A Guest of the Cool Mountain Yi

                                                        by Jim Goodman

Yi festival in the mountains of Ninglang County

       Southwest China’s Yi nationality is the fourth largest ethnic minority in the country.  They inhabit mostly mountainous terrain in southern Sichuan, western Guizhou and Guangxi and throughout nearly all of Yunnan, where they form 11% of the province’s population, the most numerous of its 25 ethnic minorities.  Ancestors of Yunnan’s Yi founded the Nanzhao Kingdom, which vied for supremacy with Tang Dynasty China from the 7^th century for control of southwest China until both regimes collapsed in the early 10^th century. 

        Though the Yi permanently lost political power in Yunnan they were still the dominant ethnic group in the successor Bai-run Kingdom of Dali and remained so after the Mongol conquest in the mid-13^th century.  Only when the Ming Dynasty sponsored large-scale Han immigration to Yunnan did the proportion of Yi in Yunnan begin to reduce. 

Yi women in the Ninglang city market

            Contemporary Yi are not, and never really were, a homogenous nationality.  In Yunnan alone there are over two dozen sub-groups, residing in different kinds of ecological conditions, speaking five distinct dialects.  That much I knew myself before I ever visited Yunnan.  But on my first journey there the first Yi I wanted to meet were the Liangshan Yi, the Cool Mountain Yi of Ninglang County.  I had read about them already in a Peter Goullart account of his journey with a Black Yi aristocrat as well as when doing research on the Long March.  The Red Army had a memorable encounter with the same branch of the Yi in southern Sichuan.

       Maps of southwest China compiled by Western explorers in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries marked the entire Liangshan area, the Greater Cool Mountains in Xichang, Sichuan and the Lesser Cool Mountains in Ninglang, Yunnan as “Independent Lololand.”  The designation Lolo, which translates as something resembling savage, was the pre-1949 term for the Yi.  While today all Yunnan Yi refer to themselves as Yi when speaking to outsiders, among themselves they use their own name for their sub-group:  Nisu in Yuanyang, Tuli in Weishan and Midu, Sani in Shilin, etc.  The Liangshan Yi call themselves Nuosu—the Dark People.  While they dominate Ninglang County, the Nuosu also reside in Lijiang, Shangrila, Lanping, Jianchuan and Yangbi Counties. 

Nuosu Yi villlage in early autumn

      “Independent” did not mean a separate state.  It was more of a no-go zone for outsiders, particularly Han, because the Liangshan Yi society was a slave-holding one and outsiders risked capture and sale as a slave.  It was a very complex one, though, and one’s status was not permanently fixed.  At the top were the Black Yi aristocrats, comprising about 15% of the people at most.  Below them were the White Yi, serfs to the Black Yi, around 50% of the population.  They did not have the privileges of the Black Yi and were often drafted to fight in the ceaseless feuds the Yi lords had with each other.  But they could not be enslaved or killed with impunity.

Cool Mountain Yi, in felted wool cape

       Two kinds of slaves ranked below the White Yi—field slaves and house slaves.  Unlike the situation in the pre-Civil War American South, the field slaves were actually better off.  They had to labor in the master’s fields, but could actually work their own private plot, make money and either buy their freedom or buy a slave of their own to work and then amass enough capital to, for example, buy out the slave’s whole family.  Meanwhile, their slaves could work their own plots and even buy a slave to work for them.  The lowest status in Nuosu society, therefore, was to be a slave of a slave of a slave.

       House slaves didn’t have that option, however, and their lives and conditions were subject to the personality traits of their owners.  Some were nice; some were harsh, even cruel, as attested by the display of torture instruments in the Xichang Museum.  After 1949, though, no “Independent Lololand” could exist.  The new Communist government, however, moved gradually to eliminate the slave system.  They began by winning over Black Yi slave-owners, already aware the system was doomed, to emancipate their slaves in return for positions in the new autonomous governing body. 

carrying water in wooden buckets

       Not all acquiesced, though, and the government was obliged to mount a military campaign in 1956 against recalcitrant Black Yi in remote areas.  It lasted two years and the cemetery in Ninglang is full of the graves of young Chinese soldiers who died in the campaign.  All that is a distant memory today.  But while the old slavery system is dead, the Nuosu are still one of the most conservative of Yi sub-groups. Typical characteristics associated with Yi culture—the mid-summer Torch Festival, the role of the ritual specialist called bìmaw (also spelled bimo), the use of the ancient Yi script—are not necessarily part of Yi life everywhere in Yunnan.  But with the Nuosu they are.

