by Jim Goodman
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| terraced farms in rural Dayangjie district |
The hills of Honghe County are
part of Ailaoshan, the chain of mountains that begins in central Yunnan and
runs southeast into northern Vietnam. The range flanks the right bank of the Red River and averages
2500 meters in height. In Honghe
County, like its neighbors Luchun County to the south and Yuanyang and jinping
Counties to the east, ethnic minorities inhabit the highlands and the landscape
features rows of irrigated rice terraces stepping down the slopes.
On my first excursion I took
the road west of Yuanyang City (ex-Nansha) along the Red River. The valley is fairly broad and villages
and farms line the way, interspersed with groves of tamarind, banana and lychee. The people are the same animist Dai La
branch in the valleys of Yuanyang County, and live in flat-roofed, mud-brick
houses, drawing water from an adjacent stream to channel through the village.
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| the lower neighborhoods of Honghe City |
Several kilometers before the
county capital the road begins ascending slowly past a rather barren, uncultivated
slope until the lower end of Honghe City.
The buildings here were all modern, even back at the end of the 90s, and
residents all Han. But remnants of
an old town, the main markets and administrative centers were further up the
hill.
Near the market by a small pond
surrounded by old houses a walkway took me up to the top of the slope. It ended in a park, dominated by a Qing
Dynasty tower housing an even older bronze bell. A view tower stood nearby, looking south across the
hills. But the hills beyond had no
terraces, forests, villages, pastures or anything—just lumpy shapes against the
sky.
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| old town remnants in Honghe City |
Somewhere over the crest of
those visible hills, however, lived the Hani, the ethnic minority I had come to
visit. I was especially interested
in the Yiche, from photos I’d seen of the women’s traditional clothing--short-sleeved
black jackets over extremely short pants, with no leggings, plus a plain white
peaked cap.
Especially when worn by the
young women, it was altogether the sexiest outfit in Yunnan. In meeting several Hani sub-groups
already in neighboring counties, I found the females overwhelmingly preferring
to dress in their traditional style.
I was hoping the same would hold true for the Yiche.
Told they lived somewhere near
Langti, 67 km southwest, I took an early minibus there next morning. After about half the distance we crossed
over those barren hills and the landscape changed, with steeper hillside
slopes, forests, terraced farms and villages. Langti lies alongside one such slope, though the townsfolk
themselves are mostly Han.
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| bell tower at the top of Honghe City |
I arrived mid-morning on a
market day. Most of the villages
in the vicinity are Hani, some Yi, and market day drew two Hani groups. The majority belonged to the Rani
sub-group. Their women wore
cotton, indigo-dyed, long-sleeved, side-fastened jackets with some trimming along
the lapels, neck and hem. Plain
black trousers and a brightly colored hand towel-headscarf completed the
outfit.
Some of
the young girls wore a hat shaped like a sitting chicken, like that of the Nisu
Yi in Yuanyang County, but studded with little silver half-globes. The ancient origin of the hat narrates
how a voracious ogre was chasing Hani girls (or Yi girls, for the Nisu tell the
same tale) through the hills very late at night. Just before it caught up with them, a cock crowed to
announce the coming sunrise.
Because the demon could only be active in darkness and was powerless in
daylight, it stopped the pursuit and hurried back to its lair. To honor the chicken and commemorate
the event, the girls designed the hat and wear it as part of their tradition.
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| Hani child in Langti wearing the 'chicken hat' |
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| Rani and Yiche Hani in the Langti market |
Yi women in Langti also wore
side-fastened jackets, but in light, pastel colors, tied with a belt that hung
down in the back, with flowery embroidery at the end of the tabs. The other Hani group was the Yiche,
from villages to the north. But the
only traditional clothing they wore was the plain white peaked cap. The market ran along the main street in
town and ended in a large square.
Stalls lined the way, selling cloth8ng, shoes, vegetables and fruits,
chickens, snacks, herbs, etc. A
pony market was near the square and a few stalls sold turkeys or rabbits and one
a couple of big snakes, which the seller probably caught himself.
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| terraces near Langti |
In the early
evening two Chinese friends turned up, here for the same reason as me. According to a Yunnan festivals
book the next day was supposed to be Guniangjie, the Young Girls Festival of
the Yiche Hani. Surely we’d see
the famous traditional short-shorts then.
Our Yi lodge manager knew nothing about it, but directed us how to get
to the nearest Yiche village.
After about a 90-minute hike
early next morning we reached a Yiche village of mud-brick, tiled houses in the
central Yunnan style sprawled across a ridge. We didn't spot any festival activity or anyone wearing
traditional clothes, other than the cap.
Soon a man appeared on our path and invited us to his home. Over a round of tea we told him of our
intention to see the festival.
Well, they didn’t hold it in this village and anyway it was six days
earlier, on a monkey day. The book
was wrong.
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| Yiche Hani village |
As for the clothing, he said
the Yiche stopped wearing it in the Cultural Revolution. Besides condemning it as a
manifestation of “little nation
chauvinism” the Red Guards denounced it as immoral, provocative and looked
stupid. But after the Reform Era,
unlike all other Hani groups, the Yiche did not revive wearing their traditional
clothing, other than the cap.
The outfit originated with the
sub-group’s eponymous founder Yiche.
