by Jim Goodman
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| Yi from Fuheng district in Yangbi for the festival |
The summertime Torch Festival
is the best-known annual event in the Yi people’s calendar. With 11% of the population, the Yi are
the largest minority nationality in Yunnan, with about 25 sub-groups and five
dialects, living all over the province except the southwest borderlands. Not all the sub-groups celebrate it,
and the Bai and Naxi have a Torch Festival of their own, but most visitors
think of it as a Yi festival, partly because of the massive publicity given to
the extravagant celebrations of it in the Stone Forest.
Several origin stories exist,
but the one most common to Yi in central and western Yunnan attributes it to a
hero’s successful defense against the wrath of a jealous god. Accordingly, once upon an ancient time
lived a famous Yi wrestler named Eqilaba, with a reputation for being
invincible. A jealous god in
Heaven, determined to undermine his fame, dispatched a champion of his own to
challenge Eqilaba. The challenger
lost his life in the attempt.
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| bridge in Longjiang Park, Chuxiong |
Furious, the god sent a swarm
of insects to attack the Yi people’s crops. Eqilaba organized the people and ordered them to light
torches to drive away the insects.
It worked. The people repelled
the attack. And ever since then,
on the 24th day of the 6th lunar month, the Yi stage the
Torch Festival to commemorate their victory. Village or city programs may include wrestling matches, bull
fights and horse races to enliven the day, and then conclude in the evening by
lighting torches and dancing around a bonfire.
I witnessed the Torch Festival of the Nuosu Yi in Ninglang city in the northwest on my first trip to Yunnan in 1992. The following summer I attended a
multi-village celebration of it in the mountains northeast of the city. Some years later, when my research took
me to other parts of Yunnan, I tried to see it with the Huayao Yi in Shiping
County. But just when all the
participants, dressed in their finest, turned up at the venue it began to rain
heavily and didn’t stop until morning.
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| dinosaur display, Chuxiong Museum |
That was unlucky, but not
unusual. The 6th lunar
month is in the middle of the rainy season. A few years later I scheduled another attempt, this time
near Damedi, in Shuangbai County in Chuxiong Prefecture. But a landslide had just recently cut
off the village. So I opted to
take the earliest minibus to Chuxiong city and try to see it there. Chuxiong is a Yi Minority Nationality
Autonomous Prefecture, which means the folks in charge of the government are
Yi. They would be sure to sponsor
something. And the closer I got to
the city the more the skies cleared, though they remained dark to the south.
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| the stage at the Yi nationality theme park in Chuxiong |
Chuxiong was never a popular
tourist destination. Most
travelers in the 90s only knew it from a lunch break stop on the bus route from
Kunming to Dali. And by the end of
the decade buses used the new highway and didn’t even stop in the city. The city had little of interest; a
couple nice parks, a single Buddhist temple, and a plethora of new, unimaginative,
concrete buildings. A statue of
Miyilu, the heroine of the Yi Flower Festival in spring, was the only visible
Yi motif in this capital of a Yi Autonomous Prefecture.
By 2000 that had changed. The city now had a new prefectural
museum, one of the finest in the province, much of it—four floors in the
central part of the complex--devoted to various aspects of local culture,
predominantly Yi. The ground floor
displays all the items used in traditional daily life—tools and implements,
baskets and containers, hunting and fishing gear and musical instruments. There are also house models of the Yi
and Chuxiong’s other minorities the Miao, Lisu and Dai.
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| selling Yi guitars in Longjiang Park |
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| Yi bimaws in ceremonial clothes |
The second floor exhibits over
fifty traditional clothing outfits, mostly women’s, from the prefecture’s Yi
sub-groups, other parts of Yunnan and sub-groups from Guizhou and Sichuan. The exhibit includes spinners, winders,
looms and accessories like jewelry and embroidered shoulder bags. The third floor features the books in
the Yi alphabet used by the bimaw, or
religious specialist, as well as grotesque wooden masks, painted gourds,
lacquered bowls and other antiques.
