Xishuangbanna Craft Villages, Past and Present

                                                             by Jim Goodman

ceramic figurines on a temple roof

       In the classic period of its history, from the late 12^th to the early 19^th centuries, Xishuangbanna was a virtually autonomous state.  Its ruler acknowledged the Chinese Emperor as his suzerain and in return ruled his domain without imperial interference.  He also paid tribute to the Chinese Court, but sometimes he also, just to be safe, paid tribute to the much closer Burmese Court.  The state’s population was mainly Dai, inhabiting the plains towns and valleys.  Non-Dai minorities lived in the hills, but interacted little with the Dai, while their administration was left to village headmen.

       Dai society then was strictly hierarchical.  At the top were the ruler—chao phaendin—and his extended family.  Just below them were his relatives.  They formed the Dai aristocracy, the classes that didn’t have to indulge in any manual labor.  That responsibility fell on the much more numerous commoner classes of indigenous settlers, servants and slaves, in the form of taxes, requisitions or services.  

       Villages were basically self-sufficient.  Hence, commercial trade did not play nearly as important a role as it does now.  District towns had shops, of course, for farmers couldn't produce everything they required.  They also had periodic market days, when people from the vicinity came to exchange goods.  A few of these have persisted to contemporary times, such as the Menghai County towns of Menghun, Menga, Xiding and Mengman.

Dai potter at work

making paper in Manzhao

       Besides their ordinary agricultural production, some villages specialized in particular crafts.  Sometimes these were for contracted customers, such as the ceramic figurines for decorating temples, palaces and the homes of aristocrats, or the paper and palm-leaf manuscripts used by temples and government offices.  Other times they worked under contract to supply the aristocracy with its needs.

       Certain craft items were produced for the market and the public at large, such as pottery, drums, jewelry, umbrellas and cloth.  Some of these villages, mostly in Menghai County, have maintained their craft traditions down to the present day, even if fewer families are engaged in such production.

traditional paper umbrella

Dai drums

       Jingzhen village, home to the Octagonal Pavilion, has long been associated with the production of the little ceramic figurines that decorate the roofs of temples and houses.  They are made from a certain kind of white clay peculiar to the area.  Workers pound and knead this clay and then shape it into figures of roosters, peacocks, nagas, stylized flames, etc. and paint them different colors.  When these are dry the workers put them in a small kiln to bake them.

making a drum in Mandan

       Manzha village, in Menghun district, still produces the kind of ceramics for general use—bowls, vases, pots, jars and basins.  Nowadays much of the production is of bricks and tiles, which were not used so much in the past.  But pottery for domestic use still accounts for a good percentage of the output, made in the same manner as it was hundreds of years ago, without the use of a kiln.

       Potters use a small, thick wooden wheel mounted on a swivel.  Seated on a stool beside it, the potter drops a lump of clay onto the wheel, spreading it up to a few centimeters from the circumference edge.  Giving the wheel a spin, the potter shapes it from the inside, adding more clay as required to make it taller, using a thin, flat stick to make the inside surface smooth and a thicker, flat board for smoothing the exterior.  After the piece has been put into its desired final shape, the worker takes it to an open field, stands it on its rim, covers it with straw and burns the straw.  When the piece has been completely fired it is darker, hard and ready for use.

sample of inlaid patterns on Dai textiles

       In former times the village production of everyday ceramics served many villages in the area. But these are in competition now with containers made from synthetic materials like rubber-plastic.  As the Dai have become more prosperous though, they have often replaced their wooden houses with ones made of brick, like in the Dai neighborhoods of Menghun.  This is why production in the village shifted more towards bricks and tiles. 

       The production of palm-leaf manuscript pages, formerly the specialty of Mangui village, east of Jinghong, has all but died out.  Paper long ago had already been replacing palm leaf for religious manuscripts and the Red Guards destroyed nearly the entire stock in the village in the late 60s.  Mangui lies opposite a strange, abandoned park called The Art Garden of Banna Dreams.  It contains a number of dilapidated buildings in the Dai style and weird statues of a bearded Indra and various good and evil creatures from local mythology.  Supposedly the statues took their appearance from descriptions in the palm-leaf manuscripts of Mangui.  Nowadays the village reprints the old manuscripts on paper.  They are used to guide the selection of auspicious days for weddings, funerals, building a house, etc.

