by Jim Goodman
The Jinuo people were one of the
earliest settlers in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, and nearly all of them still live there
today, mostly around Jinuoshan in the center of the prefecture.
The area is very hilly and has become famous
as of one of the six major mountain regions cultivating Pu’er tea.
Legends trace the Jinuo origin to a
detachment of soldiers in Zhuge Liang’s army during the 3
rd century
Three Kingdoms Era.
The unit overslept
one night and when it finally caught up with the army Zhuge Liang would not
allow them to rejoin.
They were to stay
and settle where they overslept.
But to
make it easier for them, Zhuge Liang gave them seeds for tea bushes.
This was supposed to have happened
around Mojiang, but the Jinuo later migrated south to Xishuangbanna.
The Jinuo never developed a script for their
language so never recorded these events.
It’s not possible to say precisely when they began living in Banna, but
the best known and most popular Jinuo origin myth casts them as indigenous to
Jinuoshan.
Accordingly, the first human,
a giantess called Amo Yaobai, using clay models, created the Han, Dai and Jinuo
people.
The Han and Dai occupied the
plains, but the shy Jinuo opted for the hills.
When a great flood swept across the land Amo Yaobai bade one Jinuo
couple to hide inside a sealed drum to keep them safe from drowning.
When the waters receded the drum landed at
the foot of contemporary Bapo village in Jinuoshan district.
The couple who emerged from the drum became
the Jinuo ancestors.
Only in recent decades have any Jinuo
opted to take up residence in the plains.
Always a reclusive people, they have remained ensconced in the forested
mountains around Jinuoshan throughout their existence. At an elevation a few hundred meters higher
than the plains, they enjoyed a cooler summer, while the winter was never very
cold. Establishing their villages within
the tropical forests, they could take advantage of jungle resources like wood
and bamboo for building materials, animal and plant food and natural medicines.
When setting up a new village the Jinuo
usually chose a site on a hill slope facing the morning sun.
After clearing the area they marked off the
village boundary with tablets of stone or wood, decorated with carved spears
and swords, presumably protection against nefarious spirits.
They built stilted houses of wood and bamboo,
roofed with thatch or wooden tiles.
The
political and spiritual leaders stayed in individual houses.
Everyone else lived in longhouses, usually ten
to twelve families from a single clan, occasionally large enough to fit twenty
families.
Residents shared one big room
for meetings, socializing, cooking and dining.
Families lived in compartments on both sides of a central aisle, each
with a separate fireplace.
When families
got larger, to three generations, it became so crowded that people built
another longhouse.
In the longhouse tradition private life
was mostly public, for every family was keenly aware of what other families
were doing.
It’s hard to imagine growing
up in such conditions with a strong sense of individualism or inclined to rebel
against any cultural norms.
The family
was an important institution, but the village as a whole was the main social
unit.
They were farmers and the land and
labor on it were collectively shared.
They cultivated dry rice, corn, bananas,
papaya, cotton and tea.
The latter they
grew in gardens, which could begin yielding the right kind of leaves four years
after planting.
Fruit trees were
permanent, but the grains and cotton required fields cleared from the
jungle.
In early spring farmers cut down
the trees in a section of the forest and burnt them down to the layer of ashes
that would soak into the soil when hit by the first rains and provide enough
fertilization to grow crops for a year or two.
Then they would have to clear a new patch and leave the just used one
fallow for ten years.
After that, with
the land fully rejuvenated, they could clear and sow it again.
The Jinuo were not the only ones to practice this
‘shifting cultivation’ (or ‘slash-and-burn’), it was common throughout the
hills of the province.
So long as the
population was small and stable the system worked.
The people rotated fields over the same
route, re-using the fields and not extending further into the forest.
There was little strain on the overall
ecology.
Besides sharing the produce of the land,
the collective ethic also characterized hunting. Men formed parties and hunted together. Whatever they caught was shared equally,
though the one who shot the animal got to keep the pelt. They also carried with them bamboo tubes of
different lengths, each making a different sound when struck. The way the party played these on their
return informed the village how successful they were.
Women were not part of these parties,
nor were they allowed to do the butchering, because these were life-taking
activities.
Jinuo women were the
life-givers of the society, giving birth, nurturing babies, planting seeds
after the men cut down (and killed) and burnt the trees.
But they were also subject to ritual
restrictions, such as not being allowed to touch or beat the village drum.
This drum, intended as a replica of the one
that saved the Jinuo progenitors in the great flood, was housed in its own
building, beaten by the headman as a summons to a collective meeting, and put to
use during important rituals and festivals.
The schedule for the preparation of
their fields ran according to the annually predictable weather pattern. At the end of the hot, dry season it was time
to cut down and burn the trees and wait for the first rains to mix the ashes
with the soil. But the day to begin
sowing the fields depended upon the spiritual leader’s decision and that was
after conducting ritual animal sacrifices to appease the land spirits. Beating the drum accompanied the ritual
prayers. Then the elders ceremonially
planted a few seeds in their own fields and after that the rest of the village
could start planting.
Later in the year Jinuo villages also
roll the drum out to the center of the settlement on the occasion of Temaoke, a
festival honoring the blacksmith, a Jinuo cultural hero.
Before the blacksmith came into society Jinuo
life was harsh.
Nearly everything they
did was slow and laborious.
The blacksmith
introduced tools and weapons that transformed their lives:
axes, machetes, hoes, spades and plows for the
field work; knives, spears and swords for hunting and defense.
As a result the Jinuo work load became easier
and life was more tenable and sustainable.