       Among the Nuosu customs maintained is that of an almost ritualized form of hospitality.  For Ninglang’s Yi there are three kinds of guests and each type requires a separate kind of reception.  The most common is a fellow villager or other familiar guest, who will be seated by the fireplace and served with whatever is available, tea and potatoes usually, liquor occasionally. 

       The second category is the special guest, one of high rank or from some distance away.  For them the host slays a two-legged animal; a chicken usually, but it could be a duck or goose.  For the third type, a very rare guest from especially far away, the host kills a four-legged animal—small pig, sheep or goat. 

typical Yi log cabins

        Coming from Thailand, I qualified as the third type of guest in every remote mountain village I visited overnight.  In Ninglang Yi houses where I made regular visits every season or so for a few years, my hosts killed chickens.  Part of this hospitality routine was to take a prognosis of the event, while the chicken was being cooked, by inserting two toothpicks into two small holes in the chicken’s thighbone.  If the toothpicks leaned too close together that meant the guest was trying to take advantage of the host.  If they were too far apart it signified the host was trying to evade hospitality responsibilities.  If they formed a nice “V” (as mine did each time, fortunately for me and the hosts) then the visit would proceed harmoniously.

the hearth

       For the second and third type of guest, liquor is an integral part of the reception.  Overnight guests might bring their own, but the host is obligated to serve some.  But first he pours a bit into a small cup, moves it counter-clockwise around the hearth, then places it in a high place in the room as an offering to the ancestors.  Only after this does he serve some to his guest, with an exchange of toasts.

       Yi in the mountains of Ninglang County are not wealthy.  To welcome guests by slaying their animals is an expense beyond their ordinary budget.  Traditionally though, the guest acknowledges this by offering kàba, or compensation, before departure, three times, since it is also custom to politely decline twice.  Fully informed of this by my Yi friends I did the same, but the amount I was advised to give was always much less than the value of the food and liquor served me.  The Yi never seek to ‘profit’ from the encounter. 

raising a toast with maize liquor

       Along with the meat of the requisite animal, my meals with my Yi hosts included potatoes and buckwheat bread, two Cool Mountain staples.  Villages are sited too high up to grow rice, so buckwheat, barley and millet suffice instead, with some of it traded for rice in the markets.  They also grow maize, but its main use is for alcohol or animal feed.  Potatoes, turnips and radishes are the main vegetables; chickens, pigs, sheep and goats their main livestock.  They usually live in log cabins with tiled roofs, the hearth in the main receiving and dining room and bedrooms to the sides.  Overnight guests, however, sleep beside the fire.  

Yi girls dance at theTorch Festival

       Among the conservative traits the Nuosu Yi have retained, particularly among the women, is the preference for traditional clothing.  Females of all ages wear a long, cotton skirt, pleated from the knees down, each of the three or four wide sections a contrasting color; bright pastels for the younger women, darker tones for the older ones.  They hold it in place with a long, narrow, fringed belt, with a triangular purse, fully embroidered or appliquéd with crescents, whorls and spirals, bordered by necktie-shaped, decorated cloth tassels and suspended from the belt.  The purse and belt ends bounce against the skirt while she walks.    

       On the upper part of the body the woman wears a long-sleeved blouse with striped or embroidered cuffs and a silk or velvet vest.  Headgear depends on marital status.  Those married with children don a wide, rectangular black hat, while the unmarried or married without children wear either a flat, embroidered rectangular cloth held in place by tying the braids over the top of the head, or a large, rounded black hat, the edges trimmed with color bands, the hat held in place by a scarf tied over it and fastened under the chin.  For ornaments they will use strings of amber, coral and filigreed silver beads, disk-shaped earrings with attached pendants and embossed silver plates around the neck. 

Yi women on a mountain trail

traditional Nuosu woman's purse

        Among the women, traditional clothing is not just for special occasions but is the norm for everyday life--fieldwork, tending to the animals, cooking, fetching water, chopping wood and going to the market.  Men usually dress in modern style clothes, but may wear a dark turban and both sexes wear the distinctive Yi woolen cape.  Most common is the felted, A-line type called vombaw.  More expensive types are from woven wool:  the vahlah—fringed at the knees—and the heavier jyeshi—pleated top to bottom. 