 

Dai weaver in Manluangdian

      Traditional paper-making, however, is still carried on in a few places, such as Manzhao, about five kilometers north of Menghun.  Workers begin by boiling bark from the mulberry tree for a long time, then beating it to pulp on flat rocks.  Then they spread the pulp in a long tray, add a little water, and mix it to make the solution relatively even.   The worker then carefully lays a rectangular, framed screen into the solution just below its surface, spreads the pulp evenly across the surface of the screen, lifts it out, removes any twigs or debris and leans it against a tree or wall to dry.  On a sunny day the sheet is dry in one afternoon.  Besides official documents and religious manuscripts, the paper also found use for wrapping bricks of tea.

       A thicker version of the same paper is used for making umbrellas, still a tradition in Manxing village, south of Mengzhe.  Families involved in the trade produce their own paper, treat it with sesame oil and color bands of it black, brown and pale yellow.  The frame and handle are from bamboo.  Local farmers use them and traditional umbrellas are one of the gifts devotees donate to the temple monks.

making a basket--men's work

plaiting split bamboo

       Temples also needed drums, especially big ones, though they were not the only customers.  Traditional orchestras, village dance troupes and martial arts groups also used drums.  One of the last places still pursuing this trade is Mandan village, about 15 km east of Mengla, involved for over three hundred years.  It also enjoys a reputation for its martial arts tradition.

       The wood comes from various hardwoods in the nearby forest.  After cutting the wood to the appropriate sizes, the worker leaves it in the house to dry for over a year.  Then he uses chisels, knives and other tools to hollow it out and shape the outside.  When that is done he paints it with lacquer colors, usually red, white and black.  After the paint dries the last step is to stretch a square strip of rawhide over the drumhead and secure it with fasteners of split bamboo. With changes in temperature and humidity the drumhead tends to slacken and must be tightened by pulling on or twisting the fasteners tied down on the upper side of the drum.

Dai-style jewelry, from a Menghun workshop

     As for cloth production, weaving was much more widespread in the past, for virtually every Dai family had a loom and mothers trained their daughters in ginning, spinning and weaving at an early age.  Women used a wooden frame loom with two treadles and sat at a bench at the end of the loom to weave.  Heddles separated the warp threads and by stepping on a treadle every other thread was lifted, creating a shed through which to throw the shuttle with the weft thread.  After moving the reed forward to beat the weft into place, the weaver stepped on the other treadle to make the next shed.  The interlocking warp and weft threads created a strip of plain-weave cloth, with no surface adornment or complex pattern.

       To add the embroidered designs onto the cloth required making extra heddles for supplementary weft thread.  This they did by inserting thin bamboo sticks particular ways into the warp to separate different sections of thread.  Complex surface patterns needed at least a couple dozen of these extra heddle sticks.  Besides cloth for making clothing items, weavers produced sheets and bedspreads, pillowcases, towels and, when feeling religious, wall hangings (tung) for the temples.  In classic times the palace and various aristocratic families, whose women didn’t weave, contracted certain villages to produce their clothing, brocades and other fancy textiles.

Dai-style gold ornaments

leaf-style silver hair ornament

       In contemporary times looms have practically disappeared from ordinary village households.  But a few, such as Manhuomeng, near Menghun, and Manluangdian, just west of Jinghong, maintain the weaving tradition.  Most of their production is in specialty items, such as fancy brocaded bedspreads for wealthy locals and tapestries for tourist customers taken there by tour operators.

       Weaving cloth was always women’s work, but weaving split bamboo baskets and other containers was men’s work.  After cutting the bamboo into strips, men plaited the strips and shaped them into various containers.   They could be woven very loosely, with spaces between the joints, as in baskets for carrying firewood or bags of grain and other produce, or very tightly, like the large ones for carrying grain or the small tobacco cases. No particular village specialized in split-bamboo products, for they all produced them.  If they made more than they needed they sold the surplus in the markets. 

silver hair bun ornament

       In Banna today there are more men still weaving with split bamboo than women weaving with handlooms.  Factory-made cloth of all kinds is readily available in any town market, and while cheap synthetic substitutes for split-bamboo baskets and containers are also available, it takes far less time to weave a basket than a bolt of cloth.  Some men keep it up because it gives them something useful to do.  The synthetic stuff might be cheap, but that made from bamboo is free.

      A craft that was not so universal, nor the specialty of a certain village, but rather that of select families in towns like Menghun, where it still carries on, is that of making jewelry.  Dai women have always loved ornaments.  They wore rings on their fingers, bangles around their wrists, rings and studs through the earlobes, necklaces and fancy pendants, silver belts, sometimes with attached pendants, to hold the sarong around the waist, and various pins and brooches.

