Ethnic Territory—the Honghe Borderlands

                                    by Jim Goodman

Flowery Miao stall in Mengla

       Yunnan can boast of a great range of scenic wonders, but its unique ethnic diversity inspired my own extensive exploration.  The province is home to 24 ethnic minorities, comprising one-third of the population and occupying two-thirds of the land.  Some of then consist of two dozen or more separate sub-groups, with their own distinctive clothing and customs.  An aspiring ethnologist in Yunnan could never run out of places to go, people to meet and cultures to record.

       The fact that many of the ethnic minorities live in areas of great natural beauty was just a bonus.  The appreciation of scenery depends on weather conditions, with sunny skies critically important; not so when the focus is on ethnic minority encounters.  One can have a memorable time among them even when clouds obscure the mountains, fog envelops the valleys and sunlight fails to illuminate the landscape.  This is especially true where ethnic traditions remain strong and the women still dress in their traditional clothing.

Hai  with shoulder board, Jinshuihe

Sha Yao in the Jinshuihe market 

       The greatest ethnic variety is in Honghe, a Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefecture.  Yi sub-groups are present all over the prefecture, while numerous Hani sub-groups mainly reside in the southern counties.  Honghe’s minorities also include different kinds of Miao, Yao, Dai, Zhuang and Lahu.  Together they dominate the mountainous counties south of the Red River—Honghe, Luchun, Yuanyang and Jinping.  Here the Han are the minority, basically restricted to urban centers, along with some Hui.

       Of the southern counties, Jinping is a Miao, Yao and Dai Autonomous County.  Together they outnumber the Hani and Yi, though Jinping has plenty of Hani and Yi villages as well.  On market day in Jinping city the local Hani are as numerous as the Yao.  The women wear loose, side-fastened dark jackets over trousers and coil their hair on their heads in a braid that is lengthened by the addition of black woolen yarn.  They also show up at market day in Adebo, north of Jinping, but rarely at markets south of Jinping,

Flowery Miao girl in Jinshuihe

White Miao girl, Jinshuihe

       Market days in the county are fixed according to the 12-day animal cycle, held every sic days.  Ethnic minorities form the overwhelming majority of participants and so to observe, photograph and meet them the easiest program is to follow the market day schedule.  Having witnessed the action in Jinping, which holds it on horse and rat days, the next day, sheep or ox day, the venue was Jinshuihe, 25 km south of Jinping.   Mengla holds it the following days—monkey and tiger days.  Next, on rabbit and chicken days, it is the turn of Sanguocun, about halfway between Mengla and Zhemi, while the latter stages it dragon and dog days.

Guozuo Hani in the Mengla market

Dai Lu young women in Mengla

       Jinshuihe, which local people more often refer to as Nafa, is a small border town of basically two long streets.  Tropical shade trees—banyans and royal palms—line the upper street, which starts at a riverbank and ends by meeting the lower street at a roundabout with lotus-shaped street lamps.  A street branches here to the bridge on the Laomeng River and the international boundary.  Only a border post stands on the Vietnamese side, backed by hills, with villages barely visible in the distance.

bathing pool at the Xinmeng hot springs

       Not much cross-border trade happens here, so Jinshuihe is ordinarily a sleepy and boring town.  But on market days the lower street and the plaza at the western end fill with stalls and ethnic minorities from the district and even from Vietnam.  When I witnessed it, Yao, Miao and Hani sub-groups made up the bulk of those in attendance, most of them women and all the females, young and old, dressed in traditional attire.

       Among the Yao, some were from the Hongtou (Red Head) Yao prominent in Jingping, selling cloth as they did the day before in jinping’s market day.  Their name comes from the pointed red cap married women wear. They also wear long-tailed coats and shin-length trousers that they heavily embroider with cross-stitched patterns.   A few others were Landian Yao, who dress mainly in plain black, with a skein of magenta woolen thread suspended vertically along the front of the jacket.

 

Guozuo Hani  village above Xinmeng

      The largest contingent was the Sha Yao sub-group, who live in villages in the hills between Jinping and Jinshuihe and over the border in Vietnam.  Their women wear black jackets and trousers and a skein of pink woolen thread down the front, but also long white aprons and a bulky cap with a bill and pink trimming.  Silver neck rings and arrow earrings, like those of the other Yao, were the most popular ornaments.  Unlike the Miao and Hani, who often wandered the market alone, the Sha Yao walked around in groups of four to eight. 

