Life in a Kam Village in Southwest China, 1930–1949
GEARY_f1_i-xiv.indd i 7/11/2007 6:53:55 PM Sinica Leidensia
Edited by Barend J. ter Haar
In co-operation with P.K. Bol, D.R. Knechtges, E.S. Rawski, W.L. Idema, E. Zürcher, H.T. Zurndorfer
VOLUME 80
GEARY_f1_i-xiv.indd ii 7/11/2007 6:53:56 PM Life in a Kam Village in Southwest China, 1930–1949
By Ou Chaoquan
Translated by D. Norman Geary
LEIDEN • BOSTON 2007
GEARY_f1_i-xiv.indd iii 7/11/2007 6:53:56 PM On the cover: Dazhai in Xiangye village. Photo by Dean Schauer. All photographs by Dean Schauer. All line illustrations by Zhong Shengzhi.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISSN 0169-9563 ISBN 978 90 04 16229 7
Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands
GEARY_f1_i-xiv.indd iv 7/11/2007 6:53:56 PM CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ...... vii Preface ...... ix Maps ...... xiii
Chapter One Location ...... 1 Chapter Two Langdong ...... 9 Chapter Three The name ‘Kam’ ...... 21 Chapter Four The villagers ...... 25 Chapter Five Physical characteristics of the people ...... 33 Chapter Six The village ...... 39 Chapter Seven Farming ...... 51 Chapter Eight Spinning and weaving ...... 61 Chapter Nine Thrifty people ...... 69 Chapter Ten Mornings and evenings ...... 81 Chapter Eleven Food ...... 87 Chapter Twelve Mealtime etiquette ...... 97 Chapter Thirteen Drinks ...... 103 Chapter Fourteen Clothing ...... 109 Chapter Fifteen Coming-of-age ...... 115 Chapter Sixteen Courtship by night ...... 121 Chapter Seventeen Courtship by day ...... 129 Chapter Eighteen Intimidating situations for young women ... 133 Chapter Nineteen Matchmakers ...... 139 Chapter Twenty Engagement ceremony ...... 145 Chapter Twenty-One Marriage and divorce ...... 149 Chapter Twenty-Two Unorthodox marriages ...... 159 Chapter Twenty-Three Marriage relationships ...... 167 Chapter Twenty-Four The distinction in culture between men and women ...... 177 Chapter Twenty-Five Clan-centred community ...... 183 Chapter Twenty-Six Pipe-smoking elders ...... 193 Chapter Twenty-Seven No beggars or thieves ...... 201 Chapter Twenty-Eight Monotonous and primitive music ...... 205 Chapter Twenty-Nine Festivals and celebrations ...... 209 Chapter Thirty Children ...... 217
GEARY_f1_i-xiv.indd v 7/11/2007 6:53:56 PM vi contents
Chapter Thirty-One Survival in the midst of suffering ...... 223 Chapter Thirty-Two Author’s postscript ...... 231 Chapter Thirty-Three Translator’s postscript ...... 247
Glossary ...... 253 References ...... 255 Index ...... 259 Plates ...... 265
GEARY_f1_i-xiv.indd vi 7/11/2007 6:53:56 PM ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The rst draft of this book was completed in Chinese and signed by Professor Ou Chaoquan in June 2004. Several colleagues assessed this Chinese manuscript: Professor Wang Liangfan (of Guizhou Univer- sity), Professor Long Yaohong (of Guizhou Institute of Nationalities), Professor Shi Lin (retired from Nankai University in Tianjin), Mr Pan Yongrong (of the Guizhou Nationalities Research Institute), Ms Glo- ria Chan (then a member of SIL International) and Ms Lu Qilian (a graduate of the Guizhou Institute of Nationalities). All these friends gave useful feedback. While not all the feedback recommended publica- tion in Chinese, all indicated that it might be worthwhile publishing in English. The translation of the manuscript was delayed until 2006. Before that, in May 2005, Alastair Dore did some useful background research on life in Guizhou province in the 1930s and 1940s. Helen Buchanan helped with library research. The work of translation was supported by Mr Hai-Tao Wang, who supplied a ready computer-translation from Chinese into English; and by Mr Wei Peilei, a Kam colleague who helped to interpret many unfamil- iar turns of phrase. For the most dif cult translation questions, answers were sought from the author himself, Professor Ou Chaoquan. Once a rough manuscript existed in English, it was given a thorough reading by William Geary, who made many useful suggestions. Com- ments from a referee, appointed by the publisher, were also helpful. A nearly- nal version was carefully examined by Ruth Geary and by Donna Snyder, and at that stage many improvements of clarity were made. The translator made a trip to Xiangye in August 2006, accompa- nied and assisted by Wei Peilei. On that occasion, the two visitors were kindly hosted by the village party secretary Mr Yang Xiubiao and his neighbour Mr Ou Chaoheng. During the photography visit at the end of March 2007, the same two men again served as hosts, together with the village leader Mr Ou Chaosheng. On both visits, the villagers of Xiangye displayed the warm hospitality that characterizes the Kam people generally.