       They also decorated their hair with flowers, ribbons and jewelry.  Women tied their hair in a bun and embellished that with a special pin, affixed silver leaves to it, or wrapped it in an open-work silver cone, with dangling pendants.  The upper classes referred gold, while the commoners used silver.  Nowadays, with the classes abolished and prosperity reaching all Dai villages, traditional jewelry is still popular.  On market days particularly, Dai women like to show it off. 

      In those families still involved in the production, young women do most of the work.  Their tools comprise an awl, clamps, pliers, a small, bellows-operated, acetylene torch, a perforated plate for sizing wire and a roller to make silver plate super-thin.   They use the little torch to weld together chain links, using a copper-silver alloy, though the rest of the item is pure silver.  For filigree work they make careful use of the pliers.

making a silver chain in Menghun

rubber seed necklaces in Manhefang

       Traditional jewelry is still popular in Banna because the Dai people, though not immune to modern influences, have retained a strong sense of tradition.  They often prefer using split-bamboo baskets and containers and ceramic pots over substitutes in the market just because they are traditional.  In recent years some villages that have kept their traditional stilted houses have applied for recognition as a “culture village.” 

       One of these, Manhefeng, south of Jinghong near the prefecture museum, invented a new handicraft—the making of rubber seed necklaces to sell to tourists.  The village didn’t have enough land to turn over to rubber plantations and so the people never benefited enough from their small rubber patch to afford new houses.  But with the prefecture government promoting all things traditional, Manhefeng saw a chance to turn their small rubber production into a new income.   

       Because of its traditional architecture and its location near the museum, Manhefang became a regular tourist stop.  A couple of silver workshops are on the itinerary, along with stalls selling Dai clothing, but the main souvenir item is the rubber seed necklace.  Villagers use on an old-fashioned wooden punching device to make holes in the seeds.  Business has been good since Manhefang became a “culture village” and its residents have monetary incentive to keep their tradition.  One can only hope that other Dai villages, not yet wealthy enough to have the option to discard their traditions for a modern look and lifestyle, will be inspired to do something similar.

Dai-style silver sarong belt with pendants

                                                                      * * *

      

Buddhist Mountaineers—the Bulang of Xishuangbanna

                                                 by Jim Goodman

Bulangshan village, with its temple at the top of the slope

     The hills of Xishuangbanna are home to several non-Dai ethnic minorities, constituting one-third of the prefecture’s population.  For many centuries they lived with little interaction with the Dai in the plains, following a different material way of life and adhering to an animist view of the world scarcely influenced by the folks in the plains.  The sole exception was the Bulang nationality, one of the earliest migrants to the area, coming up from Myanmar beginning in the 7^th century, who are Buddhist. 

     Around 38,000 Bulang, a little over 40% of Yunnan’s total, live in Xishuangbanna, accounting for about 3.6% of the prefecture’s population. Over 85% of them are in the western and southern parts of Menghai County, nearly always in villages high up in the mountains.  Bulang in parts of Pu’er, Baoshan and Lincang prefectures are animist, but those in Xishuangbanna have been Buddhist for centuries, perhaps even as long as the Dai.  According to their own mythology, the Bulang are elder brothers to the Dai and received the Buddhist doctrine at the same time, though only the Dai got the writing system. 

Bulang Buddhist temple compound

     Consequently, the Bulang use the Dai language for rituals and religious terminology and their monks read and write the Dai script.  Some of the older men can write the Bulang language using the Dai script, but this knowledge is not widespread, nor were any books or pamphlets ever published in Bulang employing the Dai alphabet.  The government did not devise a script for Bulang using English letters, either, as it did for Hani and some other minority nationality languages.

     Traditionally all Bulang males spent a few years in the village monastery, usually sited above or beyond the residential area, where they became familiar to one degree or another with the Dai script.  Such familiarity with religious manuscripts written in Dai did not, however, make them fluent in spoken Dai.  Their own language belongs to the Mon-Khmer linguistic group and is completely different from Dai.   Situated so high above the plains, the Bulang did not have much social intercourse with the Dai.  Because the Bulang practiced the same religion as the Dai, the latter considered them the most civilized of the hill people, but still grouped them together with the other hill folks in a rank lower than that of the Dai commoners in the prevailing social hierarchy in Banna.  Dai mythology did not identify the Bulang as their elder brothers.

monk resting on the steps ofa Bulang temple

     No Dai monks resided in Bulang villages and Bulang monks did not study in Dai monasteries before beginning their religious careers.  Bulang monks learned to read the Dai religious manuscripts from older Bulang monks.  Yet it was these manuscripts that were the major factor in insuring that the practice of Bulang Buddhism was a close replica to that of Dai Buddhism.  Even today young Bulang men still spend a few years at the monastery after middle school.  Villages still celebrate Buddhist festivals like the Water-Sprinkling Festival and the three-month Buddhist Lent, but with a few differences.

