Black Eagle Flights: The official Page of Jim Goodman's Travel Writing: The Ethnic Mix of Little-Known Menglian County

by Jim Goodman

The landscape and culture of southwestern Yunnan’s Menglian County very much resemble that of Xishuangbanna. Hills rise around the alluvial plains, where the major towns lie along rivers. The Dai minority nationality dominates the plains population, wet-rice cultivators who live in stilted houses and practice Theravada Buddhism. Other ethnic minorities, from the Tibeto-Burman and Mon-Khmer linguistic groups, inhabit the hills, growing dry rice, sugar cane or tea.

Dai temple in Menglian old town

Menglian (the Chinese word for the original Dai Muang Lem) was never administratively part of Xishuangbanna, though. The southern part of Lancang County separates it from Banna and even today travelers from Banna have to go to Lancang City first, then go southwest to Menglian. Until the late Qing Dynasty Menglian was an autonomous Dai state, first established in the 13^th century. The previous century a Dai chieftain in Xishuangbanna had already founded a kingdom, but relations between the two remained friendly. The two shared a common religion and social order and their Dai dialects are close as well.

The little Dai state of Menglian not only retained its autonomy over the centuries, it remained aloof from the internecine power struggles that plagued Xishuangbanna throughout the 19^th century, when Jinghong was repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt in new locations. As a result, today virtually nothing remains of old Jinghong palaces, walls, classic buildings, etc, while Menglian’s old Dai

riverside chedi

quarter still exists, nestled on a gentle slope beside the west bank of the river, opposite the new city. In the past, the ruling family, state officials and nobles lived in the upper part of the slope, while the commoners lived on the flat section at the base of the hill and in hamlets across the river. Today this section has become part of Menglian’s commercial quarter, but the upper part of the old town is still in place.

Most of the houses have in the past decade or so replaced their bricks and tiles with cement and corrugated iron. They retain the Dai style, though, with angled roofs and sculpted peacocks below the roof apex. And while a couple of new, large temple compounds have gone up in recent years at the base of the hill, the old quarter still retains two of its old temples, with wooden walls and tiled roofs, further up the slope.

The old quarter also retains the former ruling chao’s palace, now the city museum, just above the ceremonial center of the town, about midway on the slope. Though it’s obviously the biggest residential compound around, as a palace it is relatively modest. The chao and his wife slept on simple mattresses on the floor, rather like the commoners, and did not furnish the place with a lot of fancy furniture, even in the royal audience hall. The kitchen is not particularly capacious, the buildings not embellished with ornate carvings and other decorations, the heirlooms on display not evidence of a rich royal family.

the former ruling chao muang's compound

So it was not a particularly wealthy state, but it didn’t really need to be. It had no quarrels with its neighbors. Its people carried on with their lives in pretty much the same manner in the past as they do today. They raise their crops, perform their daily chores and attend the periodic markets. They have electricity now, modern communications devices like cell phones and computers, vehicles like motorbikes and tractor-trailers, but their lives are still ruled by the seasons.

Menglian today still has that relaxed, laid-back atmosphere that must have characterized the former chao muang’s realm. The city is not very big. From the new bus station on the expanded eastern edge of the city it’s but twenty minutes walk to the river. Traffic is not very heavy yet. The main road crosses the river and continues to other points in the county all the way to

Dai grill stand in Menglian city

the Myanmar border. But above this road, taking a walk up the slope through the old town to the former palace or the two old temple compounds is like strolling through a quiet rural village. The old town is beyond the hearing range of city traffic sounds.

The new city is never very noisy, anyway. Buildings are rarely more than four stories high, maximum seven, and no towering skyscrapers dominant the skyline as in Jinghong. On my first visit in September, 1998 a row of attractive buildings and a gilt chedi lined the river’s east bank just below the bridge to the old town.

Menglian riverside, 1998

After the turn of the century I found the city demolished all but the chedi, replacing them with a football field. But a couple years later the city established a new park further downriver from the chedi, that included bronze sculptures of ethnic minority activities, a performance park, temple and other chedis, carved pillars and a palm-lined walkway beside the river to the southern bridge.

Menglian is officially a Dai, Lahu and Wa Autonomous County in Pu’er Prefecture. The Aini, though, are also a numerically significant presence and so the park’s sculptures include them as subjects, too. Depictions of ethnic life include an Aini woman carrying a pack basket that uses a shoulder board and head-strap, as well as Dai farmers in the rice field, a Wa woman making liquor, a Lahu woman weaving with a back-strap loom, Dai dancing girls, a Wa hunter and a Lahu fisherman. The performance area is the venue for government holiday events, but also the programs, usually dances, associated with the Dai Water-Sprinkling Festival and the Wa New Rice Festival. At those times villagers of all ethnic minorities are in the city to watch the show and their colorful presence enhances the events.

Lahu women in Menglian for market day

Dai thread merchants, Menglian market

They will also come to Menglian, in only slightly greater numbers, for the market day the city hosts every five days. Arriving in trucks, minibuses and tractor-trailers, Dai, Lahu, Wa and Aini villagers swarm into the city from early morning. Most of then are women and dress in all or part of their traditional outfits. Among the Dai, it’s generally just the older women in ethnic clothing, dominated by white, gray, blue and black, with white turbans. The Lahu women dress in red and

Wa cap and earplugs

black sarongs and jackets. Wa women are distinctive both by the style of sarong, the cap laden with silver chains, perhaps with s smoking pipe tucked into the top, and the large silver ear plugs and disc pendants they favor for jewelry.

