and selling bundles of split bamboo and palm fiber, were more ready to engage with the stranger and seemed to be the most self-assured people in the market.  In the end, it was another memorably colorful day in an otherwise nondescript town.

sunrise near Pinghe

      The last stop on my borderlands run was Pinghe about 25 km west, inside Luchun County.  The road follows the river alongside Zhemi until it crosses the county boundary and veers into the mountains.  The small town of Pinghe lies on the western end of a long ridge, not very attractive itself and offering only the most basic accommodations.  The original Hani village is adjacent to its northeast side and the women wear the same outfits as the Hani in Zhemi or Huangcaoling.  The immediate area, and especially the mountains to the north, features the spectacular ancient irrigated terraces sculpted all along the sides of the mountain slopes, equally impressive as the area around Panzihua in Yuanyang County that was recently declared a World Heritage Site.

       Above a picturesque set of terraces 4 km west is the Landian Yao village of Shangpinghe.  Unlike the simpler mud-brick, thatched homes of the Landian Yao elsewhere, the homes here were sturdy, two story hillside buildings with flat roofs.  Male and female Yao were both dressed in traditional style when I visited and as they rarely saw foreigners, if ever, they proved to be quite hospitable and cooperative.  Invited for a meal, I sat with the household head, while the others ate separately, the usual Yao custom.  They were easy to photograph, even volunteered to pose, and the day is still lodged in my memory as another typically interesting and congenial adventure in the borderlands of Honghe Prefecture.

Landian Yao men at Shangpinghe

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Jinping is a major stop; on Delta Tours Vietnam’s cultural-historical tour of Yunnan’s Honghe Prefecture.  See the itinerary at https://www.deltatoursvietnam.com/honghe-prefecture