Hidden Attractions in Mengla County

                                                        by Jim Goodman  

looking north from above Mengxing

       Most visitors to Xishuangbanna spend their time in and around the city and on day-trips to the Dai Park, the pagodas at Damenglong or various places west in Menghai County.  If they venture into Mengla County at all, it will be to Menglun, about 60 km east, just inside the county boundary.  The sprawling, fascinating Botanical Garden is just across the river from the town and is certainly worth the excursion.  The only other place in the county to see many travelers is Mengla city itself.  And these are people passing through on the way to or from northern Laos and may not even stay long enough to look at anything.

Dai girls in Manla

       Thanks to the new highway, the journey from Jinghong to Mengla only takes about three hours, as it skirts around the highest hills or tunnels through them.  Buses on the old road took nearly the whole day, having to climb a high mountain south of Mengxing, then up and down hills before the descent to Mengla plain.  Of course, it was a far more scenic route, with views of the hills to the north and lots of forest on the way.  The new route runs mainly through low hills full of rubber trees.

       As the view from the mountain pass just south of Mengxing indicates, the northern half of Mengla County is much hillier than the lower elevations of its southern districts.  Of the northern towns, Manla is basically a Dai village turned into an administrative center.  Xiangming, on a road branching west just south of Manla, is the prefecture’s only Autonomous Yi District, mainly inhabited by the Lalu branch of the Yi who migrated here from Jinggu County in Pu’er Prefecture in the last decades of the Qing Dynasty.  They also have settlements near Yiwu and north of Manla.  Some of them moved on into northern Laos, where they are known as the Lolo, the original name for the Yi.  About 57,000 Yi live in Xishuangbanna, comprising 5.6% of the population.

Longshi Jinuo village

        Their clothing style—side-fastened tunic, usually blue, black trousers and turbans--and housing type—timber posts, brick walls and tiled roofs--resembled that of the rural Han in their original homeland.  They were not as distinctly different as the Miao and the Yao settling in the county then as well, but coming in the area long before the Han had any significant presence, they probably impressed the Dai as very different kind of people.

        Xishuangbanna’s Yi do not share a couple of the most famous Yi characteristics common to bigger sub-groups in the province.  They do not celebrate the summer Torch Festival.  Villages do not have a bimaw, the Yi spiritual specialist who keeps the traditional books written with the unique Yi alphabet, covering myths, legends, pharmacopoeia, ritual rules, moral aphorisms, and so forth.  Like other Yi, though, they keep an ancestral altar in a corner of the dining and receiving room and make offerings at New Year and other occasions.

Yiwu

       In Xiangming the local government last decade revived the Baishijia Festival, honoring Jin Xian, an ancient martial hero.  When drafted into the army to fight a foreign invasion he promised his village he would return by the next lunar New Year.  As it turned out, he didn’t show up until the 8^th day of the 2^nd moon.  He was, however, laden with decorations in recognition of his valor in combat.  So the festival is held on that day to celebrate his return.  The revival was a typical government-sponsored event, dominated by songs and dances, but for once the traditional Yi costume was the fashion of the day.  From 2011 the festival has also been staged in Yiwu.

above the fog in Yiwu

       In the mountains west of Xiangming, aside from a few stray Miao settlements, the villages are mostly Jinuo, a mountain-dwelling people who only reside in three areas of Xishuangbanna; here in the Kongmingshan area, as well as Jinuoshan and Mengwang districts in Jinghong County.  The paved part of the road out of Xiangming ends after four kilometers and the dirt road begins climbing uphill several km further from the large Dai village of Manlin.   After passing thick forests full of flowering trees, interspersed with tea gardens, it reaches the new Miao village of Andong.  From here a road north goes to Xinfa, and then on to Longshi, through the heart of Jinuo territory.

tea gardens near Yiwu

       According to the prefecture maps, this is a designated Scenic Area.  Longshi lies on a spur with a clear view of the blunt peak of Kongmingshan directly west.  The Jinuo here do not ordinarily dress in their ethnic style and the characteristic stilted houses that still prevail in Jinuoshan are absent.  A few are modern style, but most are simple wooden structures with corrugated iron roofs and satellite dishes for their televisions.   And perhaps because of the television influence, only the older generation still uses the Jinuo language.  Everyone else converses in Chinese.  Like their cousins in Jinuoshan, they cultivate tea rather than rice.

