Babao to Haizibian: Through the Middle of Wenshan

                          by Jim Goodman

the hill scenery at Babao

       Twenty years ago I had an assignment to revise and update the Yunnan and Guangzi chapters for the Insight guidebook to China.  This was my only trip to China in which I ventured beyond Yunnan.  Certainly the scenery along the Li River from Guilin to Yangshuo is a spectacular sight, but the rest of the destinations, like drab and gray Nanning, were not so impressive.

       Moreover, the local Chinese were unlike what I’d become used to in five years of journeys through Yunnan.  They were polite, but my conversations were always brief, ending shortly after they learned what my occupation was—researching the ethnic minorities in Yunnan.  They knew nothing about ethnic minorities even in their own Guangxi, didn't want to and just couldn’t understand why I found “those kind of people” at all interesting.

Zhuang village next to Babao

       Since no one in Nanning could recommend any minority-inhabited areas anywhere near the city, I decided, having finished my work there, to curtail my exploration of Guangxi.  With the remaining time on my visa I would visit a place in Yunnan where I had not yet been—Wenshan Prefecture in the southeast.  I bought an overnight bus ticket to Babao because I’d seen a nice photograph of the hills there in a big Yunnan picture book. 

       Arriving about noon, I checked into a guesthouse in the center of the old town and had a meal in its restaurant before I started wandering around.  While I was eating I heard the only other customer, a Chinese man, ask the manager, ‘What’s the foreigner doing here?’  ‘Probably the scenery,’ the other replied.  ‘Also for the ethnic minorities,’ I told them.  ‘You are interested in the ethnic minorities?’ the manager asked me.  ‘Yes.’  “Then when you finish your meal, go out the door and turn right at the first street until you are past the hill.  Then turn right again.  There’s a Zhuang village there.  You will like it.  They still keep the traditional statues over the house doorway to keep away evil spirits.”

Zhuang women laying out warp threads for the loom

       What a different attitude towards minorities that was compared to my encounters with Han people in Guangxi.   Anyone could have told me how to get to the nearest Zhuang village.  But here was a Han resident informing me not just of the directions, but also of a particular minority cultural trait he thought would pique my interest.  In my time in Babao I found the Han people quite appreciative of their Zhuang neighbors, considering them a prime asset of the district, as well as the Miao and Yao, who lived further away but were frequent visitors.  They have had a longer and closer relationship with the minorities than the Han have in Guilin, Liuzhou and Nanning.  Consequently, they view them not as inferiors, but as interesting equals.

typical Zhuang house near Babao

       I took the manager’s advice and soon entered Babao’s scenic hill area.  A Zhuang village lay at the base of the nearest hill, of mud-brick houses with tile roofs and, as the manager had promised, a niche above the doorway holding a snarling, lion-like creature.  Two women in a lane were busy laying out the warp threads that would be mounted later on a loom.  The women’s clothing wasn’t particularly attractive—medium blue, side-fastened jacket over black trousers and a white turban on the heads.  But all the Zhuang women wore it.

villagers coming to Babaoi  for market day

       Villagers were full of smiles upon meeting me and soon folks invited me in for tea.  They hadn’t had many foreign visitors back then, if any, and my presence was a sensation for the children.  They followed me all through the village, bursting into animated discussion whenever I stopped to take a photograph.  The hill behind the village had a staircase to a viewing platform at the top, but the children didn’t ascend it with me.

       This is the best view of the landscape Wenshan people call Little Guilin.  Looking east, the limestone hills, generally 50-200 meters high, in a variety of shapes, rise above a perfectly flat plain, with a river meandering among them.  Zhuang villages of 50-60 houses, densely clustered, lay beside many of the hills, their rice fields filling the spaces between them.  The hills can have very smooth sides, look like cones or gumdrops or crouching cats, covered with green vegetation, but too stony to make terraced farms.

Zhuang villagers bringing storage baskets to sell

       The same river also runs through the town, crossed by stone bridges, straight and arched, that add to Babao’s atmosphere.  It rained throughout my first night there, making an excursion to the waterfalls next day impossible, for no vehicle would chance taking the unpaved road.  But it was market day that day, when those bridges were active with rural folks coming into town.   The rain was occasionally heavy, but mostly just a drizzle and ceased by the afternoon.