GEARY_f1_i-xiv.indd vii 7/11/2007 6:53:56 PM viii acknowledgements
The Kam artist Mr Zhong Shengzhi drew the line drawings. He did so by reference to the Chinese manuscript and his own imagination and experience. Dean Schauer, a member of SIL International, took all the photos appearing in the book. Wei Peilei prepared the maps. The Assistant Editor for Asian Studies at Brill Academic Publishers, Ms Patricia Radder, was ef cient and encouraging at every stage of the publication process. An Editor at Brill, Ms Caroline van Erp, helped incorporate many improvements to the manuscript in the later stages of its preparation. Thanks to all these friends for their help. Special thanks to Ruth Geary for her patience and help during the busy days of translating, checking and re-checking the English manuscript. Any errors in the book do, of course, remain the responsibility of the author and of the translator.
Ou Chaoquan (author) Norman Geary (translator) Guiyang April 2007
GEARY_f1_i-xiv.indd viii 7/11/2007 6:53:56 PM PREFACE
Geary et al. (2003) wrote the second book available in English about the Kam nationality in China.1 (The Kam are known in China as the Dong (侗) nationality. The word ‘Kam’ is pronounced in the same way as ‘gum’ in ‘chewing gum’.) The book was a general anthropological description with the title The Kam People of China and the subtitle Tur n- ing Nineteen, which referred to a looking-back towards the ‘best days’ of the Kam culture. In reviewing the book, Wellens (2003, p. 556) criti- cized it for ‘a tendency to essentialise and exoticise ethnic minority cul- ture . . . The picture presented of Kam society is a rather rosy one and criticism of the policies of the Communist Party is almost absent.’ The authors recognized that there was some truth in such criticism. Two co-authors of The Kam People decided in response to embark on another, measuredly frank, description of the culture—not to the exclu- sion of ‘rosy’ parts, of which there are still many, but with an emphasis on telling the culture-story as it really was. Was, because The Kam People itself was already close to is, and because the Kam culture is presently a moving target, spiralling off in a haze of rapid change even as these words are written. Moreover, as Wellens implies, no description of a culture can be made without reference to political environment and a deliberately open treatise on the modern-day Kam runs a higher risk of becoming entangled in an unhelpful way with political issues. Instead, the perspective of a Kam community in the 1930s and 1940s was cho- sen. This choice had the added bonus of bringing to light a lifestyle and an era that has barely been documented elsewhere, even in Chinese writings. This book, with the title Life in a Kam Village in Southwest China, 1930– 1949, was commissioned in the minds of the author and the translator as a companion-volume to The Kam People. Life in a Kam Village and The Kam People are like grandparent and grandchild, night and day, private showing and public exhibition, respectively. They represent local and global Kam culture, respectively.
1 The book was entitled The Kam People of China: Turning Nineteen. The rst book was a pictorial description of the Kam culture entitled The Dong People of China, A Hidden Civilization, by Rossi and Lau (1991).
