Li Wenshi, 73, one of the few remaining Derung women with facial tattoos, shares an amusing moment with her daughter Li Yuhua at their home in Yunnan province.
Life for the villages in the mountains of northwest Yunnan provinces has changed very little in decades. Could the Internet change all that?
As dusk falls in Xiongdang village, deep in the shade of the Gaoligong Mountains in northwest Yunnan province, Li Songying's relatives and friends gathers around a fire pit fenced with bricks to protect the small, wooden house. Slices of pickled pork suspended above the flames sway in the warm air and a chicken boils slowly in a pot of rice wine, diffusing an appetising smell.
Welcome to a party of the Derung ethnic group. After serving cooked taro and corn, Li Songying, 48, joins the fun. Losers in one game, where players attempt to correctly guess the number of fingers their opponent will hold up, have to perform a "forfeit" by quaffing a cup of the lethal "chicken soup".
The party ends at midnight, when the wine jars are finally empty, and the guests lay down to sleep on a piece of plastic sheeting next to the fire.
Xiongdang, deep in the hills that straddle the border with Myanmar, is the most isolated settlement in Dulongjiang township, located at the far end of the road that links the two. Even in good weather, it takes three days to travel by bus from the provincial capital Kunming to the Gongshan Derung and Nu autonomous county and a further seven hours by car to the township.
Residents of Xianghong village, which has no road, face a seven-day trek if they need to visit the township government.
From November to June, the road is regularly rendered impassable by snow, which can lay 10 metres deep. Infrequent interaction with the outside world has sheltered the area from modernity, but it has also condemned the residents to a life of economic disadvantage.
The ethnic group was historically known as the Qiu people, but was renamed by former Premier Zhou Enlai in 1954 to Derung, meaning "single dragon" in Chinese.
Roughly 60 per cent of the Derung live along Dulong River. Once they were famous throughout China for the facial tattoos sported by the womenfolk, but the practice is fast disappearing.
Li Wenshi, 73, and Lian Zixian, 74, both have facial tattoos, but the seven other girls tattooed alongside them as teenagers have passed away.
"The girls were bound with rope and the mother would hold her daughter's face still," Li Wenshi explains. "The tattooist scratched the design into their flesh with a sharp, red-hot chisel and then filled in the scars with ink made of soot from the bottom of cooking pots. The bloody scars took a week to heal and the girls' faces were swollen for at least five days."
The practice was forbidden during the cultural revolution (1966-76) and has never restarted, leaving those still bearing the tattoos as living historical relics.
Only 34 tattooed women are left in the township, according to records at the Dulongjiang Frontier Police Station, and the youngest is 56. Two or three die every year, meaning that within a decade all trace of the practice could be gone. A series of photographs, taken when the local police station compiled health dossiers on the women, will be the only reminder of the tattoos that were once commonplace in the area.
Traditionally, the Derung did not use money, but believed in absolute equality, even sharing the meat from the pigs that were only slaughtered for New Year celebrations, says Li Heng, a researcher at the Kunming Institute of Botany with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who conducted an eight-month survey of Dulong River in the 1990s.
Kong Zhijue, 22, has made his living by collecting medicinal herbs since he graduated from middle school. The low level of rainfall between June to October provides the best conditions, and Kong can spend as long as five days and nights combing the mountains, carrying only a cooking pot, some rice, a sheet of plastic and spare clothes.
Taking care of their 400-square-metre plot of land means that few parents have time to look after their children and so a system has developed whereby an older child from a different family is "borrowed" to act as a babysitter. Even though the local government now allocates 180 kg of rice to each resident annually, the tradition remains.
In contrast with the sobs heard at most funerals, the Derung people laugh instead. They believe that death is natural and therefore there is no point in being sad when it occurs. When one Xiongdang resident died several months ago, his still-clothed body was simply left to decompose close to the banks of the river. No one would tell me his name.
Traditionally, theft is unknown in the area and few mountain residents bother to lock their doors when they leave the house to scout for herbs or work in the fields.
Mobile telephones were introduced to the area in 2004. The limited signal capacity means that only 15 people can make calls simultaneously and the service is patchy.
And earlier this year, the residents of this remote land, whose electricity comes via hydroelectric generators that don't sustain television sets, were finally connected to the Internet.
To what extent that will expose them to the outside world is anyone's guess but it could have well raise the level of education in a region where exposure to knowledge is badly needed.
Latest stories in this category
- A world of work
- At KidZania, youngsters have fun trying out..
- THE SCHOOL'S THE THING
- Tribal Tattoos Works Fashion Magic
We Recommend
- World's fastest men head for Bangkok to compete in racing..
- The Rajamangala National Stadium in Bangkok will..
- Expat denies role in grisly killing
- 'Government to blame' for poor graft ranking
Comments conditions
Users are solely responsible for their comments.We reserve the right to remove any comment and revoke posting rights for any reason withou prior notice.
Article source: http://www.thethailandlinks.com/2012/12/13/where-time-stands-still/
0 comments:
Post a Comment