Nuosu Yi girl, Ninglang County

        Ninglang is a Yi Autonomous County, so Yi officials run the administration, subsidize the annual Torch Festival celebrations in the city and encourage the maintenance of Yi traditions.  While Yi officials, teachers, businessmen and so forth may no longer themselves cling to the old animist world-view, their womenfolk are still steeped in it.  I once attended a traditional ritual expulsion of evil spirits in the house of my Yi friend, an English teacher in Ninglang, whose wife insisted on the ceremony due to some domestic bad luck in recent days.

       A young bìmaw in his late 20s conducted the rites beside the hearth, wearing a special round bamboo-frame woolen hat, reading incantations from a Yi-language manuscript.  Then he poured a bit of water on the coals to create steam, grabbed the sacrificial cock and waved it through the steam to purify it, moved it clockwise over the hearth to retain the good spirits in the house, counter-clockwise to repel the bad ones, and several times over the host couple’s heads to expel evil and prevent nightmares.

       Continuing recitations without the use of the book, the bìmaw next knocks the chicken senseless, slices it through its mouth, breaks the left wing bone at its shoulder and cuts a hole in the skin at that spot.   After more incantations the bìmaw picks up the dead animal, puts his mouth over the hole at the shoulder and blows hard.  This makes the cock crow as if it were alive, which makes any lingering evil house spirits take fright and flee.  Just to be sure, the bìmaw repeats the procedure several minutes later.

young Yi bìmaw

       The final act is to throw the cock and the sacrificial knife outside the door.  If the blade and the cock’s head and feet point away from the house, as it did the time I witnessed, the rite is deemed successful.  If they point towards the house the bìmaw has to repeat the rite with a fresh chicken.  When successful, the host gives the bìmaw a bottle of liquor and some money, placed in a bowl of buckwheat flour.   Then they all dine together when the hostess cooks and serves the chicken.

       With an attitude typical for Nuosu men, however secular-minded and well educated they may be, my Yi friend saw no reason not to participate in this “superstitious” event.  For him it was a positive occasion showcasing his people's time-honored customs.  The bìmaw’s youth testified to the continuing strength of Yi culture. It takes several years to qualify for the role of theYi ritual specialist and obviously the next generation was keeping the tradition going.  And though my friend may not have believed in the true efficacy of the ritual, it was fine with him that the women and children did.  The rites restored their sense of worry-free domestic harmony.  And that’s a bonus for the non-believer as well.  Being modern doesn’t mean you have to stop being Yi.

Nuosu Yi woman--pride in the traditional look

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           for more on the Ninglang County Yi see my e-book Children of the Jade Dragon 

      

       

The White Yi Bull Fights

                                                            by Jim Goodman

          Counties north of Yunnan’s capital that are part of Kunming Municipality Prefecture are among the least explored in the whole province.  Photographers might zip up for a quick excursion to take pictures of the red soil that is such a prominent landscape feature.  Though the area has its share of natural beauty and colorfully dressed ethnic minorities, little information is available, even now on the internet, so travelers tend to opt instead for better-known destinations.

White Yi family in Xundian County

          My own introduction to the area came about courtesy of a Kunming friend in the hemp cloth trade.  He had a business connection with White Yi villages in western Xundian County and we decided to pay them a visit on the day of the summer Torch Festival.  There wouldn’t be the usual bonfires associated with Torch Festival celebrations elsewhere in the province, though.  His contact had informed him the main event was a round of fights between the prize bulls of different villages.

           Xundian is a Yi and Hui Autonomous County.  The Hui live in and around the county administrative seat as well as around Liushao, to the west.  In between lies Qingshui Lake, locally renowned for its clean, clear water, atmospheric scenery and a species of trout bred there that tastes like salmon.  Some Miao villages lie south of Liushao, while in the rolling hills to the west and north the White Yi dominate.