typical Bulang village

     Like the Dai, during these three months every fortnight a different neighborhood will conduct rites.  But the event lasts three days rather than one.  The richest family plays host and picks up two-thirds of the tab, while the rest of the neighborhood contributes the remainder.  The first day’s activities include the assembly of the gifts to the monastery and the preparation by the younger generation of a grand feast for the older generation, comprising lots of meat and chicken dishes and a special beef pudding for the occasion but, unlike the Dai, no alcohol now or for the entire three months.  (They will, however, serve alcohol at the feast to any non-Bulang guest.)  Before the elders begin eating though, younger Bulang go around to wash their seniors’ hands first.

assembling gift packets for the monks during the Buddhist Lent

     Following the feast monks come to the house to recite scriptures, repeating the session the next two days.  On the second morning people carry their gifts to the monastery and on the third day, with the conclusion of the recitations, the celebrants indulge in dancing, including one number in which men smear soot on their faces and wear “barbarian” clothes.

     Not every Bulang holiday is strictly a Buddhist one, though.  A few are vestiges of ancient, pre-Buddhist times.  For two days in the first lunar month families honor relatives who have died during the preceding year.  They take strips of palm leaf to the monks to have them inscribe on them the names of the deceased.  They take these and offerings of meat and leave them at the relatives’ graves, the temple, the village gate and the village center.  For all families, the end of the second lunar month signals three days of rites honoring their ancestors.

hillside chedi in Bulangshan

     In the past, the Bulang also held an annual festival honoring the bamboo rat.  Their mythology credits this animal with delivering grain seeds to their ancestors, thus introducing the Bulang to agriculture.  Villagers had to catch a bamboo rat that day, sacrifice it, cook it and divide the meat up among all the households so that everybody got a bite of it.

     For most of their history agriculture was the mainstay of their livelihood. Like their Aini and Lahu neighbors, they created farms by slash-and-burn and grew rice, maize, cotton and vegetables.  Their only major tea-growing area was Nanuoshan, until the Aini evicted them at the end of the Qing Dynasty.  But by then the tea business was beginning to expand and by mid-20^th century far more Bulang villages were involved in tea cultivation than in growing food crops.

     The Bulang had been drinking tea before they cultivated it, but in those days they got the ingredients for it by picking up the used leaves of the Dai.  Now that they have their own tea they have developed their own distinctive pickling and souring preparations.  Tea with a sour to bitter taste is the Bulang favorite.  They also like to chew betel and both chew and smoke tobacco.

pounding rice in a wooden mortar

carrying home the wood

     Their preferred taste for food is hot and sour, especially with fish and chicken.  They also wrap spiced meat chunks and fish in banana leaves and bake them in the fire.  All this they wash down with cups of rice liquor and bitter tea.

     The tea boom enriched a good number of Bulang villages.  In some places, especially those close to main roads, families abandoned the traditional wood and bamboo, stilted houses with tile roofs for a two-story, modern-style, cement house.  Others were satisfied with replacing the tiled roof with one of corrugated iron, in bright blue.  Generally speaking, as soon as one family changed their house, everyone else rushed to follow.  

new houses in a Bulang village enriched by the tea trade

     Still, in more remote Bulang villages, while they might sport corrugated iron roofs, houses are still the elevated, traditional ones, if not on stilts then on brick piles.  Most women have not adopted contemporary style clothing, though the younger ones are more likely to dress in Dai sarongs and matching blouses, rather than the blue-black, striped sarong and side-fastened, waist-length jacket, slightly flared at the hem, still favored by the older women.  The latter also wear the dark turban, decorated with colored pom-poms and silver at festival time, which the youth have eschewed.

     In the old days the youths of both sexes used to dye their teeth black as teenagers, rather like a rite of passage.  Youth associations of people of the same age group organized the affair.  First the boys helped the girls dye their teeth, using burnt leaves of the chestnut tree, then the girls helped the boys.  Marriage was by choice, not arrangement, and still is.  After the marriage rite the groom sleeps with his wife at her natal house for three years, but returns to work at his own house all day.  After three years, if all has gone well between the couple, he takes her to his own village to set up house.  They even hold a second wedding.