       Local residents and villagers set up early, with stalls selling clothing, shoes, household goods, toiletries, cosmetics, noodle dishes and snacks, as well as vegetables, grain, bee larvae, tools, fishing nets and baskets.  Zhuang villagers also brought huge bamboo storage baskets to sell and men carried small pigs in bunches, tied up and suspended from each end of a balance pole.  By mid-morning Miao from the surrounding hills arrived, some selling Miao women’s clothing components and accessories.

a rainy market day in Babao

       Two kinds of Miao turned up.  Women of the more numerous group wore plain, side-fastened jackets in various solid colors, occasionally with some sleeve decorations, over bulky, pleated, knee-length white or black skirts.  Long, rectangular, fully embroidered and appliquéd panels hung from the waist to the hem, front and back.  Another group wore ankle-length pleated black skirts, the top half covered with colored strips, with long-sleeved black jackets embellished with colored strips on the sleeves, hem and lapel.

Yao girls on their way to Babao

       Yao from one of the Landian branch sub-groups also attended market day.  The females dressed in hip-length black jackets and trousers.  They wrapped their hair inside a black cap, topped by an engraved or embossed silver disc.  A bright belt around the waist and strings of beads and pink thread tassels around the neck added dolor to the outfit.  Children dressed the same as adults, but wore round caps with a broad band of colored strips around the base and tassels attached to the top.

       From Babao, Highway 323 ran straight west through the middle of Wenshan via Yanshan, then past the prefecture boundary to terminate at Kaiyaun.  The scenery consists of low, rolling hills, pleasant but not outstanding.  The main changes I noticed en route were among the minorities.   Zhuang villages in southwestern Guangnan County comprised stilted, wooden houses, though the women dressed like those in Babao, except for a few stripes on the sleeves.

Yi women in Ameng

young Yao woman in Ameng

      After crossing into Yanshan County, around Amemg I found the Zhuang women wearing very different, much more colorful ensembles:  short green jackets with broad bands of mostly red trimming on the sleeves, lapel, neck and hem and a wide cap with the front heavily brocaded, a skill for which Zhuang women have long been famous.  Yao women dressed in black like those in Babao, but with a large white collar on the jacket and embossed silver plaques just below it.  Ameng was holding market day when I passed through and Yi women were also in attendance, wearing short black, side-fastened jackets with colored bands on the sleeves and all around the lower half of the jacket.

Zhuang woman on the road to Yanshan

         Yanshan city lies at the northern end of a long, elevated plain, mottled with limestone hills, a few of which pop up within the urban area.  A medium-sized, modernized city with wide avenues and new buildings, it had a park on the eastern side where stood big sculptures of the city mascots—a pair of chickens.  Elderly folk practiced tai qi exercises here in the evenings.  It was a relatively quiet city, without the loud karaoke bars that marred my evenings in Babao.

       In the center of Yanshan stands a rocky hill called Chengzishan.  The Hui quarter lies south of it and an unusual mosque is at the foot of the hill, its central green domed tower flanked by a pair of thin minarets with sharply pointed tops.  A viewing tower on the hill gave me a view of nearby Tinghu Reservoir and the broad farms growing pseudo-ginseng, a local specialty.  A park at the base of the hill provided a late afternoon venue for urban men to meet, relax, and listen to the caged songbirds they brought with them.

the suburbs of Yanshan and Tinghu Reservoir 

       I took a day’s excursion to Haizibian, in the narrow strip of territory between the eastern and western chunks of the county, sited next to the natural body of water called Bathing Fairies Lake (Yuxianhu).  It is bounded by low hills on the southern shore, contains several small islands, a Zhuang village at the near end and a Miao settlement at the far end, with water clean enough to be drawn by villagers for domestic use.  Apparently attempts had been made to turn it into a resort, for groups of floating cabins lay just offshore and the village’s Qing Dynasty temple had been turned into a hotel, with the former monks’ quarters transformed into rooms for guests and a subsidiary building made into an entertainment hall for ethnic minority dance shows.  An arched bridge stood next to the boat landing and a fancy pavilion offered views of the lake scenery.

Miao woman near Haizibian

       No one was lodged in them at the time, nor were any of the floating cabins occupied.  In such a picturesque setting, with friendly and colorfully dressed Miao, Zhuang and Yi in the area, I was surprised it wasn’t filled with tourists, or at least city day-trippers from Yanshan and Wenshan.  There were no restaurants or bars in the vicinity, though, and most shops in Haizibian were closed except on market days.   

       I hiked the trail along the shore to the Miao village near the end of the lake.  All the women wore their traditional outfits of pleated batik skirts and bright jackets, heavily embellished with strips of embroidery and appliqué.  I watched a weaver at work and got invited inside next door for tea, liquor and snacks.  Then I wandered around the village and its mud-brick, tiled, one-story houses before returning to the trail along the lake back to Haizibian and flagging down a minibus going to Yanshan.