       Two Miao sub-groups turned up.  Flowery Miao women dressed in bulky, pleated, indigo-dyed skirts, the lower half covered in bright red or orange embroidery and appliqué and V-neck black jackets.  The White Miao wore nothing white, but long black coats and black trousers.  The coat lapels were heavily embroidered, as were their caps.  Besides the vegetable displays, the Miao took most interest in stalls selling thread and Miao clothing components.  Miao men also wore their traditional black jackets and blue trousers

Hani woman spinning thread in Sanguocun

Laowo  Yi woman in Sanguocun

       A few Hani from Jinping came down to run stalls, but most were from the Guozuo sub-group prominent around Jinshuihe and Mengla.  The women and girls wore long blue-black coats, fastened on the right side, shin-length trousers and leg wrappers.  Patches of embroidery and silver studs decorated the jacket along the lapel and above the left breast.  The headgear consisted of three red rattan strips across the front, pink tassels dangling on each side, colored cloth strips across the top and a black flap over the back, festooned with buttons or silver threads.  Many of them carried pack-baskets attached to a wooden shoulder board to more evenly distribute the weight.

Hani women in Sanguocun

       The crowds began dissipating after one p.m. and I headed west for Mengla, a much larger town of mainly White Dai, on the north side of the Laomeng River, in a broad plain with several Dai villages around it.  Market day began early next morning, attended by Hongtou and Sha Yao, White and Flowery Miao, Guozuo Hani and a few down for the day from Jinping and, of course, the Dai.

       Most of the latter around Mengla are White Dai and animist.  Their women wear plain black sarongs and long-sleeved blouses, in dark colors for the older women and bright ones for the younger, with twin rows of silver clasps down the front.  They live in villages of stilted wood and bamboo houses with thatched roofs with one area reserved for their simple ancestral altars.

Landian Yao woman, Saguocun

Kucong woman in the Zhemi market

       They are not the only Dai in the area, though, for a few km across the river, around the hot springs near Xinmeng, lie a few villages of Dai Lu, immigrants from Xishuangbanna.  They live in the same kind of houses, though many had been replaced by concrete modern structures when I visited, and are Buddhist.  Young Dai Lu girls in matching blouses and sarongs, in bright colors, wearing flower wreaths in their hair, stood out as an extra, unexpected attraction of Mengla’s market day. 

Kucong village near Zhei

       Following the market activity I opted for a night at the hot springs in a ramshackle guesthouse, close to the main bathing pool.  “Come here in mid-afternoon,” the proprietor told me, ‘and you’ll see women bathing without any tops.’  The pool measures about 60 m circumference, surrounded by concrete walkways.  The hot spring sits just above it, enclosed by a stone wall, its water bubbling over it into the meter-deep pool, rendering the water comfortably warm, never too hot.

       It began filling up with bathers right on schedule and yes, many females bathed topless—those over 60 and under 6.  This was the most popular pool, though other smaller ones existed in the vicinity, as well as brick bathhouses.  The main Dai village lay a short walk away from the biggest pool and a trail from there ascended into the hills, passing water-filled terraces, to reach the Guozuo Hani village of Tawmazhai.  Stilted houses of wood and bamboo prevailed, very similar to those of the Dai in the plains and very unlike the ‘mushroom houses’ of the Hani in Yuanyang County, though their dialect, lifestyle, customs and festival schedule were the same.

       Early next morning I caught a minibus headed west for Zhemi, which would hold its market the following day.  About halfway there, at a village called Sanguo, the vehicle had to stop for a couple hours to offload a passenger’s merchandise, probably for what turned out to be market day in Sanguo.  I found this scene just as colorful as other county market days.  The Yao here were of the black-clad Landian sub-group and the Flowery Miao of the same branch I saw in Mengla.  They differed from those in Nafa by their side-fastened black jackets with wide rows of embroidered strips along the lapel and around the upper arms and neck, plus the plain black tubular turbans.

White Dai village near Zhemi

Alu Yi girl in Zhemi

       The Hani were of a different sub-group.  The women wore a shorter, side-fastened, indigo-dyed cotton jacket over plain trousers and leg warmers, with two Yao-style silver buckles.  The lapel was lined with colored strips and coin-pendants and most women also sewed a large silver French colonial piaster over the left breast.  Many Hani women spun thread while they roamed the market or ran stalls.  Hani houses on the edge of the village had dyed yarn hanging out to dry in their yards.

       The Laowo branch of the Yi were also present.  Their women wore long black coats trimmed with colored strips and a big black turban embellished with very large colored pompoms on either side.  This sub-group also lives in Laomeng district to the northwest, where they dress in brighter colors.