     Nowadays blackening teeth has fallen into desuetude, perhaps because young people are more susceptible to modern toothpaste advertising, which stresses the beauty of clean, white teeth.  Bulang youth are also migrating more to the towns and cities for employment, only returning to the villages at festival time.  The older generation seems to prefer the mountains and most of them hardly ever leave the vicinity of the village.  Some of the more enterprising women do go down to market days in Mengman, Xiding and especially Menghun, generally dressed in their best ethnic style.

chedi and sacred tree in a field beside Bulangshan town

    Just south of Menghun a lateral road turns left and south, proceeds uphill through a thick forest of big, fat old trees, emerges near the summit and ends at Bulangshan Autonomous Bulang District.  Bulangshan itself is a nondescript, one-street town with a few shops, government buildings, modest restaurants and cheap lodges.  Just behind it, though, is a sizable Bulang village with its characteristic stilted wooden houses with tiled roofs and attached open-air balconies, its temple at the top of the knoll.  In the open field beside the town stand pagodas and shrines and a sacred tree.  Bulang villages lie along the road to the west and in various cleared areas in the forest, while to the east of Bulangshan are a couple Lahu villages.  Tea plantations dominate the area, with fewer rice fields than one would find in the plains.

     Bulang villages also dominate Bada, another Autonomous Bulang District in southwest Menghai County.  Other Bulang settlements are scattered in Mengman and Xiding districts and one of these, Zhanglang village, 10 km southwest of Xiding, became the site of the Bulang Nationality Ecological Museum.  With no direct bus there, tourists have to rent a car to go, which some groups do when first visiting Xiding on the Thursday market day. 

     Even if it had no museum Zhanglang is worth a visit on its own.  It is one of the very oldest and most attractive Bulang villages in the prefecture.  Residents claim its foundation was 1400 years ago and that the temple was originally built three generations later.  A thick forest, full of old trees with trunks over two meters wide, surrounds the village.  Over a hundred houses stand here, almost all traditional stilted houses.  A few use brick piles instead of wooden stilts, but retain the sloping tiled roof and open-air balcony.  Many have roof decorations at the corners and in the middle, usually stylized flames or buffalo horns, plus the occasional pair of birds.

ancient stone carving at Zhanglang village

     The road enters the village from the east.  Near the entrance is an old well, now dry and boarded up.  But a stone lion, a deity and other old carvings on the wall around the well are still intact.  Continuing along the road another 150 meters one passes the end of the old village, then a small patch of forest, then a new extension of Zhanglang of about fifteen houses.  At the edge of this neighborhood is the museum, with a view down the valley of Bulang villages on the lower slopes, a few Aini and one Han village higher up, and a white chedi on the summit.

     Within the museum are the tools and implements of everyday life, the baskets of split bamboo that are still being used, Bulang costumes and all the equipment for making their clothing, antique temple furnishings and wood-carved house decorations like plaques and a dragon staircase.  A case displays medicinal plants used in the area.  Another display features religious manuscripts on both palm-leaf and paper, and a manuscript of the village’s history, with drawings portraying the village founders.  In short, the museum gives visitors an excellent presentation of Bulang culture.  Combined with a visit to the ancient temple and a walk around the village observing daily chores, an excursion

Bulang woman, Zhanglang village

to Zhanglang offers the most complete introduction to the Bulang way of life.

     The inevitable question is how much of their traditions the Bulang will be able to retain in the future.  The major difference between them and other minorities in the hills suggests a positive outcome.  The animist world-view that characterized traditional thought among the other hill peoples is withering fast as people become more aware of the modern and scientific view of the world.  While they may maintain some old customs and celebrate a few festivals, the old spirituality underlining their traditions has eroded. 

     In contrast, the Bulang are still enthusiastic about their own, Buddhist world-view.  New roads have connected remote villages with plains markets, allowing them to become involved in the tea business and import goods that improve their domestic life.  But ideas that might compete with their religion don’t seem to travel to the hills, much less lodge themselves there.  For the Bulang, there is no real contradiction between the demands of 21^st century life and the concepts of the religion that has served them well for 1500 years.  The Buddha still points the way.

                                                                       

Bulang-style Buddha, Bulangshan

                                                                        * * *                                                                                       for more on the Bulang and other hill people in Banna, see my e-book                                     Xishuangbanna:  the Tropics of Yunnan  

The Dai Stilted House

                                                          by Jim Goodman

    When the ancestors of Xishuangbanna’s Dai people first migrated to southern Yunnan over two millennia ago they discovered the lush valleys were suitable places to grow the kind of rice that was so important to their way of living.  So the new settlers selected sites near rivers or streams and set about building the kind of houses that they were accustomed to back in the original homeland in southeast China.  The model was the stilted house, with high, sloping roofs and adjoining open-air balcony, which is still the norm, in the 21st century, for most Dai villages in the prefecture.  Its structure is perfectly suited to the weather and environment.  The stilts keep the living quarters above the damp and flood-prone ground and away from snakes, scorpions and other wild creatures.  The high, sloping roofs protect the interior from rain and allow for plenty of ventilation.  And the overall shape, set against the undulating hills, is perfectly harmonious in its environment.