The fourth floor contains books on Chuxiong and the Yi.
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| Yi women with torches ready to light |
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| lighting their torches |
It is not just an ethnic
museum, though. Rooms around the
center are devoted to other topics.
One features the prefecture’s fauna, its reptiles, amphibians, birds,
insects and mammals and another the extinct creatures of the past, such as the
dinosaur skeletons found in Lufeng County and the remains of ancient man. There’s a calligraphy room, exhibiting
elegant brushwork as well as thin pieces of wood shaped into Chinese
characters. Another hall features ceramic
and bronze artifacts from the Zhou Dynasty, with paintings beside them that
show how they were used.
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| Yi singing group performing in Chuxiong |
The other major change in the
city was the recently completed construction of an elaborate park northwest of
the city on the other side of the Longchuan River. With the wordy name of The Park of the Ten Month Calendar
Culture of the Yi Nationality in China, this was the new venue for the Torch
Festival. Previously, the
celebrations were held in the roundabout with the Miyilu statue. But this was now covered by an overpass
complex and the statue removed.
The park’s name refers to the
pre-modern Yi calendar that divided the year into ten, 36-day months. The month contained three ‘weeks’ of
twelve days, each named after an animal in the Yi zodiac. The Chinese also have a twelve-day
cycle with each day named after an animal, but the two zodiacs are slightly
different; the Yi pangolin day being one example. The Torch Festival back then was Yi New Year Day.
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| Yi dancers at the Torch Festival |
It seems everything in this park was
intended to be big and impressive.
Enormous blocks of carved stone stand at the entrance, depicting dance
scenes from the Yi Laofuzhuan (Dressing Up as Tigers) festival in Shuangbai
County, flanked by a huge bronze drum replica. Dominating the rear of the park is a tall, carved column,
surrounded by smaller ones, on top of a monumental edifice of walls and
stairs.
The city’s Han, who form at
least 90% of the population, also enjoy the Torch Festival as a holiday of
their own On this day red lanterns and vertical
banners decorated shops and offices.
Stages went up in Longjiang Park for performances by singers, jugglers
and magicians, street vendors were everywhere and some Yi men set up stalls
selling ‘moon guitars’, gourd-pipes and flutes. Since the government-sponsored program would not begin until
after dark, early arrivals from the Yi contingents in the prefecture, dressed
in their finest traditional clothing and ornaments, wandered the urban streets
and parks.
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| the festival bonfire at Chuxiong |
At sunset people began heading
for the park. The program was
scheduled to start at 8 p.m. but got delayed until after 10, when the fireworks
launched from tall buildings in the city center had already been illuminating
the sky. Then a group of Yi girls,
in red jackets and turbans, climbed onto the stage in front of the columns and
lit their torches. They strode
offstage to a central bundle of faggots in a big iron cauldron in the plaza as
other Yi contingents followed them, including a few bimaws dressed in fancy ritual garments and miters.
The bimaws seemed to be there just for show, for they didn’t actually do
anything. (In traditional village
celebrations, aside from morning ancestral rites performed by the senior lady
of the household, the Torch Festival never involved any ceremonies. It was a secular event, full of games,
songs and dances.) The young women
tossed their torches into the pile of faggots and soon a bonfire was blazing.
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| Yi visitors in the Yangbi park |
Performers still occupied the
stage for a while—solo singers, duets, comedy skits and groups of traditional
Yi singers and musicians. Finally
the stage action concluded and the Yi sub-group contingents in the square
commenced ring dances around the fire.
The activity continued past one a.m., both here and in the city.
Most Yi-inhabited areas hold
the Torch Festival on the 24th day of the 6th lunar
month. The exception is Dali Bai
Nationality Autonomous Prefecture, where the Yi follow the Bai custom of
marking it on the 25th day.
This gave me the chance to see it again the day after the Chuxiong
affair. I left in the morning for
Yangbi, 38 km from Xiaguan, the nearest Yi-administered county in Dali
Prefecture. Thanks to detours
because of road repairs and construction of a new road from Xiaguan to Yangbi,
it took most of the day to get there.