Shangpinghe Yao village

       As a town, my next stop Zhemi, was not very pretty, for all the buildings were newly made concrete structures.  But the area was attractive, surrounded by hills and old-fashioned White Dai villages nearby.  Zhemi is a Lahu Autonomous District, for the main community here is the Kucong branch of the Lahu.  Looking south from a hill above Zhemi I could spot Kucong villages, lying in cleared areas of forested knolls, about 40-50 houses per settlement, single story, mud-brick, with corrugated iron roofs.  Houses lined up almost like military barracks, in neat rows, spaced evenly apart.

       Though they are the most numerous ethnic minority in the district, they were the smallest group coming for market day.  The women wore long black, shin-length, right side-fastened coats, usually with multi-colored striped sleeves, over plain trousers and a tight cap liberally festooned with colored pompoms.  The outfit closely resembled that worn by Lahu women over the border in Mường Tè, Vietnam though very different from that of the Kucong in Xishuangbanna or Laos.

       Others in town for the affair included local White Dai, the Alu Yi from the mountains northeast, the Goho Hani, the same sub-group living around Huangcaoling, directly north in Yuanyang County, and the Landian Yao.  The Alu, running layouts selling vegetables jungle herbs and edible insects, were quite shy, as they were in Laojizhai, their main concentration.  The Hani, managing cloth stalls and selling bundles of split bamboo and palm fiber, were more ready to engage with the stranger and seemed to be the most self-assured people in the market.  In the end, it was another memorably colorful day in an otherwise nondescript town.

sunrise near Pinghe

      The last stop on my borderlands run was Pinghe about 25 km west, inside Luchun County.  The road follows the river alongside Zhemi until it crosses the county boundary and veers into the mountains.  The small town of Pinghe lies on the western end of a long ridge, not very attractive itself and offering only the most basic accommodations.  The original Hani village is adjacent to its northeast side and the women wear the same outfits as the Hani in Zhemi or Huangcaoling.  The immediate area, and especially the mountains to the north, features the spectacular ancient irrigated terraces sculpted all along the sides of the mountain slopes, equally impressive as the area around Panzihua in Yuanyang County that was recently declared a World Heritage Site.

       Above a picturesque set of terraces 4 km west is the Landian Yao village of Shangpinghe.  Unlike the simpler mud-brick, thatched homes of the Landian Yao elsewhere, the homes here were sturdy, two story hillside buildings with flat roofs.  Male and female Yao were both dressed in traditional style when I visited and as they rarely saw foreigners, if ever, they proved to be quite hospitable and cooperative.  Invited for a meal, I sat with the household head, while the others ate separately, the usual Yao custom.  They were easy to photograph, even volunteered to pose, and the day is still lodged in my memory as another typically interesting and congenial adventure in the borderlands of Honghe Prefecture.

Landian Yao men at Shangpinghe

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Jinping is a major stop; on Delta Tours Vietnam’s cultural-historical tour of Yunnan’s Honghe Prefecture.  See the itinerary at https://www.deltatoursvietnam.com/honghe-prefecture      

   

      

      

      

      

       

THE ALPHABETS OF YUNNAN

                                                      by Jim Goodman

    The Chinese writing system has been used in Yunnan since the Han Dynasty, over a thousand years before Yunnan became integrated into the Chinese state polity.  The system, of course, is ideographic; that is to say, its characters represent ideas or words, not the sounds of vowels, consonants or syllables like the letters of an alphabet.  The advantage to ideographs is that people can still read them no matter which dialect of Chinese they may speak.  The disadvantage is that they are so complex and take so long to learn.  It wasn’t until relatively recently in history that the majority of the Chinese population could read and write ideographs.
    Yunnan was originally occupied by non-Chinese people, from many different ethnic groups and sub-groups.  Even today one-third of the population of the province is non-Han, living on two-thirds of the territory.  The government recognizes 24 minority nationalities and the larger ones all have several sub-groups and dialect differences.  Most of their languages have no written system, although many of these ethnic groups believe they used to have one, but it got eaten, lost, destroyed or whatever.   This was a tribal tragedy, for it made them ever since feel inferior to those who did have a writing system.

dongba pictographs

    However, four of Yunnan’s ethnic minorities—the Naxi, Shui, Yi and Dai—did have writing systems.  Granted, except for Dai, these systems were only known to the ritual specialists.  But in the case of the Naxi and Yi, these specialists produced thousands of books, a great number of which have survived, covering much more than rituals and religious injunctions.  They include myths, legends, fables, riddles, puzzles, romances, war stories, moral tales, philosophy—in short, they are like works of ancient ethnic literature.    
    The best known of these native writing systems is the Naxi dongba script.  Said to be the invention of Dongba Shilo, a Bön shaman in the Baishuitai area several centuries ago, dongba script is a pictographic system that uses simplified pictures of the area’s flora and fauna, such as just the head of animal, and stick figures of humans that when in motion signified verbs; altogether depicting about 3000 words.  Additionally, about 700 simplified glyphs represented sounds or grammatical elements, such as tense.