Yao man in the Mengla market

Aini woman in Mengban

      The prime center for tea production in the northern half of the county is Yiwu, in the hills south of Manla.  Vehicles have to turn off Route 213 in the valley and climb up to the city.  It’s a small town, mainly Han-inhabited, with Yi and Miao villages within walking distance.  Tea merchants dominate the commercial area, while tea gardens lie along roads in every direction out of the town.  A walk along the road north of the town in the early morning gives one a spectacular view of peaks above the low clouds of early morning, especially Kongmingshan.

the aerial ropeway walk

       The Yi who might be in town dress in modern clothes, but a few Miao may also be around, the women distinguished by their bulky, pleated skirt.  Around 12.000 Miao live in Xishuangbanna, mostly in eastern Memgla County, comprising 1.1% of the prefecture’s population.  Like the Yi, they came here in the last decades of the Qing Dynasty, migrating from Guangxi, but are a small fraction of the over one million Miao in Yunnan and the over seven million throughout China.  They are not congregated in any particular area in Banna, but scattered in the hills among other minorities.  

       Forced migration has been a theme of Miao history since ancient times.  They settled in remote hills and secluded valleys until expanding Han populations began encroaching on their territory.  Then they would revolt, drive out the Han and face massive military retaliation, forcing them to surrender their land and move south.  Originally from central China, and there are still Miao communities in Hunan, different sub-groups eventually settled in China’s southern provinces and over the border into Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar.

bridge over the Nanla River near Mengla

well pagoda in Mengla 

       Xishuangbanna’s 20,000 members of the Yao minority nationality also live mainly in eastern Mengla County, mostly from the Landian sub-group, who also reside in Jiangcheng, Luchun, Yuanyang and Jinping Counties.  Their women wear a tight pair of black pants to just below the knee, white leggings, a loose black jacket, a skein of bright magenta wool thread hanging down from the neck in front and silver ornaments in their hair buns.  They also shave off their eyebrows. 

pavilion at the Manlongdai bridge

       This Yao sub-group favored locations at lower altitudes than most other Yao and except for the Yiwu highlands established villages in remote valleys with nearby streams.  Traditionally the Landian Yao built one-story houses of wattle and thatch, with mud floors, and aligned them with the stream, facing upstream.  They are concentrated around Manla in the north and Yaoqu in the center

       A road along the Nanla River north of Mengla comes to a fork after 27 km at Nazhuo.  Another 11 km northeast lies Yaoqu, but it is a modern town and the Yao around here do not dress Yao-style nor live in traditional houses.  However, the fork turning northeast passes Naka, a typical Yao village along the Nanla River, where at least the females still wear traditional clothing.  They may also be seen at the market in Mengban, a few km upriver, along with Miao and Aini.

 

typical Manlongdai house/restaurant

      Aini villages lie a couple of hours walk up into the hills directly east of Mengban.  Their stilted houses with attached, open-air balcony resemble those of Aini elsewhere in Banna.  But the women’s outfit is very different, without a skirt or lavish use of embroidery.  In this sub-group they wear a long black coat, with a bit of appliqué around the lapel, over calf-length black trousers.  The black headscarf features a row of silver studs in front, coins attached to the sides and silver chains with a pair of hoops at the ends dangling from each side.

       The road from Mengla to Nazhuo offers pleasant views of the river.  Parts of it are filled with half-submerged trees and thick forest flanks the eastern banks.  Fishermen ride rafts of lashed bamboo poles, about three meters long and half meter wide.  At bends in the river’s course the mountains to the east are visible.

temple compound near Manlongdai

       About ten km north of Mengla a side road turns west into a patch of virgin rain forest, one of the last surviving in the prefecture.  In most cases, people have to appreciate the wonders of such a forest from a ground-level viewpoint.  From 2007, another perspective became possible here.  An aerial ropeway adventure opened, offering a walk across planks mounted twelve meters up in the trees, flanked by heavily netted sides and a railing to hang onto while making the walk.  Only a few people are allowed on the walkway at a time, and it does sway a bit while used, but is perfectly safe.  The view is both up and down at magnificent tall and straight tree trunks, creepers, vines, epiphytes and a hundred shades of the color green.  The walkway ends in full view of a jungle waterfall.

the interior of Manlongdai's temple

       In Mengla City, most of the shops, restaurants, hotels and offices lie on the busy north-south road.  The residential areas are off to either side.  The little central park is busy mornings and evenings with local people practicing tai qi and other forms of exercise.  On the hill above it is the local Buddhist temple compound.  Just down the street is the Nanla Shopping Mall, with attractive buildings employing Dai architectural motifs, like pagodas on the roof, that include a supermarket, several boutiques, snack and drink shops and outdoor restaurants along the river.  A Dai-style pagoda well stands at the corner and a right turn here along Qingnianlu leads to the old neighborhood of Mansai, a collection of traditional Dai houses, a few of which double as evening restaurants.