Dai house in Jingne

    The Dai, or their Baiyue ancestors, were not the only people in ancient times to use stilted houses.  In fact, the earliest archaeological evidence of them comes from Zhejiang Province, dating at least 6000 years ago.   They were also in use in central Yunnan about 3300 years ago, according to relics unearthed near Jianchuan.  So the Dai may not have been the original inventors.  But according to their own mythology they were, or at least their culture-bearing hero Pa Ya Shanmudi was.
    Dai legends vary, but Pa Ya Shanmudi was either the original leader of the Dai race or its chief priest.  The story begins in the aftermath of a great flood that wiped out life in the plains.  The Dai then were living in caves in the hills.  After the floodwaters receded the Dai population began to increase so fast there were not enough caves to shelter the people from the elements.  Pa Ya Shanmudi decided to lead his people to a new location on the plains. 
    After a long journey they finally came to what seemed like an appropriate site.  On a knoll just above the plain they rested beneath the canopy of an enormous tree and observed the rainstorm as it broke upon the plain.  Pa Ya Shanmudi noticed that the rain pummeled a patch of wild taro plants, but the raindrops kept splashing off the surface of the leaves.  When the storm ended he took four thin tree trunks, implanted them in the ground, then created a roof of interlaced branches, covered by a thatch of taro leaves.  This was the first Dai shelter. 
    His people copied the design and built their own structures.  No sooner had they settled beneath the roofs than a storm broke.  The taro leaf thatch kept them dry for a while, but eventually the roof began leaking and the people were soon thoroughly soaked.  Even after the rain had ceased, water kept dripping through the roofs.  Pa Ya Shanmudi angrily abandoned the project and led his people back to the hills.  But, knowing life was basically no longer tenable in the hills, he continued to ponder the problem of a proper shelter for his people.

simple "phoenix house" in Mengla County

    One day he happened to spot a dog sitting on the ground during a rain.  He observed that the dog’s body, seated on its haunches with its forelegs straight, formed a slope.  And the rainwater slid down its back while the ground beneath it remained dry.  So Pa Ya Shanmudi ordered a new structure built.  This time the two front poles were tall and the rear poles were short, with the same kind of roof, but now sloping.  This was the second Dai shelter.
    All went well when the first rains came, for the rain ran right down the side of the angled roof and did not leak inside.  Everybody remained dry.  But then the storm kicked up, the wind reversed and the rain began pouring in the front of the shelter and soaked the people through and through.  Well, that kind of shelter wasn’t going to work, either, so Pa Ya Shanmudi once more led his people back to the hills and resumed brooding over the problem.
    At this point in the story a Dai equivalent of a deus ex machina enters the narrative.  Having observed and admired Pa Ya Shanmudi’s sincere efforts to better the lot of his people, the gods in Heaven decided to help him with a lesson on how better to learn from Nature.  One of them transformed into a golden phoenix and, after summoning up a storm, flew down in the rain to Pa Ya Shanmudi.  The bird called out to him to observe how it stood tall on its long legs as its wings, slightly spread, resisted the winds from all directions and allowed for the run-off of the rains. 

    So here was the solution.  Like the legs of the phoenix, they built a structure on stilts.  Like the wings and tail of the phoenix, they used sloping roofs on all sides.  This withstood storms blowing from any direction, while the elevated living quarters would always remain dry.  This was the third Dai shelter, now more properly called a true Dai house.  In memory of the source of the inspiration for the house, the Dai still call it a “phoenix house,” hon hen in the Dai Lu language.

capacious interior of a traditional Dai house

    The original was no doubt a lot simpler than what we find today, with extra gables and sliding windows and open-air balcony.  Wooden roof tiles have largely replaced the original thatch, too.  Yet its suitability for the climate of Xishuangbanna is obvious by its continued use millennia after its introduction and by its basic adoption by most of the peoples who later on moved into the hills.
    Basically the Dai house is an elevated rectangle with roofs like the sides of a triangle.  Access is by a staircase at the front entrance, though in the past it was a notched log.  Attached to one end is an open-air balcony, with its own staircase or notched log.  People use this area to dry crops, laundry, dyed cloth or thread, or to just sit out in the sun for a while.  Within the one-story building, the cooking, sleeping, activities of daily life and the reception of guests all take place on this single floor.  There may be partitions for the kitchen, the sleeping quarters of the elders, or a small shrine.  Generally, at night the family spreads mattresses and pillows along the floor for all the family to sleep together.