       My time then was too limited to stay longer.  So I added Haizibian to the list of places in Yunnan I wanted to further explore one day.  Ten years later, while heading for Kaiyuan, west of Wenshan, I detoured to Haizibian to stay a couple nights and get a second look.  I wanted to stay in the old temple converted into a hotel, but it was locked, the rooms shuttered and the entertainment hall turned into a storage room for crops.  I had to settle for a room above a small shop.

Bathing Fairies Lake (Yuxianhu), Haizibian

       The resort not only had not revived, it was in ruins.  The bridge was mostly under water, the boats gone, the floating cabins dismantled and the few restaurants and viewing pavilions on the shore empty, stripped of their glass and furniture.  Nevertheless, the lake was still beautiful, village architecture still the same and people just as friendly as on my initial visit. 

       Luckily for me, it was the peak of market day when I arrived.  All of Haizibian’s fifty or more shops were open and local ethnic minorities set up stalls on the streets to sell products of their villages.  Besides the nearby Miao, the market attracted many Yi and Zhuang, whose women all dressed traditional style.  The Yi here are a branch of the Sani, who also live in neighboring Qiubei County.  They wore blue jackets, white if unmarried, with contrasting colored bands around the sleeves and along the lapel. 

       Zhuang women dressed much more colorfully than those in Babao and Guangnan.  Their jackets had two colors, blue and brown or black for the older women, black and brighter shades for the younger ones, with embroidered bands around the sleeves and along the hems.  Over the jacket they wore a long bib, with the top part or edges lavishly embroidered.  Some wore plain black turbans, others a headscarf with a brocaded front, like around Ameng, or a tall cap laden with triangles of silver studs.

fancy Zhuang headdress for market day

Zhuang woman at Haizibian mareket day

       In the late afternoon I walked along the lake and discovered that everything else about the area was unchanged.  Villages still looked the same.  No development projects had added new factories or buildings.  Ox carts still carried people around, not motorbikes.  Rural life carried on as it always has.  It’s easy to imagine the eventual resurrection of a resort scene here.  More people are traveling than ever before, searching for the natural and the authentic.  Unspoiled destinations are getting scarcer all the time, even in Yunnan.  Bathing Fairies Lake won’t remain neglected forever.

drawing water from Bathing Fairies Lake

                                                                        * * *           

Hidden Attractions in Mengla County

                                                        by Jim Goodman  

looking north from above Mengxing

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

Dai girls in Manla

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

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

Longshi Jinuo village

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

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

Yiwu

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

above the fog in Yiwu

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

tea gardens near Yiwu

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

Yao man in the Mengla market

Aini woman in Mengban

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

the aerial ropeway walk

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

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

bridge over the Nanla River near Mengla

well pagoda in Mengla 

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

pavilion at the Manlongdai bridge

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

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

 

typical Manlongdai house/restaurant

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

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

temple compound near Manlongdai

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

the interior of Manlongdai's temple

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

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

Huilong Falls

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

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

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

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

in the heart of a tropical rain forest

                                                                         * * *                                                                                                  

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

                                           Xishuangbanna:  The Tropics of Yunnan

       

Puzhehei—A Second Sani Homeland

                                                          by Jim Goodman

Yi village and Pearl Lake

       Landscapes in Wenshan Autonomous Zhuang and Miao Prefecture, southeastern Yunnan, jutting into Guangxi province on its eastern side and bordering Vietnam to the south, differ greatly from the rest of the province.  High mountains characteristic of most of the province don’t exist here.  Instead, small limestone hills of less than a thousand meters height speckle broad plains.  In some places they appear in scenic clusters and Puzhehei, in Qiubei County, where lakes, streams and ethnic minority villages flank the hills, is the most beautiful example.

       About 13 km north of Qiubei city a road bends west to a flat plain studded with small hills and scattered Miao, Han and Zhuang settlements.  It’s another two or three kilometers to the resort  at the edge of the lake, while villages in the immediate area here are Yi.  Puzhehei’s natural attractions made its development as a tourist resort inevitable, but on my first visit in 1999 the business hadn’t really taken off yet.  There were a few hotels and restaurants and a stadium where local Yi put on shows for the occasional tourist group.

farmland beside Pearl Lake

       Next to the resort a few dozen boats lay moored in the water, for the prime activity for most visitors is to take a boat ride on the watercourse that begins with Pearl Lake, at 530 hectares the largest of the district’s 70-odd lakes and ponds, most of them connected by streams to form a 20-km boat journey.  The ride includes stops at a few of the 80 large caves within some of the 300 hills in the area.  