       The latter are popular with visitors who stay overnight.  For afternoon meals, though, tourists and even Dai from other parts of the prefecture tend to head for Manlongdai, just several km north, an 800-year-old Dai village famous for its cuisine.  With scarcely any modern-style buildings around, just Dai-style stilted houses, diners can relish their meals in an authentic traditional setting.   Hosts serve them various locally grown vegetables, raw and cooked, steamed fish, boiled and grilled chicken, ground pork mixed with herbs and cooked in a bamboo tube, and Pu’er tea and rice liquor to wash it all down. 

Huilong Falls

       The village lies on the south side of a narrow stream, with the rice fields on the other side.  A modest wooden gate stands on one side of the bridge across the stream, while on the village side is a very ornate, red-painted gate doubling as a rest stop, decorated with carvings and a painted peacock below the roof apex.  Just beyond the north end of the village is the old monastery, with wooden walls and roof tiles, still the original building from centuries ago.

       Just two km away another Dai village, two centuries older than Manlongdai, has also retained its original temple compound buildings.  They’re a little dilapidated and they use a bit of corrugated iron here and there on the awnings above the ground floor.  Concrete pillars have replaced the wooden posts.  The interiors are quite well preserved, however, featuring lavishly painted altars, ceiling imagery and wall murals internal and external.

       In the jungle a short distance from Manlongdai is the most hidden of all of the county’s little-known attractions—Huilong Falls.  The waterfall plunges about a hundred meters from a tall cliff straight through the jungle.  To reach this serene and lovely site one has to find a guide to take one down a certain jungle path, then cross a creek and fight through the bushes, perhaps startling a porcupine on the way, bend under tree branches and crawl over boulders for about a half hour just to get into a position to see five of its nine cataracts. 

       Similar unexplored jungles still exist elsewhere in the county.  No doubt intrepid travelers In the future, driven by an insatiable appetite for unspoiled natural beauty, will discover new waterfalls, caves and scenic tucked-away ponds.  The list of Mengla County’s hidden attractions is bound to grow.     

in the heart of a tropical rain forest

                                                                         * * *                                                                                                  

                              for more on Mengla County and its people, see my e-book

                                           Xishuangbanna:  The Tropics of Yunnan

       

The Akha Swing Festival, a.k.a. ‘Women’s New Year’

                                                                 by Jim Goodman

    The mountains of southern Yunnan, China and the northern parts of Myanmar, Thailand and Laos are home to several different ethnic minorities.  Their villages look similar, created by clearing a patch of the hillside forest and employing wood, bamboo and other jungle materials for the construction of their buildings.  The main difference among them is in the house type.  The Yao, Hmong and Lisu houses tend to sit directly on the ground.  The others—of the Akha, Lahu, Jinuo, Bulang and Wa—are stilted houses, with open-air attached balconies, modeled on the houses of the Shui Dai, Shan, Thai and Lao of the plains in the respective countries. 
    From a distant view, even before one can discern whether the village houses are stilted or not, it is still possible to identify a traditional Akha settlement.  It will feature one structure, clearly visible in an open area, usually at the high end of the residential area, which no other hill people have—the village swing.  Made of four long tree saplings lashed together near the top, it stands as a cultural symbol of the people, a proclamation that this is an Akha village.  It’s not the only distinctively Akha structure, for each traditional village has a pair of entry gates at opposite ends of the village.  But these are half hidden by trees and not as easy to see as the swing.