    The dongbas wrote their manuscripts on local paper, made into thin, rectangular books.  They were not complete manuscripts, however, but abridged versions or detailed summaries.  When using the book in a ceremony the dongba didn’t so much as read it but use it as a guide to the keywords of the ritual, story, etc. and fill in the rest of the text by memory, from having done the exercise so many times already. 

pictographs decorating a Naxi house

    The revolution in 1949 put an end to the dongba tradition, for the new regime saw it as backward and superstitious.  The practice survived in remote areas, but the production of manuscripts did not.  In the Reform Era of the 80s traditional ethnic culture was back in favor again, but the mind-set that prevailed when dongbas were active community members was not part of the revival.   The last surviving dongbas went to work not as ritual specialists again, but at a government office as translators of old manuscripts.  Nevertheless, with ethnic pride back in full swing, the dongba script has seen new use in modern painting, carpet weaving designs and city signboards, even if nobody can really read it. 

    The least known writing system in Yunnan is that of the Shui nationality.  They inhabit a few places in counties next to Guizhou Province, where over 90% of the community resides.  Called Shuishu, the system was known only to ritual specialists and its books dealt only with geomancy and divination.  Denoting some 500 words only, the characters are sometimes simple pictographs, other times similar to simple Chinese ideographs but backwards or upside down.  Shuishu books are very small, more like manuals, and the use of them has all but ceased.
    The most widely used ethnic writing system was the script used by the Yi.  They are the largest minority nationality in Yunnan, comprising about 11% of the province’s population.  They are divided into some two dozen sub-groups and speak five major dialects.  But they have a single writing system, used by nearly all sub-groups, and it is a true alphabet, albeit a syllabic one.  The Yi claim it developed in the Tang Dynasty, though the oldest inscriptions are 15th century.

Yi language book

    The use and knowledge of this script was also, like the Naxi and Shui, restricted to the ritual specialist, or bìmaw.   Actually, he was more important than the Naxi dongba.  In fact, he was the second most important person in the village, after the chief, for he was the reference, the authority, by virtue of the information contained in his books, on all matters of culture, custom and precedent.
    Originally the Yi script contained 1840 letters, but with a few thousand regional variants.  In the 1970s the government sponsored a project to standardize the script, based on that used by the Nosuo Yi in the Liangshan Mountains in Xichang, Sichuan and Ninglang County, Yunnan.  Besides the regional and dialect differences, there was also a problem with the Nosuo Yi books.  In this Yi stronghold feuding was traditionally part of Yi life.  The bìmaws sometimes tried to protect the information in their books, like the spells and magical formulas, which might fall into enemy hands, by writing it in code, making up their own variations of the traditional letters. 

   In the end, the project group came up with a system of 785 letters and produced a Yi-Chinese dictionary several inches thick.  A traditionally conservative people, (with the Nosuo Yi that’s almost fiercely so) the Yi revived the bìmaw tradition in the 80s, with even young men taking up the task of learning the script and, more importantly, using it to make new books.  

palm-leaf manuscripts, Xishuangbanna

   The writing system used by the broadest spectrum of society, and not restricted to the ritual specialists, was that used by the Dai; more specifically, since some of Yunnan’s Dai are animist, that used by the Buddhist Dai.  Two scripts, both true alphabets, came into use in the 13th-14th centuries, one for the Dai Neua of Lincang and Dehong and one for the Dai Lu of Xishuangbanna. 

   The Dai Neua script resembles the one used for the Thai language.  Originally it lacked tone indicators and letters for certain vowel sounds.  After the establishment of the People’s Republic the government backed a local committee that reformed the alphabet by introducing tonal marks and new letters to indicate vowel sounds not previously identified by a single letter.  The government officially introduced the new system in 1956.
   In Xishuangbanna, the Dai Lu adopted the alphabet introduced by invading armies from Lanna in northern Thailand in the 14th century.   Though somewhat more cursive, it resembles the Burmese script used today.  As in other Buddhist Dai areas, boys in the villages entered the monastery at an early age and monks there taught them how to read and write.  The longer they stayed the more literate they became.  The Dai script was used for all religious manuscripts, most of which were Buddhist sutras.  But the manuscripts also covered folklore, history, mathematics, medical knowledge, astrology and farmers’ almanacs.

inscribing on a palm=leaf manuscript

   Monasteries kept this literature on palm leaf manuscripts.  Artisans making these used the long narrow leaves of the royal palm tree.  After cutting the leaves and shearing the ends to make them straight, they boiled them in a large wok, which took away the green color.  The next step was to flatten and dry them in the sun.  After that they were ready.  Another specialist used a stylus, shaped like a big, thick pencil, to inscribe the text, then rubbed ink into the lines of the letters.  When that process was concluded the final step was to rub a thin coat of oil over the leaf, to help preserve it. 