White Yi village near Jijie

          The architecture of a typical White Yi village resembles that of rural Han settlements in the province—houses of mud-brick and wood with tiled roofs and stone foundations.  A few even have the carved wooden fish hanging from the apex of each roof corner, a symbol of water as protection against lightning or fire.  The villagers grow rice, maize and vegetables, but also hemp, for producing the cloth used to make their traditional garments. In modern times they have also been using cotton for their clothing, but hemp cloth clothing is still what tradition demands that a deceased White Yi must be wearing at his or her funeral and burial.

White Yi women

           Whether it’s hemp or cotton, the Xundian White Yi traditional outfit is one of the more dazzling in the province.  The dominant component of White Yi women’s clothing is a red and white poncho-like garment worn over a wide-sleeved blouse and a long, bulky skirt.  It is about three meters long, with white cotton or hemp on the sides and hems and a bright red woolen body with a square hole in the center to slip the piece over the head.  The back of the cloth has blue patterns near the end and the women often tuck this section in a way that shows them better.

          The red part of this piece is a very bright hue, leaning to orange, covered in patterns, some a single repeating motif, others a conglomeration of many.  Each village has its own particular set of designs, so that at markets or inter-village events the women can recognize by the patterns from which village the wearer came.  When embroidering patterns the woman not only makes her own selections from the village repertoire, she may also add some of her own creation.  The result is that at a crowded multi-village event like this festival, no two outfits are exactly alike.

ethnic style of the White Yi women

traditional White Yi man's outfit

          The women’s lower garment is a three-part long cotton skirt.  The top part is white, the middle mostly red with thin stripes, while the bottom third is heavy blue cotton so finely pleated that at first glance it looks like corduroy.  Younger women and girls wear a long, voluminous, white pleated hemp skirt.  Neither type of skirt has a drawstring, so to wear it the woman puts it on over her head, drops it down to the waist and bunches it together under the end of the blouse and secures it with a cloth belt.

BlackYi women, Xundian County

           Not all the county’s Yi dress in such vibrant colors.  A smaller Black Yi group wears a wide-sleeved, black wraparound jacket with strips of embroidered flowers on the hems and lapels.  Another group wears very wide-sleeved silk blouses with broad stripes of contrasting colors.  Both groups’ women wear black trousers rather than skirts.  But a final item of attire for any of Xundian’s Yi women may be an elaborately embroidered shoulder bag.  And while a traditional broad-brimmed cap still exists, most women top the outfit with a rather incongruous Red Army cap.

          White Yi women still don their traditional clothing for everyday work, saving their choicest outfit for special events.  On those occasions a great number of the men dress in the ethnic style, too.  Most of the items are made of hemp cloth and, like the women’s skirts, the wide-legged, untailored trousers have to be bunched together at the waist and secured with a belt.  On the upper part of the body a long-sleeved shirt goes under a long-tailed, white vest, a black waistcoat with wide half-sleeves, and a short, white vest with narrow bands of colored trimmings along the hems, horizontally across the middle and vertically on the sides.  Like the women, too, they top off this imaginative set of layers with a Mao cap.

awaiting the start of the program

          The venue for the festival we came to see was in the western part of the county in a kind of natural amphitheater surrounded by forests near the km117 marker on the Kunming-Jijie route.  The bulls would fight on a small, flat basin just down the slope from the east side of the road, devoid of trees or bushes.  Behind it rose a slope where spectators could sit in the relatively bare section just below the trees.  A rocky knoll bound the north side of the basin and the south side slid away into a small valley. 

          There was no host village.  Yet by our arrival at mid-morning the slope beside the road was already full of food and drink stalls under tents or large umbrellas.  People began arriving in trucks and on motorbikes.  Most of those attending were White Yi, but the crowd also included Black Yi, Han, Hui and Miao.   Older Han women wore the traditional embroidered dark bib, including one octogenarian in tiny feet.  The Miao women wore ankle-length skirts of black and white or solid black and dark jackets with blue trimming, among the least colorful Miao women’s outfits I’d seen in Yunnan.  They were quite friendly, though, several of them twining hemp thread while they chatted and waited for the start of the show.

White Yi at the festival grounds

          The White Yi women, nearly all of them of all ages wore their traditional outfits, stood out in the crowd wherever they went.  They moved around in groups of three to seven or more in waves of fluttering red and white against a largely green background.  Some people watched a basketball tournament held about thee hundred meters from the arena, but most just milled around, drinking or snacking, playing games of skill or chance, until around 2:00, when the first pair of bulls were ready to square off.