    Besides the interior, the hosts might also invite guests, if the weather is good, to sit outside on small round stools on the balcony.  Nowadays, with piped water coming into every village, the family water tank might well be mounted on the balcony, and perhaps a solar heater, pigeon coop or satellite dish as well. 

Dai village near Daluo

    Below the living quarters the space below the house is high enough to stand up easily.  Here the people stored their plows and other agricultural tools, as well as their looms, spinning wheels and thread winders.  Nowadays the looms are mostly gone and the space occupied by motorbikes and tractor-trailers.  However, that’s a more recent development.

    Dai houses sit in separate compounds, originally delineated by bamboo fences or hedges.  More recently they have taken to brick walls.  Within the yard, part of which might be used as a vegetable garden, sits a small, elevated building that is the granary.  In the rear of the yard was the outhouse.  To clean themselves after defecation the people used rectangular bamboo chips, rounded off and angled at each end.  Since the 20th century introduction of paper, of course, they don’t do that anymore.  Yet in the old days a Dai village was assigned the production of such bamboo toilet chips for the royal household.
    By the late 20th century many Dai houses had installed modern toilets and the extension of electricity and piped water everywhere in the prefecture put an end to the need to bathe in the river or suffer the meager illumination of oil lamps at night.  But in just about all other respects domestic architecture and lifestyle resembled that of their ancestors centuries earlier. When Xishuangbanna began hosting tourists in the 1980s the classic stilted house was still the norm in every Dai village.

traditional house, Dai Park, Ganlanba

    That would change soon, not because of tourism so much as due to the sudden wealth generated by two suddenly booming businesses—rubber and tea.  Given the go-ahead by government reforms that allowed long-term leases on formerly state-owned and administered land, Dai families joined the rush to clear forests and plant rubber trees, even replacing the traditional village bamboo grove with a patch of rubber trees.  Prices peaked in the mid-90s, then fell by half by the end of the decade, only to begin rising steadily after the turn of the century.
    The rapid spread of rubber cultivation also upset Xishuangbanna’s ecological balance.  By 2010 rubber plantations covered 20% of the land and the prefecture’s natural forest cover had shrunk to 26%.  The voracious rubber trees eat up all the nutrients in the soil, so that virtually nothing else can grow on a rubber plantation.  The plantations need more water than other crops and the run-off is three times that of a natural forest.  This puts strains on the local water supplies and causes wells to dry up.  The government finally had to step in that decade and declare the rest of Banna’s forest protected reserves.
    Most rubber plantations lay in the central and eastern parts of the prefecture.  Menghai County, the western third of Xishuangbanna, lies on higher plateau and most of it is not conducive to rubber cultivation.  But Menghai County is perfect for tea, especially the Pu’er tea variety, which people grow both in the hills and in the plains.  At the beginning of the 21st century, newly rich Chinese speculators, looking for a suitable investment, suddenly took an interest in Pu’er tea.
     The mania took hold after a cabal of speculators cornered Banna’s tea market, bought everything available and drove up prices.  Cultivators planted more tea bushes and Dai farmers in the plains of Menghai County created tea gardens at the edges of their rice fields.  Ambitious investors from other parts of China arrived to contract for some of the expanded production and set up tea factories of their own.  By mid-decade there were 3000 tea merchants and manufacturers in Xishuangbanna, intensely competitive and suspicious of one another.

mixed architecture of a village in transition

    By 2007 the price of Pu’er tea had risen to ten times what it sold for at the start of the century.  But it wasn’t just the speculators who made money.  Pickers and growers could, at the peak of the frenzy, get 200 yuan per kilo for fresh leaves and 300 yuan per kilo for leaves sun-dried in one of the village squares for a few days.  The tea bubble burst in 2008, when prices fell by 90% by the end of the year.  Over a third of the new tea factories closed down and outside speculators took their money elsewhere.  But a lot of local people, including Dai farmers, got rich from the boom years.