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| torches in a Yangbi street |
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| Yangbi statue of Miyilu |
Yangbi is a much smaller city
than Chuxiong, notable for its old bridge, traditional Hui quarter and
indigenous-style mosque. The rest
of it is a rather run-down modern city with the only Yi symbol being its own
Miyilu statue. It is a Yi-run
county, though, so its local government sponsored the celebrations, meaning
sub-groups from all the county districts would be paid to come to the city for
the event.
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| Nuosu Yi group in Yangbi |
Rather than the bundles of
long wooden sticks of Chuxiong, the torches here were mostly structures of
colored paper in several tiers, with pennants on each side, like the Bai
torches, and stood at intervals in the streets. Dark clouds were already filling the sky when I arrived,
making the torches’ bright colors stand out. By the time I got my hotel room night was beginning to fall
and the procession to the central stadium was about to begin.
Four different sub-groups
participated, wearing distinctly different outfits. The least colorful of them dressed mainly in black and white
with sparse embellishment. The men
wore long-sleeved white shirts over dark pants and an open black vest. The women wore the same shirts with
sleeveless, knee-length black tunics trimmed in blue over black trousers, with
a wide white belt. Women of
another sub-group wore knee-length, side-fastened tunics, blue on top and black
on the bottom, with thick, multi-colored, appliquéd bands around the collar,
hems and lower sleeves.
The female contingent from the
western district of Fuheng wore brighter, flashier tunics and aprons, covered
with appliquéd strips and embroidery.
Complementing this were their round black caps with a silver band along
the bottom and colored pompoms sticking up from them. Their men wore plain white shirts and black pants.
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| Nuosu Yi girl |
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| Nuosu Yi man |
Finally, the cast included the
Nuosu Yi from the northern part of the county. I knew and had written about them in Ninglang County, but
didn’t know they also lived this far south. The women dressed in long, tri-colored skirts, vests and long-sleeved
blouses and the same very wide-brimmed hats as in Ninglang, or the flat cloth
head cover with a front brim that is more common in Xichang, Sichuan. The men wore black turbans, embroidered
vests and black woolen capes.
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| another Yi contingent in Yangbi |
When all those in processions
had filed into the stadium and taken up positions around the central torch, two
Nuosu Yi youths, shirtless and in wide-legged trousers, beat drums and cavorted
around the torch. Then two of
their women came out to give a bowl of rice-liquor to each of the men charged
with lighting the torch. Because
it had been doused with paraffin already, the torch caught fire easily. One of the Yi groups then commenced
dancing around the burning torch.
Soon it began raining, though
that didn’t dampen the dancers’ spirits, especially the lead male wielding a
long curved sword. But when it got
heavier the audience fled for shelter and the dancers stopped. After 40 minutes the rain was just a
slight drizzle, so the dancers and crowd returned and all the contingents got
their turn. The torch had
continued burning and folks added more paraffin-soaked rags to keep it
going. In spite of the rain, the
dances were quite vigorous and no one slipped on the wet pavement.
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| taking rice liquor before lighting the torch |
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| lighting the torch in the Yangbi stadium |
From the top of the bleachers
men set off a series of fireworks.
While not as plentiful as in Chuxiong, they were quite spectacular and closer
to the audience. The dance groups
occupied other areas of the stadium besides around the main torch and continued
for another couple of hours. Out
in the city streets, the torches that had been standing all day were now piles
of cinders, while youths with mini-torches prowled the streets with resin in
one hand to toss onto the torches to make them flare up whenever they met
anyone in their path.
Around midnight the activity
began slowing. The stadium emptied
of dancers and observers. The last
shops still open shuttered their doors.
The kids with the flare-up torches ran out of resin powder. Reveling was over. It was time to retire, review memories
of the day and sleep secure in the knowledge that, being Yi, they will be able
to enjoy it all again next year.
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| Yi waiting to add their bundles of sticks to the Chuxiong bonfire |
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