       Having already been to the best of Yunnan’s caves, I passed up the boat ride option and spent my time on foot exploring the area, climbing the small hills to get better photo angles and wandering along the lakes and streams.  The hills come in a variety of shapes.  Some are like round skull caps, others look like thimbles, some like straight or leaning triangles, others long and low, one side higher than the other, resembling crouching animals.

Sani village, Puzhehei

       Puzhehei is a Chinese transcription of a Yi language word that means ’pond teeming with fish and shrimps.’   Gathering those fish and shrimps is part of the local Yi lifestyle.  A few families use cormorants to catch fish.  Most villagers take their canoes out onto the lake to cast nets, but also lay long, tubular, netted traps, held together by poles every meter or so, just under the surface along the shoreline for catching shrimps, small fish and a few crayfish.  After pulling in their catch, the people lay them out on the walkways to dry.

       The Yi in Puzhehei are the Sani sub-group, most of whom live in Shilin and Mile counties further north.  They migrated to Puzhehei several generations ago, though I did not get the story of how and why.  Their dialect is the same as that spoken around the Stone Forest and they dress in similar apparel. 

Sani buffalo cart

tourist boats at the resort

       While I did wander briefly through a couple of villages on my hike that time, on the second visit eight years later, I spent more time in the nearest Yi village than I did looking for angles to photograph the scenery.  While the resort area was only modestly built up in the interval, the biggest change, other than increased boat ride prices, was the apparent effort to turn the Yi village adjacent to the resort into a showcase of Sani culture.

laying out the netted traps

       Crossing the stream at the end of the resort area, a path leads through the trees, passes a life-sized recumbent stone tiger and comes to a stone statue of what looks like a sitting tiger cub behind a row of carved wooden figures beside the village entrance gate.  A couple of nice, big traditional buildings just inside the gate serve as restaurants.  A right turn on the path behind them leads to an area looking like the village ritual grounds.

       A tall stone pillar stands in the foreground, its surface carved with clumps of twisting vines topped by little demonic faces.  The area behind the pillar is studded with stone statues of the heads of rather fierce-looking creatures, with big eyes and wide, fanged mouths, obviously demons of some kind.  A few heads lie on the ground, others sit on small brick pedestals and some stick out of the ground two meters high.

submerged trap

       Behind this field of grotesquery a path leads to a stone staircase up the hill beside the village.  From the summit one has a broad view of the whole area, a vantage point to revel in the various configurations of water, hill and plain that change with every direction you point your eyes.  In addition, you can see rice fields of rich red soil flanking the ponds and streams.  Dikes by the shores enclose the lake water in small ponds for shrimp farms.

      The lakeside Yi village below this hill and opposite the field of sculptures mainly consists of traditional mud-brick, two-story houses with tiled roofs, in the same style as those in Sani villages around the Stone Forest.  A few whitewashed, three- or four-story concrete houses had been erected since my previous visit.  A few of these and the older houses offer home-stay services for visitors.  For this, at a quite moderate price, the boarders get a clean room with a comfortable bed and meals, which always include, whether ordered or not, a plate of deep-fried little shrimps.

enchanting landscape of Puzhehei

       The main village square is just a couple blocks from the entrance gate.  At one end of the square a stone tiger (or cub), similar to the one by the entrance gate but bigger, with a wide open snarling mouth, sits on a pedestal, the surface of which has an inscription in the Yi script.  Several houses in the vicinity have Yi mythological figures, generally demons with big eyes and fangs, painted on the exterior walls.  Other houses have carved wooden masks hanging on the outside wall.  Most consist of a single ferocious visage, but a few include a smaller demonic face or two on the head of the larger one.

       Such wooden masks are part of Yi culture elsewhere in the province.  The Yi Museum in Chuxiong has a display of some that are exactly the same style as those in Puzhehei.  The same masks are used by the Yi in Weining, Guizhou province, in a dance depicting the creation of the world.  They are also used by various Yi sub-groups to ward off evil, represent mythological creatures or in rites to propitiate spirits. 

stone Yi demon head

grotesque village sculptures

       In Puzhehei I didn’t learn to what use they were employed.  Many houses also mounted a small clay tiger image on their roofs, obviously a protective device and a custom shared by other ethnic groups in the province.  But besides the wooden masks, others, round, of clay or papier-maché, and not at all fierce-looking, adorned the walls of other houses.  Yi-style ‘moon guitars’ and the long-handled, bucket-shaped three-stringed instruments also were on display.  So perhaps the masks, like the other items, (except the rooftop tigers) were there simply to proclaim Sani ethnicity.   

       The main square, surrounded by shops and a few snack stands, is also the terminus for the various conveyances coming into the village.  Oxen and buffaloes pull one or two passengers in cabs or haul trailers loaded with bamboo or products of the fields or forests.  Pony-drawn coaches carry up to four passengers, residents and visitors, from the resort to the village and back.