The festival events include rituals by
the men honoring the drum and a series of dances mimicking the successive
activities of the rice-growing cycle. The
theme is unique to the Jinuo. Other
peoples have blacksmiths, too, but they do not accord them the same cultural
prominence. Temaoke thus represents a
celebration of what’s special about being Jinuo and nowadays the people dress
in their best traditional garments for it, even if they no longer wear them
every day.
Nowadays, too, the festival includes
vigorous drum-beating while the dances transpire, especially by women, no
longer forbidden to touch or play it.
In
fact, the women’s drum dance is more attractive than the men’s.
Men beat it from a single position, standing
in front of it and striking forward.
Women move around, hitting it forward, sideways and backwards, dancing
while doing so, making for an energetic, more entertaining performance,
especially when more than one woman is playing.
Besides the taboo on touching the drum,
the injunction against women being butchers has also lapsed. They still do not take part in killing
animals for sacrifices to the spirits, for the control of religion belongs to
the men, but in recent decades a few Jinuo women have undertaken jobs as
butchers. Nowadays there is virtually no
occupation off-limits to women and they hold a highly respected position in
society. Tradition says that in the past
Jinuo society was divided into seven matriarchal and seven patriarchal clans,
but that the matriarchal system was abandoned three centuries ago.
Nevertheless, Jinuo villages have two recognized
leaders:
the oldest male and the oldest
female and the latter supervises women’s affairs.
Within the longhouse the younger generation
engaged in fieldwork, while the elderly women stayed behind and looked after
the children.
Thus grandmothers were of
strong influence on a child’s upbringing.
The Jinuo did not venture down to the
plains very often and were a mystery to the Han and Dai, who called them Youle
people, after a prominent mountain in Jinuoshan.
Governments classified them as a branch of
the Dai nationality, though their language belongs to the Tibeto-Burman
linguistic family, unrelated to Dai.
Familiarity with Jinuo culture and identity only began with the founding
of New China in 1949.
From 1954 Communist Party cadres began
contacting isolated Jinuo communities to help them improve their lives. The following year they set up cooperative
work teams for agriculture and introduced wet-rice cultivation to replace the
dry-rice farming that relied on the slash-and-burn method of field
preparation. Now the Jinuo built
permanent fields in terraces, irrigated by water pumps. Production increased and, thanks to health
care improvements, so did the population, nowadays reaching 25,000. The old way of shifting cultivation would not
have been tenable much longer anyway.
The government also established the town
of Jinuoshan, an administrative seat for the Jinuo-inhabited area.
A network of roads came next, linking major
villages within the district.
Hydroelectricity projects reached the villages and electric lights
replaced the tiny oil lamps for internal illumination, while electric milling
machines took over from mortar and pestle action.
In 1979 the government finally
recognized the Jinuo as a separate minority nationality. They were no longer a branch of anyone. They were their own people. The year was the start of the Reform Era, the
dismantling of the commune system and the revival of ethnic consciousness, long
castigated as “little nation chauvinism”.
For the Jinuo this meant a new appreciation of their traditional
clothing and subsidies for their festivals, as well as other cultural
promotions appealing to ethnic pride.
From 1979 many Jinuo families took the
newly possible option now to leave the commune system altogether and started
their own farms.
They also began
building separate homes outside the longhouse.
In general they were stilted houses of wood and bamboo with roofs of
wooden tiles.
Into the 21
st
century they began deviating in style, with roofs of corrugated iron, walls of
brick or cement and directly on the ground.
This has been the fate even of the officially designated “cultural
village” of Bapo, where the drum landed after the
great flood.
The village lies above a slope and lying
across that slope is a massive stone sculpture of Amo Yaobai. It was made by a Sichuanese sculptor after a
design drawn up by the Sichuan Academy of Art.
She is lying on her back, limbs
outstretched, face up and eyes open. A
walkway alongside right up to the village enables visitors to view the entire
work up close. Tour agencies bring
groups here, usually arranging for ethnic dances as well. Bapo, like all Jinuo villages, still has its
drum house, though the village architecture has modernized so much it hardly
justifies the enormous ticket price to enter.
One of the government projects designed
to promote ethnic consciousness in Jinuoshan was the opening of a Jinuo
museum.
Unfortunately, it was not in
Bapo cultural village, nor in or near Jinuoshan, where visitors might look for
such a thing.
Instead it is in Baka,
east towards Menglun, in a rather dilapidated state, converted from an
abandoned longhouse.
Separate cubicles
hold exhibits of hunting gear like crossbows, traps, snares and rifles,
spinning and weaving material, ritual items and sets of local Jinuo clothing.
The museum has never been properly maintained
and the glass cases are so encrusted with dirt the exhibits within them are
only visible from the sides.
Traditional clothing is similar
throughout Jinuoshan except in Mengwang District in the northeast, where the
government sponsored a sub-group recently to move from deforested hills to
vacant land in the plains. The women’s
much longer peaked cap reaches to the waist in back, while the blouse,
wraparound skirt and gaiters are similar they do not wear the same kind of
colorful jacket, but plain blue or purple cotton or silk. Men wear black jackets with red trimming and
a red sun, with spokes like the drum, over the front pocket and the upper back. Mengwang clothing differs from the Jinuo
norm, but its components and style make it recognizably Jinuo. And though the last longhouse residents in
Jinuoshan moved out in 2002, the collective spirit survived and villages stage
their own village feasts and celebrations in which all the residents
participate. It’s essential to being
Jinuo.
* * *
For more on
the Jinuo see my e-book Xishuangbanna:
the Tropics of Yunnan