          Attention now turned to the arena as men in their full traditional attire, the only thing deemed suitable for the role, the tails of their starched white vests flapping in the breeze, escorted their contending bulls from opposite ends of the field.  The handlers guided the pair into position against each other, prodded the two into combat and let go of the leashes when they began to fight.

          The first match, however, nearly ended in disaster.  The head-butting had barely begun when suddenly one bull panicked and wheeled around to flee, accidentally goring his handler in the process and charging into the crowd.  Other handlers quickly caught and subdued it while four men rushed in to rescue the injured man.  Two of them lifted him by his arms and the other two grabbed onto the cuffs of his trousers.  As they carried him away his trousers slipped down and his bare ass hung low over the ground all the way to the ambulance.  Fortunately, the wound was slight and he was soon back on his feet.

escorting the village champion to the arena

The next match was nearly a repeat.  The pair of bulls pushed and shoved each other for several minutes until one lifted his opponent and began shaking it.  That move frightened the losing bull, which abruptly turned around, knocked down and ran over one of its handlers and began running towards the slope beside the road, where I myself was standing.  Everyone scattered and I ducked behind one of the small refreshment tents, figuring the bull would get tangled in the tent canvas before it could reach and strike me.
Fortunately, the bull halted before reaching the tents, turned away and ambled quietly towards the valley.  For me and the other startled spectators it seemed we were in for an exciting day.  But none of the ensuing fights matched the drama and adrenalin rush of the first two.  In fact, they were so normal as to be, in view of what had happened already, kind of anti-climactic.

a handler watches his bull i combat

At each round first one handler led his leashed bull in a stately march from the valley to the center of the arena.  After he was in place another handler from the rocky knoll side of the arena brought in the opposing bull.  Once they had been positioned, the bulls would dig up a bit of the turf in front of them, as if to mark their territory.  The handlers, their bulls still on leashes, prodded the bulls to face each other and commence combat, and dropped the leashes when the bulls began to fight.

For the first two rounds the bulls went at it as soon as they faced each other.  But in the several matches that followed the bulls seemed reluctant to fight.  We amused ourselves speculating that maybe the bulls had witnessed what happened the first two matches, did not fantasize themselves as the mighty winner, but rather feared they might be the one that suffered the humiliating rout.
The Yi were prepared for any bullish recalcitrance.  Several Yi picadors jabbed at the beasts with long sticks to provoke their anger, under the assumption the bulls would take it out on each other and not turn around and attack the picadors.  Finally the bulls locked horns and began pushing and ramming each other, with pauses in between efforts, until one bull proved the stronger and the loser turned and fled.

In one match, however, one of the bulls simply refused to fight.  Whenever its handler prodded its head to face the other bull it turned in another direction.  And it was oblivious to the repeated picador jabs.  It just wanted to run away, but couldn’t because it was still on the leash.  After several fruitless minutes of trying to make this dumb animal be a good bull and fight like a bull, while the amused crowd laughed and heckled its handlers, the latter gave up and led the bull away.  Its opponent was declared winner by default.              

head-to-head and may the best bull win

         The matches concluded in the late afternoon and the crowd vacated the area to return home for a big evening feast.  We did likewise at the home of our Yi host and probably, just like them, slowly consumed the meat and washed it down with several cups of strong rice liquor while we exchanged anecdotes of our individual adventures and encounters at the arena.  In our case, though, we also wondered about the reception given the competitors today when they returned home with their bulls.  What would be the reaction as the results became known to those who didn’t make it to the fights?  For the winners that was easy.  They brought pride to the village.  Everybody was happy.  For the panicky losers of the first two matches, well, at least they put up an initial fight and their handlers could argue that anyway the winners were just stronger bulls. 

          But the bull that refused to fight like a bull?  The bull that revealed the embarrassing fact it had the heart of a rabbit?  Their so-called village champion bull?  We figured the handlers probably just informed the disappointed villagers that this bull would no longer represent the village in any future tournament.  They would train a replacement, one with a bull’s true fighting spirit.  As for the bull that brought shame upon itself, its handlers and the village it represented, they would use it as raw material for the main ingredients of a big, happy, compensatory, collective village feast.  Cheers!

 

young Yi women on the way home after the festival

                                                                   

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