The China We Don't Know

       If you are planning a trip to the popular sites of China- Beijing with its Great Wall and Imperial Palace, the incredible port and commercial center of Shanghai, Guilin and its limestone cliffs and misty landscape, Xian, the site of the buried army of the Han Empire, and the other most well known sites - you are in for a series of historical, aesthetic, and cultural wonders. As I write this blog, China is probably completing the construction of some new road or office building or apartment complex and the face of the country is changing stone by stone. But there is another China for those with interest in diversity and history and tradition, a China which requires perhaps a good number of additional miles and a bit more time and effort to experience. It is the China of minority life, a colorful look at age old traditions, dress, music, architecture, and customs.

      The visitor could start in the mountain kingdom of Tibet which most travelers are quite familiar with. The political dilemma of a sojourn in that province are personal. Like some other areas in China, it is a place seeking independence and experiencing oppression. Yet it is clearly a different culture. The ethnic background of the people, the religious practices and many other aspects of the province are distinct. For an even more dramatic encounter with unexpected minority life, one might wish to travel to China's far western province of Xinjiang, a massive area bordering Central Asia, Pakistan, India and Tibet. This is Muslim China. The majority of the people who live there are of Turkic or Persian descent and fair-skinned much like their Central Asian neighbors although China is encouraging hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese to move into the province to establish a working majority (a common Chinese maneuver). There are Uyghurs, Tajiks, Khyrgiz and other peoples in the area who speak their own language, dress in their own style, worship in mosques, have a distinct history and art and music and clearly oppose the rulers in Beijing. Present among them are Hui people who are ethnically Han Chinese yet practice Islam. One can see the unusual architecture of the Hui homes and mausoleums, the yurts of the nomadic Kyrghyz and other mountain dwellers, historic mosques and amazing Buddhist caves decorated more than a thousand years ago. It is an unsettled area which includes a long leg of the famous Silk Road dotted with scattered market towns and isolated farms as it runs between great deserts and high mountains .


      While there are several other sections of China where distinct subcultures exist, the largest concentration of these lie in the South in Yunnan, the part of China neighboring the Indo-Chinese Peninsula. A few hours south of Kunming where the Stone Forest is a tourist attraction live the Yi (ee) people, one of the most colorful of the minority groups. You can visit their small villages and see the unique and colorful dress that is distinctive to their group. Even further south, the mountain groups that live near Xishangbanna, home to the Dai people, share many of the customs of their neighbors in Burma and Laos. North of Kunming minority life is even more in evidence. The Bai minority group are quite a sight at their weekly markets all of them in traditional, unfamiliar dress. A walk through these markets is a photographer's dream. The ancient pagodas just outside the city of Dali are worth traveling to alone. A bit further north still is Lijiang, home of the fascinating matriarchal Naxi who have single handedly retained ancient music of the countryside in spite of repression of their musicians during Mao's tenure. They also maintain the only known Dongba Cultural hieroglyphs and lead their own singular life in the beautiful city. Past Lijiang is the fascinating road to Shangri La, the area made famous in Lost Horizons, a spectacular mountain area inhabited mostly by Tibetans. One other characteristic of Yunnan that should be mentioned is its eternal spring-like weather. A great place for sunshine, beauty and wonder.


     There are 56 recognized minority groups in China although they constitute only a small portion of the total population. If the tourist is interested, he or she can visit the Manchu in the far north and the Zhuang in the South or any of the many places where traditional peoples are concentrated. In any event, such a voyage offers the tourist a substantially different China than one might ever imagine. When we Westerners think of exotic countries on other continents, we imagine that each cultural area is homogeneous but such is not the case. Travel almost anywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, or southern Asia or many sections of South America and Meso-America or even islands like Borneo or Papua New Guinea and you are in for the delightful experience of visiting people who live considerably differently from their nearby neighbors and who take pride in their membership in a group, usually more than their citizenship in a nation.

