Far West in the Far East: Twenty-four hours in Xiding

On my trip to Xishuangbanna a couple of weeks ago, I was able to time a trip to Xiding with its weekly Thursday market. A vibrant, colorful affair filled with photogenic Hani women, various animal parts, string tobacco, and pretty much everything else under the bright morning sun, the market was an obvious draw to the town. But Xiding is also a great place to hike around the rolling hills, as there are many minority villages in the area.

On the map, Xiding is very close to Menghze, where we stayed the night before. We caught an early-morning bus, bumping along a dusty, flat road in the midst of dormant rice paddies. After a completely straight thirty minutes, our bus hit the mountains and started climbing. I had no idea Xiding was in the mountains, so it was a pleasant surprise to measure our progress by the views we were gaining. The bus twisted up hillsides for another 30 minutes, finally reaching a sunny, thin-aired Xiding.

We saw only one hotel, which cost my friend and me each about $2.50 for a shared room. The bathroom was in a back courtyard, next to the smokehouse. We weren’t to have electricity until much later that night, so using the windowless bathroom was an exercise in bravery.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was traveling with a friend who was researching the relationship between tourism and minority crafts. We decided to follow the dirt road that continued out of Xiding in the hopes that we would come across a minority village, and after two hours of walking along the cultivated hillsides, we found what we were looking for. Shaded by thick growth, a small village full of wood homes with thatched roofs sat quietly, looking at the same view as Xiding.

%Gallery-80168%Within minutes, a man invited us to rest in his home with a cup of tea. He chatted with my friend, while his wife and grandchild looked in, sunlight illuminating them in the doorway. From there, we followed a path between homes and came across an old woman weaving on a giant bamboo loom, a good fifteen feet of thread stretched out in front of her. A young man probably in his early twenties and dressed in a suit was the only person who spoke Mandarin. He translated for my friend, who asked about the the woman’s weaving: Did she spin her thread? Yes. Did she dye it? Yes. Who did she sell it to? Other Hani people. He opined that the older Hani were stubborn and backwards, because they refused to wear modern clothing and were very poor. He was on a visit from Shanghai, where he had been working for a year, and his feeling of superiority was obvious in his clothing choice.

After taking photos and watching a giant pig snuff around the dirt yard where the woman stood weaving, we set back to Xiding and arrived starving, just before dark. No electricity, so dinner was a candlelit affair, and afterward we wandered around the dark village trying to spot constellations. My friend is from the East Coast and has only seen the Milky Way twice in her life; I live in Alaska and am used to star-filled winter skies, but on this night I saw more stars than I’d ever seen in China.

We got up early the next morning to experience the market, which was filled with photogenic Dai and Hani women. The typical produce, meats and baskets of bean curd filled the sidewalks, but there was also a street-side dentist, hill tribe clothing (I bought legwarmers, which caused a bit of a stir when the women insisted on tying them on for me), angel-haired tobacco, and cheap knock-off clothing. The Thursday market was obviously the place where villagers came to do their one-stop shopping.

Since there was only one bus out of town, we bought our tickets early, boarding at noon, and then headed back down the way we came, the bus threading through steep hillsides covered in rubber trees.

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Far West in the Far East: The Wa Women of Nanya

Last week I was treated to the kind of experience travelers look for but seldom – at least in my case – come across. An hour up a dirt road outside a small town in western Yunnan province, China, a dozen women from the Wa tribe donned their ceremonial clothing and spent the afternoon dancing for me and my friend. All they asked was that we take photos and video of them, since there’s very little recorded of either their clothing or dances.

But let me back up. I spent the past week traveling around Xishuangbanna, an area in southern Yunnan, with My Friend the Fulbright Scholar (MFFS). MFFS is in China on a scholarship to study the relationship between tourism and minority crafts. The majority of the Chinese population is Han, but there are dozens of tribes in China that have their own clothing, language, and customs, and as might be expected, their ways of life are changing.

Though we’d visited several other minority villages during our trip, seeing the Wa was a particular goal for MFFS. Not only is the group somewhat elusive due to its rural locations along the Burmese border, but their mysterious status is amplified by the fact that they were headhunters until the 1970s.

Our luck began with our arrival in Menglian, a small town close to Burma and just north of Xishuangbanna. We planned on buying a ticket for an early morning bus to a Wa village, but read in our trusty Lonely Planet that a helpful cafe owner named Nan Qing was Wa. We sought her out, and she immediately chatted MFFS up, cooked us dinner, gave me the jacket off of her back, and arranged transport to her childhood village the next morning.

%Gallery-80170%We met Nan Qing in the morning for a Chinese breakfast of savory noodles, then hopped on motorbikes for the hour-long ride to Nanya up a dirt and cobblestone road through the mountains. All but the steepest hillsides were cultivated, and we passed small herds of water buffalo as well as people carrying impossible loads on their backs.

Once in Nanya, Nan Qing showed us around, pointing out medicinal plants and telling us about the Wa’s daily lives. While they were once large in the opium trade, their work is now mostly agricultural. They subsist on less than $1000 US per year, butchering their meat and growing most of their own food; according to Nan Qing they need only to purchase salt, spices, and rice.

We came across a woman weaving an intricate stripe for a skirt, all on a small but complicated bamboo loom. Behind her, an older woman with three-inch diameter earrings squatted and watched. While we sat in the sun, the village “official,” a petite, strong woman that appeared to be in her 50s stopped by. I thought perhaps she was keeping tabs on our whereabouts, but it turned out she was talking to Nan Qing about dancing for MFFS and me.

Nan Qing announced that the women of the village would dance for us, and asked that we please record it for them. Usually if I ask someone in China if I can take their picture they say no, so this invitation was a welcome surprise. As the women filtered onto a large cement patio outside their community hall, MFFS and I began snapping photos. They encouraged to get up close, inside their circle, and many of the women asked for photos of themselves sewing, pretending to smoke long pipes, or posing with their friends.

Their clothing consisted of long headdresses covering their waist-length hair and weighted down with silver necklaces. They paired black shirts festooned with fake silver buttons with hand-woven skirts in bright colors. The women wore heavy silver bracelets and necklaces, carried hand-woven bags, and wore Nike sport socks in a typical display of Chinese incongruity.

Though the dances were clearly all about the women, three men led the rhythm at the center with one large drum, a pair of cymbals, and a small gong. The women marched and chanted in unison, speaking in their Wa dialect. I couldn’t understand any of it, but the rituals of grooming and smoking came up several times. In one dance the women let their hair down, smoothing it and doing a side-step as they wrapped it back up in their headdresses. In another, they squatted down and pretended to light and smoke long pipes.

After several hours of dancing and posing for photos (and a giggly game of “Dress the Foreign Girls in our Traditional Clothing”), the afternoon wound down. We all meandered up small paths and stairs to the road, and most of the women headed back home, spooling bright pink thread as they walked. The only gift I had with me was a small bar of face soap from my parents’ town in Washington state, which seemed horribly inadequate for such an amazing afternoon. The women accepted it gracefully, saying that the oldest woman in the village would use it to wash her face.

Nan Qing asked my friend and me if we had any ideas on how to bring more money into Nanya. “The villagers are simple people who lead simple lives,” Nan Qing explained, “but they are very poor.” She suggested bringing tourists to watch the dancing, which MFFS and I tried not to immediately discourage. Nan Qing came up with the idea of sewing logos on the traditional clothing and selling it in town, which would bring money into the village without bringing tourists, and that seems like a great idea though I wonder if there is much of a market for those goods in little Menglian. If you have any ideas or examples of a project like that, leave me a comment.

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