Yi wooden mask

      Other than the paved way from the entrance gate to the square, all the other lanes in the village are unpaved.  Unless it’s raining, these are rather active on any normal day.  Village women tend to do a lot of their agricultural chores outside their houses:  sorting chilies, binding bundles of spices, stacking firewood, shelling maize and laying out their freshly harvested grain for drying.    

       In the traditional Sani division of labor, men do the heavy agricultural work like plowing and threshing.  They are also responsible for the fishing and take their boats out onto the lake from early to mid-morning and maybe again around an hour before sunset.  Usually they go out solo, but sometimes the wife comes along to pole the boat along the shoreline while the husband lays the traps.

       Women more or less do all the rest of the work, both in the fields and at home.  Deeply immersed in the behavioral codes and the work and social responsibilities of women in Yi society, they are more tradition-minded than the men.  They are more likely to be aware of what day in the lunar calendar or animal cycle it is, whether that is a propitious day or one to avoid certain kinds of activities.  They will worry about the influence of bad spirits that the men maybe don’t believe in anymore.  The men are more exposed to the outside world, its new ideas and very different concepts about everything.  The women adhere to the old ways.

working outside the house

       A consequence of this traditionalist mind-set is that Sani women prefer to dress in Sani garments, not just on special occasions but every day.  Over plain black trousers they wear a side-fastened, long-sleeved jacket, usually light blue, occasionally red.  A rectangular piece patched on vertically below the lapel and the sections of the sleeves from the biceps to the cuffs are in contrasting colors, usually black, sometimes embellished with embroidered flowers.  Around the waist they tie an apron, usually white, blue or black. 

       To top off the outfit women wear a round headdress, heavily embroidered on the sides with rows of embroidered flowers, the color red dominating.  Some of these headdresses have flaps protruding from the front sides.  Some women wear headscarves instead, while those donning the traditional headgear while working during the day may keep it protected by wrapping it in clear plastic.

       Unfortunately, I had already checked into a hotel in the resort area before discovering the possibility of staying in the village.  I did take my meals there, though, and learned that my visit coincided with that of provincial Party officials and the family running the restaurant invited me to observe the performances that night that the village would stage for the guests.

Sani village with its view

      The venue was the grounds opposite the village, around the tall, carved, stone pillar.  Three different troupes performed:  young women, young men and older women.   The young women wore trousers that matched the blue of their jackets, which were fancier than usual, with spangled trimmings.  The young men wore wide-legged trousers, plain black or blue with two bands of contrasting color above the cuffs, and were shirtless with open vests.

       Usually in ethnic minority clothing tradition the younger women wear the flashier, brighter, more eye-catching outfits and the older women dress in darker, duller colors with little or no embellishment.  Not this night.  The jacket of the older women was longer and over it they wore a covering bib-apron in many panels of color, with long thin tails hanging down from the waist in front.  The headdress was more elaborate, with embroidered, butterfly-shaped flaps added to the front.

       The program began with the young women dancing while embroidering cloth.  Then they did a number with the young men, playing moon guitars while the men played the long-necked, 3-string lute.  In another dance the boys didn’t play the instrument but instead waved it over their heads while they danced.  The choreography was quite vigorous and obviously well rehearsed.

the young men's troupe

       Even more impressive were the sets of the older women, who were just as energetic as the youth.  They included dances that mimed farming activities, with baskets or sickles as props.  They also danced playing moon guitars or the same Sani mouth-harp common in Shilin County.

       I can safely assume the audience of a couple dozen Party officials appreciated the show.  It was probably a normal experience for them, for entertaining important guests to make a good impression has long been a part of ethnic tradition in Yunnan.  I have experienced this myself in several remote parts of the province, when the ’important guest’ was defined as me, the first foreigner.

      My own appreciation was different.  I had just spent a day exploring the villagers’ environment, watching them work, eating their food and enjoying their company.  Now, unexpectedly, I had the bonus of observing how they entertained themselves with their traditional dances and music.  They did it for their guests this night, but in the same way they do it for themselves at festivals, weddings and other celebrations.  And they seemed to enjoy their performance even more than their audience.  

       Nine years later, following dramatic increases in tourism, the harmony and mutual appreciation that characterized the atmosphere then has reportedly been altered by the introduction of hassling and hustling.  But one first impression I had, reinforced with my return, will surely endure.  In deciding where to make their homes, whether among the pillars of Stone Forest County or the hills and lakes of Puzhehei, the Sani certainly choose enchanting landscapes.

older women's group playing the Sani mouth-harp

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