A Visit to the Miao People of China

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At the first Miao village we come to we are treated to a traditional welcome. Lined up to meet us are a dozen young girls in coiled headdresses with scarves of pink, green, yellow and white tucked into them. The young men who accompany them are having some trouble tying indigo cloth turbans. Two elders of the village wear black cotton robes with scarves and sashes around their heads and waists. Both have thin, pointed faces and tiny beards. Songs are sung to the accompaniment of the lusheng, an L-shaped bamboo instrument which requires great skill to play as you are supposed to dance at the same time. Then the girls step forward and offer me a buffalo horn full of local rice wine. After the wine there is dancing which I am invited to join. Their village has timber-framed, bamboo-walled barns and smoke rising from the curved tiled roofs of the huts. There is a modern red-brick school building, from which children wearing tracksuits spill out and make their way home across the paddy-fields. Four miles away is a market to which any surplus maize, tobacco or vegetables are taken. This market takes place at the bottom of a grey rock face on top of which stand the remains of a Miao castle built six hundred years ago. Children are carried, always by the women, in bright embroidered cloth baskets slung on their backs. Alongside one of the buildings are lined up thirty or forty bamboo cages with songbirds inside. There are stalls full of rope, spectacles, hats, pills, clothes, steamed dumplings and other refreshments. Shimeng is another Miao village on the edge of a plateau surrounded by green and gold rice terraces. It can be reached only from a dirt road by walking for half an hour along narrow mud paths. On either side the wet earth is being turned with a wooden plough yoked to the shoulders of a water buffalo. It’s a slow process, only as fast as the
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