    Like the rubber farmers the tea cultivators suddenly found themselves in possession of more cash than they dreamed they could have had twenty years earlier. And like the newly rich rubber planters they rushed to spend it on improvements in their material lives.  The first priority seemed to be to a new, “modern” house.  So they demolished their traditional stilted houses and erected cement and brick houses that sat on the ground, shaped like a box, with flat roof and no open-air balcony.  They basically copied the design of the immigrant Han houses around the state rubber plantations, a type actually inappropriate for the tropical climate. 
    In general, once a few families took the lead in making new-style houses the rest of the village households hurried to ape them and within a few years villages which formerly consisted of nothing but traditional stilted wooden houses were transformed into villages of nothing but virtually identical concrete boxes.  This was especially true in Menghai County, where the bulk of Pu’er tea was grown.  In some cases the transformation was not quite so drastic, as the new houses at least maintained the angled, Dai-style roofs and perhaps the open-air balcony.  These would likely have satellite dishes placed on them, for televisions, automobiles, motorbikes and designer label clothing were part of the spending spree as well.

Dai village near Menghai, 1998

the same Dai village, 2008

    In Jinghong and Mengla Counties the urge to abandon the traditional Dai style house has not been so strong.  Just downriver from Jinghong, next to Menghan in Ganlanba (the Olive Plain), traditional Dai architecture is the main feature of Dai Park, a collection of five old Dai villages, opened as a tourist attraction in 1999.  The houses are all in the traditional style and by law must be kept that way, though the park authorities also pay for repairs and renovations. 
    Traditional Dai architecture in Ganlanba is not restricted to Dai Park.  The outskirts of Menghan feature outstanding examples of Dai houses, festooned with peacock decorations under the apex of the roof ends or on the rooftop.  Villages along the road to Menglun are equally well endowed with classic Dai houses.  They are getting mixed with modern styles, though, for the deforestation of recent decades has led to a scarcity of timber.  As families expand and children wed and need their own houses, they often opt for the modern style because wood is so hard to acquire anyway.
    One outside observer, already alarmed by this trend, was Zhu Liangwen, himself an architect and author of a detailed study of traditional Dai architecture.   Zhu believed that the traditional house type, raised above the ground, with peaked, sloping roofs and open-air balcony, was still the most suitable type possible for the climate and blended with the environment in an esthetically pleasing way.  If the problem was the scarcity of traditional building materials, then the solution was simply to change the materials.
    Zhu designed a new Dai village, called Manjingfa, two km south of Jinghong, using the traditional layout and style of house, but substituted concrete, aluminum and plastered brick for wood and bamboo.  Houses stand on concrete pillars, with attached concrete balcony, also on concrete pillars, and have walls of brick covered with white plaster.  The sliding windows and screens are made of aluminum and the metal tiles on the roofs are medium blue, with upturned corners and ceramic figurines lining the roof edges.  While all the houses are white with blue roofs, no two are exactly alike, combining a general uniformity of style with individual variations in the details, just like Dai villages hundreds of years old.
    The main difference between these houses and traditional ones is in the interior.  Instead of one large room and one separate bedroom for the older folks, the big room is subdivided into several rooms for separate sleeping quarters for the family members.  This also reduces the air circulation, but Manjingfa folks tend to spend a lot of their daytime hours on the ground floor underneath the house, which is paved with cement and is altogether tidier than the area under their former houses.

Manjingfa houses

the area beneath a Manjingfa house

    The nearly forty houses radiate out from a walled central circular area, with a small chedi in the center, two ornate rest pavilions and some ornamental plants.  On the western edge of the village stands an old temple.  With its classic, clean and orderly layout and its angled rooftops rhyming with the hills behind them, Manjingfa was designed as a model and prototype for new Dai villages in Xishuangbanna, an exercise in demonstrating that one need not jettison traditional esthetic values in order to be modern.
    While Manjingfa-style villages did not start springing up elsewhere, in Dai villages that missed out on the tea and rubber booms residents changed their attitude about their traditional houses.  Instead of regretting they didn’t have the money to build a modern-style house they began appreciating what they already had.  The local government, anxious to promote what remained of traditional Dai culture, sponsored the recognition of “culture villages,” where the architecture was at least 75% traditional style.
    Two such villages lie near Jinghong:  Mandui, near the airport, and Manhefeng, near the new museum.  Busloads of Chinese tourists arrive daily to appreciate the traditional layout and houses and shop at the stalls selling fruits and snacks or typical Banna handicrafts, which may or may not be made in the villages.  But the Dai villagers themselves now benefit from their own appreciation of all things traditionally Dai, especially their stilted houses.  Perhaps this appreciation will spread and the traditional stilted house will survive the coming decades.  It is still the most appropriate, most comfortable possible house for living in the tropics.

Jingfa Dai village

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for more information on Dai culture, see my e-book Xishuangbanna: the Tropics of Yunnan