Akha women drawing water for ritual use

    After entering the village and going to look at the swing, though, one finds that actually it’s just a swing frame.  Nothing is hanging from the yoke.  Nobody can swing on it.  But nobody’s supposed to on an ordinary day.  The swing is not there for amusement in a villager’s leisure time. It is activated only during a major festival, an event so full of revelry and entertainment it can be more fun than New Year celebrations.
    The Akha call the Swing Festival Yekuja, which literally means “eating bitter rice,” but don’t seem to know its origin or why the event is called that.  The Akha have a large corpus of oral literature, passed down fifty generations, detailing their migrations, conflicts, mythology and the origins of various customs, beliefs, taboos and traditions.  But the origin of the Swing Festival is not mentioned.  In Thailand the festival falls sometime in September, nine twelve-day cycles after the

preparing the ancestral offerings

ceremonial first rice planting.  This is a month or two before harvest time, so some researchers assumed that the “bitter rice” referred to the low rice stocks people would have at this time of year, so long after the last harvest.  But in China the Akha stage it in July, around the time the Dai hold Guanmenjie, marking the Buddhist retreat season.
    No matter where or when it is held, the festival begins on a buffalo day in the twelve-day cycle.  Women draw water from a sacred spring, to be used in ancestral offerings that day, and must dress in their full traditional outfit for the task.  Families sacrifice a chicken or small pig that day and perform ancestral rites at the house shrine.

raising the new swing frame

    The following morning, under the direction of the dzoema, the traditional village leader, men tear down the swing frame and build a new one.  Strict rules are in order.  The new swing has to use two postholes of the old one and they must dig two new ones.  Everyone has to be shadow-conscious.  The swing must be in a spot where no house shadow falls across it.  The diggers cannot let their shadows cross the postholes.  The dzoema first makes offerings of bits of egg and silver to each of the postholes to appease the ground spirits and insure against any untoward accidents.
    Groups of men raise the four poles and get them to sort of lean against each other near the top.  Then a pair of men climbs up the poles to lash them together a couple of meters from the top ends.  In the space just below where they’ve roped the poles together they tie a wooden yoke at the junction.  From the middle of this a long rope hangs suspended, the bottom end of it looped and just above the ground.  When all is done the men descend and the

lashing the ends together

dzoema gives the swing a test ride.  He pulls the rope back as far as he can while standing, places one foot in the loop, leaps forward and uses the other leg to pump the swing and ride higher.  A short ride is enough for him to judge it safe for everyone else and for this and the following two days (though not at night) anyone can ride the swing. 
    This day in Thailand’s Akha villages young men dominate action on the swing.  They stick one foot in the looped end, take a running leap and pump so hard and well with the other leg they swing so high you expect them to loop the yoke.  Only an increasing sense of vertigo seems to persuade them to stop pumping to the stratosphere and commence the slow return to the ground.  Of course they invited me, as a guest, to

installing the yoke and the swing rope

have a ride.  But I could never get it right.  I wound up just spinning around.  How they got so high I still can’t figure out.  After all, this is the only time of the year the swing is in use, so they don’t practice ahead of the festival.
    The third day the women dominate the swing action.  The village men slay and butcher a buffalo and divide up the meat in portions for each household.  Since traditionally, men cooked the meat and women cooked the rice and vegetables, on this day the women have more time for the swing.  Women of all ages dress up in their best traditional outfits and jewelry.  Traditional female clothing comprises a halter blouse, jacket, belt, short pleated skirt, a sash-pouch over the skirt in front, leggings on the calves, a shoulder bag and ornamented headgear. 
    The Swing Festival is one of two occasions during the year, New Year’s the other, when changes can take place in the costume components.  Around puberty, the Akha girl changes her round children’s cap for a much fancier one, decorated with lots of silver, coins, beads, chicken feather tassels, gibbon fur and the like and begins wearing  the sash-pouch in front of her skirt.  She wears this girl’s cap through adolescence and then changes to the headdress worn by fully-grown adult women.

Aini man riding high in Xishuangbanna

Akha woman gets her friend started

    In the weeks preceding the Swing Festival some teenage girls might be busy making that headdress they will don at that time. Others will be embroidering or adding appliqué patterns to newly made jackets and shoulder bags.  So will their mothers and it is this aspect of the Swing Festival, the girls and women showing off their skill and beauty wearing their best, new, gorgeous hand-made traditional clothing, that has earned the event a second name—Women’s New Year.

    They and the children ride the swing differently from the men.  Women insert a plank into the looped end of the swing, carefully tuck their skirt in as they sit on the plank, while a companion draws them back as far as possible, by hand or with the aid of rope, and lets go.  The rider pumps with both legs, like on the two-rope swings we use in the west, yet can climb as high into the air as the most vigorous young man. 