Aini women, though, are the real standouts. From dark indigo cotton cloth they weave and dye themselves they make an outfit that consists of a plain short skirt, pleated in the back, a colored and beaded sash hanging in front, a heavily embroidered jacket with appliquéd stripes on the sleeves, leg-wrappers similarly appliquéd, embroidered shoulder bag and an elaborate headdress.

Basically the headdress is a fitted skullcap with a plate rising behind it, straight at the bottom and rounded at the top. Rows of silver studs and beads cover the surface of the cap, while a false hair part protrudes below the front rim. The back plate is covered in black cloth and often decorated with strings of beads and rows of silver studs. From the sides of the headdress they might drape loops of beads and to the cap attach flowers, tassels, pompoms or green beetle wings.

Aini woman checks for messages

AIni woman, Menglian market

Many of the Aini men also show up in traditional attire, though of course these are less spectacular than the women’s. The outfit comprises plain trousers, moderately embroidered jacket and plain turban. Lahu, Dai and Wa men dress in modern style for the most part. But men are a minority anyway in the city on market day, for women both run the stalls and do the shopping. The big, covered central market is the main venue. But on the side streets beside it villagers set up rows of stalls. Aini women selling mountain and forest products—wild vegetables, mushrooms, herbs, bamboo grubs and bee larvae—will occupy one lane. On another lane Dai women sell medicinal herbs and plants, vegetables, rice, farm tools and wooden items like mortars, chopping blocks, bowls, etc. On other streets, for market day is not confined to only one area, Wa and Lahu women set up stalls to hawk their particular products.

the Menglian Lahu ethnic style

Besides Menglian city itself, each district in the county holds its own regular market day. The composition of the crowd will change according to the location. The Aini who are so prominent in the Menglian market are elsewhere only present for market day in the border town of Mengxin, directly south of Menglian. To the north and northwest, in hilly Nanya, Fuyan and Gongxin districts, some Dai come up from the valleys, but those in the market are mainly Wa, from the higher villages, and Lahu from lower on the slopes.

Southwest of Menglian, on the main road to Myanmar, Dai and Lahu dominate the Mengma market. In Menga, the border town, the venue is a pleasant shady grove at the edge of town. Besides the Dai locals, those in attendance include Wa and Lahu from both China and Myanmar. You can sort of tell them apart, even when they belong to the same sub-group. The poorer they appear to be, the more they just look around at all the goods and the less they actually purchase, the more likely they are to be from Myanmar.

winnowing grain near Mengma

Both Mengma and Menga are plains towns, so the area around them mostly consists of Dai villages, plus a handful of resettled Wa hamlets. Lush rice fields flank both sides of the highway and occasionally bamboo bridges span the stream running alongside. The best time to enjoy this scenery is early autumn, when the fields turn golden yellow and the people are out in big groups, harvesting the crop together. After they have threshed the grain they next winnow it by standing on a stilt. The grain thus has further to fall than if they were doing it standing on the ground and the wind has more time to blow away the chaff. The method may be unique to Menglian, for I’ve not seen it elsewhere in the province.

Farmers in the hills grow a different kind of rice, but nowadays far less than in the past. Many villages now raise tea or sugarcane as a cash crop, since these do not take so much out of the soil as rice does, so they do not need to make new fields for rice cultivation every two years. Tea factories have been set up in the hills and during the tea boom times in Xishuangbanna several years ago, Menglian County tea cultivators also got a windfall. They didn’t spend it on building a “modern style” concrete house to replace their own, though, as so many newly rich Banna people did. Traditional style still characterizes houses in the tea garden villages in the hills of Menglian County.

Wa woman, Mengxin district

Despite its obvious attractions, Menglian still draws few tourists. Compared to Xishuangbanna, it is less congested, less “touristy” and money–oriented, more authentic, its historical relics more intact, its ethnic minorities more colorful and traditional, yet it gets only a tiny sliver of the crowd that visits Banna. Menglian’s people don’t particularly resent that. They know their county is rather remote and not as well connected as Banna. The few foreigners who make it there find the people quite friendly and quick to smile. Minority women in town for market day do not avoid the camera nor shy away from their rare sight of a foreigner. In fact, they may become curious, especially the Wa, and approach the visitor, not to sell some trinket or other, but to engage in a short conversation, short because of their own limited knowledge of Chinese.

This is also true in the villages far from the city. In my own excursions in the hills there I found my unexpected presence taken not as an intrusion but as a welcome interruption. I could not be there more than five minutes before someone rushed to invite me inside the house for tea and talk. Learning that I lived in Thailand provoked questions about the differences between the life of the Wa, Lahu or Aini there and in Menglian; or even between Menglian and Xishuangbanna.

The big difference is that Menglian doesn’t have a tourist industry. Villagers might feel less welcoming if busloads of camera-toting strangers descended regularly on their settlements or surrounded them in the city on market day to get selfies with the lady in the exotic costume. In the 14 years since my initial and my most recent visit to Menglian, the city has added new suburbs as well as parks, and the people are as friendly, approachable and hospitable as ever. Tourists are still rare and maybe that’s why the place is so relaxed and genuine. And because it’s so off the beaten track, maybe it will stay charming for a long time to come.