   When the Chinese government began devising or reforming writing systems for its ethnic minorities in the 50s it opted to ‘modernize’ the existing Dai script rather than introduce a new one based on English letters.  But in later years of political upheaval, like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, government cadres discouraged the use of either alphabet, old or new, and even the public use of the spoken language.  After the Reform Era and its more favorable attitude towards ethnic traditions, the use of the Dai alphabet returned, only it was the old, original script rather than the new one.  But that use remained restricted to the monasteries and once the monks or novices left they had no further need for it. 
   Elsewhere, with the non-literate minorities, the Chinese introduced alphabets based on English letters, using letters, rather than diacritical marks, to indicate tones.  They were not the first to do so.  Western missionaries like Pollard in the northeast and Fraser in the far west, had introduced alphabets for the Miao language of western Guizhou and northeast Yunnan and the Lisu language in Baoshan and Nujiang.  They also employed English letters, but differently than the Chinese did later on.

Fraser's Lisu alphabet on a Nujiang church

   In Pollard’s and Fraser’s systems, the sounds of the vowels a, e, i ,o, u are that of those vowels in Italian.  To represent vowel sounds that were different, as well as consonants not represented by a single letter in English, they used English letters printed backwards or upside down.   Basically these alphabets were devised to publish Christian literature and Bible translations, but they survive today, because the Miao and Lisu in those areas are still Christian and can read the lyrics to the hymns they sing at Sunday services.  For both languages the government devised scripts to replace the Pollard and Fraser ones, but these never caught on and were only ever used on bi-lingual government office signs.

   If Yunnan’s ethnic minority alphabets were going to be restricted, as customary, to religious specialists or religious works, they would be of only marginal interest in a contemporary world dominated by the Chinese and English writing systems.  But they are also part of Yunnan’s ethnic revivalism, a phenomenon shaping the province’s history for the past two decades.  And in some cases, the use of these alphabets has extended beyond their traditional class of users and been pushed in new directions.

Yi language class, Bainiuchang, Ninglang County

   In Ninglang County the local Yi government successfully lobbied for an “experimental” bi-lingual school, in which primary students the first few years could be taught in the Yi language, then gradually introduced to instruction in Chinese.  The chosen school was in Bainiuchang village, in the eastern mountains of the county, with over 200 students.  In addition to the bi-lingual primary grades instruction, about 25 of the students received daily classes in the written Yi language.  The school used books printed in Xichang in the Yi script, dealing not only with stories and history, but also science and mathematics.

   In Guangma village, Luchun County, the local school in 1994 began instruction in the Hani language up to the fifth grade.  Twice a week all the students took classes in reading and writing the Hani language, with the alphabet the government devised for them, which was actually based on the Luchun dialect.  So far, publications in the Hani language have been folk tales, mythology, stories about the origin of customs etc, mainly in the line of preservation rather than new, modern literature.  But that’s a task they feel must not be neglected.  The Hani-language  new literature can (and will) come later.

books in the Hani language

   Yunnan’s minorities have become highly conscious of their ethnic identities in recent decades.  They have revived, and have tried to maintain, much of the tradition that was officially attacked and undermined so many years.  Naturally indigenous writing systems would be part of this revival.  But beyond being an issue of cultural preservation is another aspect in examining why a people preserve an alphabet and make books that can only be read by a small number of people.
   When Samuel Pollard was preaching to the Miao they were suffering from the oppression of Yi landlords and Chinese officials, both of whom looked down on the Miao as less civilized human beings.  And both of them had writing systems—the Yi alphabet and the Chinese ideographs.  Then Pollard introduced his alphabet.  Quickly the Miao could read and write, too.  Theirs was now, like that of the Yi and Chinese, a literate culture.  Consequently, their status, in their own eyes, shot up to match that of the Yi and Chinese.  The Miao were now their civilized equals.  
   The lesson from this was clear.  There are two kinds of peoples in this world:  literate (with writing systems) and non-literate.   Doesn’t matter how many people can read and write the system.  Literate people look down on non-literate people.  It also doesn’t matter from where a people got their writing system, only whether or not they had one at all.  And if or when they did, well then, they were part of the upper classes of humanity.

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