 

                               Local Dentist, Kashgar, China

The Amazing Tribal Peoples of India

     We Westerners tend to think of India as one overgrown homogeneous country, primarily Hindu, brown skinned, ambitious, poor and energetic. That may be true of the majority of Indians but it certainly does not take into account the tremendous variety of peoples, religions and subcultures that exist there. Of special interest are the forty million or so folks who are considered tribals. That figure is, of course, a drop in the bucket of the more than a billion Indians who populate the peninsula but their practices are so varied and unique that they merit a visit or more of their own to satiate the interests of the intrepid traveler. I was lucky enough to put together such a journey for myself and it turned out to be a highlight of my travel.

      Most of the tribal villages are in rural areas separate from mainstream Indian culture and often a distance from its vast cities. The more isolated these villages are, the more likely they are to have retained their differences in language, worship, dress and customs. These are primarily people who settled in India well before the Aryans arrived and the Hindu culture was established. Many of them are of Dravidian origin and practice one form or other of animist religions. The tribal villages are scattered throughout the country although there are a few places where one is more likely to encounter a variety of them. And the variations are staggering. Some folks pray to stone formations or to unique spirits, some others worship ancestors; others still wander about with bows and arrows, many of them value women equally or even above males and others provide for bride prices in contrast to the Hindu culture where dowries are commonplace. There are still many who practice animal sacrifice on a regular basis. There are tribals who are virtually naked in dress and others who are covered from head to toe and wear an abundance of jewelry, especially necklaces and nose rings made in tribal villages which specialize in such metalwork. There are patrilineal and matrilineal groups, bigamists and monogamists and even places where women take more than one husband; some communities allow easy divorce and others do not. A visit to their living areas is a veritable journey through National Geographic.

     My trip began in the state of Madhya Pradesh with a visit to the most numerous minority group called the Bhils who number about 7,000,000 alone. I wrote earlier about their colorful Bhagoria Festivals where young people meet, boys convince girls to run off with them to spend trial days in the woods and ultimately take the mates they find worthwhile to the boy's home at which time the family prepares an offer to the bride's family. In that part of India, one can also visit other tribes including the Bhilala, the Ghonds and the Nagdas.  These groups worship their own god, Bhagwan, and consider nature an object of reverence also. They pray to stone images sprayed with oil and offer liquor and animals to their gods. The Bhil's male and female dress for the Bhagoria Festival is incredibly colorful and original.

     Another concentration of tribal life is in Orissa on the Eastern side of India. One can visit there the Kutia Kondh and view the geometric tattoos on the faces and hands of the women so that they will recognize one another in the after world while the men dress in loin clothes even today. This tribe has very elaborate rituals for birth, marriage and death, all of which can be observed on a visit. Another artifact to be observed among the various Kondh clans is the way the villages are laid out. They generally are built with two rows of houses facing a central street in the middle of which stands an altar to the earth goddess who is worshipped faithfully. The clan of the Dongariya Kondh features women who wear three large nose rings as well as men who have their hair bunched up on their head and are decorated with smaller nose rings. They are a fascinating, unusual looking group but the Bonda and the Gadaba who also reside in the general area are even more singular. The Bonda women, according to legend, may not wear any clothing but they have fashioned one of the most unique ways to cover themselves I have ever seen. They are known as "the naked people." This group also practices bride price instead of dowry for the men's families.  The men are known for their violent, warlike manner and carry weapons to protect their women from relatively non-existent animal threats. The Gadaba female attire features gigantic earrings and the women are especially well known for their dancing.

      There are, of course, other places where one finds numerous tribes on the subcontinent, especially in the far North where groups such as the Nisha and the Monpa dwell and the West where nomadic tribes wander the deserts. I have yet to get to those places. Almost everywhere one goes in India, however, a tribal village lies not very far away. The people who live near cities and who trade extensively with the majority culture have become rather assimilated over the years, so the interested traveler who wishes to see the dramatic alternative life styles some of these minority villages offer needs to get going. The world grows smaller as I write this blog.

Gadaba Woman with Necklaces