Village hoppin'

Xijiang

Wow what an amazing two days! I have never seen anything remotely like the Guizhou countryside in my life. Early Monday morning, Sharron, Sandy and I took a train about 3 hours to Kaili, the second largest city in Guizhou province. From there, we caught a bus into the countryside to a village called Xijiang (meaning west of the river). The drive out to Xijiang is absolutely gorgeous. On the way, you pass by loads of rice terraces, farms and tiny villages. Most of the people rely solely on agriculture for a living and since the area is so mountainous, they have to level their crops onto the hillsides. The varying colors of the different sections of crops are quite a visual treat. First, some background about the Miao people, which make up about 99% of the population in the village of Xijiang....

Me and Sharron

With a population of more than seven million, the Miao people form one of the largest ethnic minorities in southwest China. They are mainly distributed across Guizhou, Yunnan, Hunan and Sichuan provinces and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, and a small number live on Hainan Island in Guangdong Province and in southwest Hubei Province. Most of them live in tightly-knit communities, which we definitely witnessed in Xijiang, where people left their doors open for friends and neighbors to come and go as they please. Xijiang is the largest of the Miao villages, with over 1,000 families. They mostly rely on agriculture to make a living, and are completely self-sufficent, growing all their own crops and raising animals. They sell a lot of their handicrafts, like batik or silver goods. They have their own Miao language, although most people can speak Mandarin in the more well-connected villages, but some in the older generations can't. When people were speaking in the Miao language, Sharron and Sandy couldn't understand a word of it! They seem to be very proud of their culture--the women wear bright embroidered clothing, often with their hair in a large bun on top of their head and a big pink flower. Clothes in this area are a huge part of the culture, distinguishing one minority group from the other. Women still weave their own clothes and make their own dyes. I especially love the designs on the baby carriers! You see women doing back-breaking work all while carrying their children (or grandchildren) on their backs. The designs on them are lovely, often including important symbols and references to myths and history.

Miao handmade baby shoes

Woman washing her clothes by the bridge

Xijiang is mostly built on the hillside, with lots of beautiful rice paddies. The houses are all wooden, with the first floor built up on pillars so the damp ground doesn't affect the first floor. The Miao people pay quite a lot of attention to the intricately detailed woodwork. It's so much more beautiful than most Chinese towns I've seen, where store fronts are quickly thrown up like cement blocks. There was real charm to this town and the people were extremely hospitable. We found a room at a local family's house.

Views from our guesthouse:

This was a great experience. We got to eat local food and get great advice from the homeowners. All this for about $2 a night. The bathrooms were outside and there was no heat but the winters are not quite as cold as back home in the northeast and hey, it was part of the experience. We got woken up by roosters, and on the second day....the slaughtering of pigs. At about 5 am I heard the neighbors killing their pigs, and the sounds didn't leave much for the imagination. It went on for a good 2 hours. The next day, I saw the pigs for sale on the road, with just about every part being sold. I could still see the hair on the flesh....

Anyway....We learned about several of the distinct Miao traditions by talking to the locals and going to a small museum about Miao culture.

Recently married women cannot go back to their parent's home for a fixed amount of time after the wedding, sometimes until they have a child. When they do, there's a big celebration where they paint the women's faces with red dye and have a special meal with red dyed eggs and sticky rice. They also chase the men around trying to get them to drink rice wine. We witnessed one of these wine fights and kind of got in the middle of it somehow. One of the men obviously lost, he was totally covered in wine.

We ended up talking to this man, who was one of the proverbial leaders of the village, and he invited us to his home for dinner. On the way up the hill to his house we got caught in the chant "he jiu, he jiu" (drink wine, drink wine!) and in order to pass the women, we had to drink a glass of rice wine. Man is that stuff strong. Luckily, Sharron warned me that if you touch the cup while drinking, they'll make you chug the whole thing. They still made me drink at least 3 full glasses, even though I didn't touch the glass, probably because I was an easy target.

At the "village leader's" house with his daughter in law and granddaughter

Another fun tradition is after a woman's baby turns a month old. Again the women paint their faces for this and toss the woman whose child is turning a month old into a wheelbarrow. We saw this happening too.

The Miao people also have some ceremonies where they make sacrifices, like kill a rooster in order to make a difficult decision. Something about which way the blood flows determines the solution to the problem. There's a large drum hidden away in one of the houses up on the hill, which is only used once every 13 years. The nephew of the "drum leader" showed it to us and also a large altar where you could light incense and say a prayer to some gods. There were some yellow pieces of paper smeared with chickens' blood that is supposed to be an offering to some kind of fertility god. We learned most of this by just walking around the village and being invited into people's houses. Of course, I wouldn't have been able to do this without Sharron and Sandy with me, due to the language barrier. It was great how open people were to sharing their culture with us.

A painter's house we stumbled upon

We hiked up through the village and past the houses to the top of the village, with some breathtaking views of the countryside. We passed by several villagers doing their daily chores, like carrying stacks of hay or vegetables on their mules or with a large branch balanced with goods on either end. I felt quite humbled as we were huffing and puffing up the mountain, to see these old men and women doing backbreaking work with relative ease, probably not for the first time that day.

Some kids we ran into on the way up.

Me and Sandy (she's always doing the peace sign!)

In the center square, there were several performances of traditional Miao singing and dancing. We got some pictures with the older members of the "drum group".

The village lit up at night:

Beautiful!