After escaping a fire in the mountains set by his enemies, most of his
clothing tore or was burned away except enough to make himself this skimpy
outfit. But later, after the Yiche
had safely settled in the area, women took up the costume as a fashion. As for the white cap, it dates to their
time of troubles. It was designed
to fool enemies when the Yiche retreated to their fields or forests to hide
amongst the white camellia flowers.
The enemy would only see these caps and think they were flowers and not
people’s headgear.
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| Honghe County Yi |
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| Yiche girls in the early 60s |
Our host didn’t think anyone
in the village even had a full traditional costume. Not the shorts, anyway. He did introduce an older woman who had a traditional
jacket. Waist-length, deep indigo
blue, it had seven layers with overlapping hems, symbolizing their rice
terraces. But the village didn’t
have a complete traditional outfit to even photograph, with or without a
model. The festival had passed and
so after buying a turkey from our host and enjoying an afternoon meal, we
left. My friends returned to
Kunming and I stayed on in Langti another night.
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| Yiche bride and attendants, early 60s |
The following year I returned
to Langti earlier in the calendar and after a night headed for Dayangjie, the
center of Yiche land. With its
promontories, ridges, steep, terrace-filled slopes and pocket valleys, the
district is much more scenic than around Langti. It was goat day, market day in Dayangjie, and local folks
were setting up their stalls as I arrived.
Most were Han or Yiche, though
the market drew a few Yi, Hani from Langti and another sub-group from further
south. Their women wore wide black
trousers and a short jacket, usually light blue or white, with appliquéd
patches on the hems and corners, and a belt with long end tassels draped over
the buttocks. On their heads they
wore headscarves or black turbans festooned with silver chains and
pendants. The Yiche wore their
white caps and drab modern clothes.
The older ones donned deep blue caps and once in a while I saw a
single-layer indigo jacket. Never
mind, the next day was Monkey Day, Guniangjie, and surely they’ll dress up for
that.
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| market day in Dayangjie |
No. The only action resembling a festival involved a mixed group
of youths hiking up to a small hill a few km distant and having a picnic beside
three old trees. Some market
stalls stood next to them and an old man occasionally rang a gong. By one o’clock it was over. The presence of a gong hinted it was a
vestige of a festival, now vanished like the adolescent dormitories of the past
and the components of the traditional female attire.
Later I learned that the last
time the Yiche dressed up for a full rendition of Gunaiangjie was for a film
company several years earlier. The
company brought the outfits themselves and didn’t leave them behind when
finished filming. So nobody had
one anymore.
Back in Kunming, a Hani
teacher I knew who had written a book about the Yiche insisted I had gone the
wrong time. It was two monkey days
later. He hadn’t witnessed it and
didn’t know whether the girls dressed up for it. I couldn’t stay that long, but the following year I made one
more attempt. Those in Dayangjie
who knew anything about any festival thought something happened last month
somewhere. That corresponded to
the time of my previous visit.
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| older Yiche woman, Dayangjie market |
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| another Hani sub-group in Dayangjie |
Nevertheless, I didn’t mind
coming again. Walks out of town to
admire the scenery and friendly encounters with the people made it worth
it. Instead of returning to Langti
I took a minibus on a newly cut road west to Yuanjiang. After keeping along the ridge for about
forty minutes, the bus then slowly wound down to the Red River, passing the
most desiccated hills I’d seen in the province.
Yunnan doesn’t have a true
desert, but this area is the closest to one. There must be a hole in the annual monsoon clouds overhead,
for the slopes were barren of vegetation, fields or trees. A couple of small hamlets lay on the
hill, but I didn’t stop to find out how they made a living in such an
environment.
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| Yiche Hani on the way to the fields |
Two winters later I made a
fourth excursion to Honghe, this time going from Mojiang to Dima in the far
west of the county. Dima was reputedly
the site of the oldest continuously inhabited Hani villages and the only Hani
community with a record of violent conflicts with neighbors over land and
water. Dima town was just a small
administrative center with a modest marketplace and a single guesthouse. Villages lie on ridges in the vicinity,
about 25-30 mud-brick tiled houses above their irrigated terraces.
Dima’s past pugnacious
attitude and suspicion of strangers had long ago disappeared and my reception
in the area was quite positive, though I was probably the first foreigner they
ever met. The closest and biggest
village was a short walk over to and up the nearest hill. With a splendid view ahead, I passed
men plowing with buffaloes in the terraces and women walking on the roads.
The traditional women’s outfit
consists of indigo-dyed cotton jacket and slacks, trimmed in light blue at the
cuffs and collar, with silver coin buttons. They braid their hair and add colored yarn to lengthen it,
wrap it atop their heads, and wind an embroidered band of cloth around the lower
part.
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| Yiche Hani village and terraced farms |
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| Dima Hani weaver at her loom |
About weaving and clothing and
even farming I knew the vocabulary, so we talked about that. My hostess invited me for dinner and then
summoned neighbors to meet a foreigner who could speak Hani—a double
phenomenon. And when I ran out of
Hani-Akha words I could fall back on my rudimentary Chinese. For the hill people Chinese is a second
language, too, so they were not likely to trip me up on unusual vocabulary or
grammatical constructions.
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| Hani women chatting on the road near Dima |
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| Dima Hani woman |
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| rice terraces next to Langti |
*
* *
For more on Honghe and the Hani, see my e-book The Terrace Builders.
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