Akha dèhâw scene at festival time

    Children ride the same way as the women and girls, though they don’t try to go very high.  The whole scene is completely spontaneous and unorganized.  There are periods when a large group of girls arrives and the action is constant for a while.  Then comes a lull, interrupted by a few children playing on the swing.  Then perhaps an old woman will sit on the plank, using her foot to push her back and forth to sway a little while she sings a slow, lugubrious old song about unrequited love or the sufferings of troubled migrations and natural calamities.
    At dusk the swing area empties as people return home to feast and afterwards watch or take part in the night activities.  The young people, still in their most resplendent clothing and as many ornaments as they own, gather at the dèhäw, the open space designated as the village dancing ground.  This is the spot where young people traditionally socialized after dinner, often singing and dancing together, especially during nights of the New Year and Swing Festivals, which could go on for a few hours and include both traditional Akha songs and dances as well as modern Thai tunes.  One troupe of young men and women go house to house everywhere in the village to chant and beat bamboo tubes on logs to chase off bad spirits.

drumming with bamboo tubes

    The fourth day features family visits to relatives in the village and another round of feasting.  Akha living in the plains might come up to the home village this day.  Those who have yet to ride the swing may have a last chance before dusk.  At that time men remove the swing from the yoke and put it away.  The frame, however, stays up until the next Swing Festival.
    Over the years the essential elements of the Swing Festival have remained unaltered, but it is not celebrated in Thailand as much as before, partly because so many villages have converted to Christianity and thus abandoned all traditional festivals.  Also, in those villages still resisting conversion, television and videos have undermined the dèhâw scene and even though it may fill up at festivals there are proportionately fewer young people electing to live in the villages.

China's Aini girls swing without a plank

    Knowing that the original Akha homeland was in Yunnan, I always wondered how different the festival might be there.  Finally, a few years ago, while doing research on Xishuangbanna, I got to witness the Swing Festival in Menghai County.  In China, the Akha identify themselves as Akha, but the Chinese government, because kha is the local Dai word for “slave”, renamed them as Aini.  In general, they are better off than their cousins in Thailand, Laos or Myanmar.  Many villages have become rich from tea and rubber plantations in the past decade or so.  They still live in stilted houses for the most part, though bricks or cement piles might substitute for wooden stilts. 
    The Aini have also had very different recent historical experiences, like forced collectivization and government campaigns against traditional beliefs and customs.  That was all over by the 1980s, with the new government of the Reform Era encouraging ethnic tradition now.  Ethnic pride returned to the Aini as well as other ethnic minorities.  But revivalism did not encompass everything traditional.  For one thing, most Aini had shifted from rice cultivation to cash crops, which thus obviated the necessity for rituals and festivals tied to the rice-growing

on the swing in XIshuangbanna

cycle.  The influence of secularism and the spread of education also handicapped a revival of the traditional animist mind-set.
    Nevertheless, the new ethnic pride demanded revival of something of traditional Aini significance.  New Year celebrations, yes, of course, but everybody has those.  Only the Aini/Akha had a Swing Festival.  It may not be exactly like the Swing Festival of olden times.  The dèhâw scene had disappeared here for much the same reasons as in Thailand and so there were no dances at night, nor a troupe of bamboo tube drummers chasing spirits away from the village houses.  But they still erect and use the swing in the old fashion and by the same rules as in Thailand.  Unlike their southern cousins, too, they will also reactivate it on 2 January, the fixed Aini New Year day.
    Admittedly, though, not so many Aini villagers come to use the swing or watch those who do.  Many of the girls dress to the hilt for the day, though, for it’s kind of Women’s New Year here, too, still.  The adults lay more stress on the family get-togethers and feasting.  That is the traditional festival requirement they enjoy the most.  But it’s more than the food and drink, for they could find excuses for that any time of year.  They partake of the feast as part of the Swing Festival they insist on maintaining, an occasion when they put their ethnic identity on display, to announce and to share.  As one Aini swing-maker told me, “We have to do it because it’s our Aini tradition.”  In the ethnic revivalist frame of mind that affects the consciousness of today’s Aini, many things they do are traditionally Aini, but the Swing Festival distinguishes them from everybody else.  Therefore, to be Aini in Banna, as it is to be a traditional Akha in Thailand, means having a Swing Festival.

Aini girl all dressed up for'Women's New Year"

                                                                      * * *
             for more about the Aini see my e-book Xishuangbanna: theTropics of Yunnan