GEARY_f1_i-xiv.indd ix 7/11/2007 6:53:56 PM x preface
Professor Ou Chaoquan is uniquely placed to write such a book. He is a scholar who grew up in a Kam village in the 1930s and 1940s, whose formative memories were born and immersed in Kam culture. His area of academic expertise is anthropology. He set out to write an anthropo- logical account of people’s lives in his native village, for ‘outsiders’ who would not necessarily be familiar either with the surrounding Chinese environment generally, or with the Kam people in particular. Life in a Kam Village is the result. It represents a rare insider’s view, authentic and sympathetic, and helps to explain the trajectory on which the Kam nationality nds itself today. The honesty of the author’s account marks it out as special. Formerly such frank records would have been frowned upon in the author’s home- land. Even today they are emerging only cautiously. Two aspects of Life in a Kam Village stand out as rare by comparison with other Chinese accounts: rstly the candid way in which the author treats relationships between minority Kam and majority Han Chinese; secondly the open- ness with which he discusses embarrassing features within the village culture itself relating, for example, to apparent estrangement between husbands and wives, or to derogatory words delivered by parents to their children. By way of quali cation, it should be stated that no claims are made here to extrapolate the story of Xiangye village to cover the whole of Kam culture. Some possible trends can be deduced or hypoth- esized and no more than that. Life in a Kam Village nevertheless resonates with signi cance in relation to the experiences of all the minority nationalities in Southwest China in the two decades before Liberation (1949). The Republican govern- ment practised a policy of assimilation,2 which generated tension in the lives of minority people throughout Guizhou and neighbouring prov-
2 Cheung Siu-Woo (2003, p. 105) quotes the chief commander of the Republican army entering western Guizhou in 1936, as issuing the following order: ‘There are said to be over 100 kinds of Miao and Yi interspersed in the Southwest, with distinct lan- guage, life, costumes and customs . . . Currently my headquarters in Anshun has estab- lished two Miao schools to implement ‘assimilation’ (tonghua) education, emphasising reformation of native costumes, languages, wedding and funeral rituals, and to promote Han-Miao intermarriage . . . According to the army’s plan of assimilation, it is stipulated that troops stationed in places close to the natives have the duty to implement ‘assimila- tion’ education . . . This order is to be issued to all troops in Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan and Guangxi. If everybody holds to the principle and works of assimilating the Miao and Yi, it is not dif cult to achieve national unity within a few years.’
GEARY_f1_i-xiv.indd x 7/11/2007 6:53:56 PM preface xi
inces. Even without such external pressure, the lives of the people of Xiangye were dif cult and many experiences of Kam villagers related in this book will have found their echo in the lives of other minority people in Southwest China, in the 1930s and 1940s. Hence the basic aims of Life in a Kam Village are twofold: primarily to tell ‘the Kam story’ as it really was in one remote village community and secondarily to play a small part in hypothesizing the social history of Southwest China as it relates to nationalities in the 1930s and 1940s. Research in English on minority life in Republican China is relatively scarce. Life in a Kam Village therefore has a signi cant role to play in ‘ ll- ing the gaps’.
NB
1. In telling the story of Xiangye from the 1930s and 1940s, the author has changed the names of most of the individuals described, to pro- tect and respect their privacy. 2. The last letter of each syllable in the Kam orthography represents not a phonetic sound but rather the tone with which the syllable is uttered. There are nine tones in the Kam language, the most of any Asian language. These are represented by the letters listed below. The letters in turn are followed in parentheses by the numerical rep- resentation of the tone using a scheme adopted in the International Phonetic Alphabet. (For example, ‘55’ means ‘high level tone’, ‘35’ means ‘high rising tone’, etc.) The nine tone letters in Kam are: l (55), p (35), c (11 or 212), s (323), t (13), x (31), v (53), k (453) and h (33). Written Kam appears in the proverbs at the head of Chapters 1 to 31 and also occasionally in the text of the book. 3. Kam proverbs at the head of each chapter are taken from three sources, as follows: Zhang Sheng et al. (1996): Chapter 1 (C1), p. 19; C2, p. 32; C3, p. 188; C4, p. 318; C5, p. 54; C6, p. 224; C7, p. 168; C10, p. 157; C11, p. 366; C12, p. 277; C13, p. 134; C14, p. 96; C15, p. 179; C16, p. 238; C17, p. 133; C18, p. 29; C20, p. 267; C21, p. 248; C22, p. 234; C23, p. 43; C24, p. 183 ; C25, p. 192; C27, p. 107; C28, p. 244; C30, p. 49; C31, pp. 287–288; Ou Chaoquan and Jiang Daqian (2002): C9, p. 370; C11, p. 366; C19, p. 368; C26, p. 368; C29, p. 367;
GEARY_f1_i-xiv.indd xi 7/11/2007 6:53:57 PM xii preface
Guizhou Subcommittee of the China Nationality Literature Research Committee (1983): C8, p. 260.
Norman Geary (Translator) Guizhou University Southwest Minority Language and Culture Research Institute, Guiyang April 2007
GEARY_f1_i-xiv.indd xii 7/11/2007 6:53:57 PM MAPS
Beijing
Guiyang
Liukai (Xiangye)
0 200 400km
Map 1. China.
Jianhe Guiyang Kaili Liukai (Xiangye) Liping Rongjiang Congjiang
0 60 120km
County boundary
Map 2. Guizhou province.
GEARY_f1_i-xiv.indd xiii 7/11/2007 6:53:57 PM xiv maps
Zhanghan Fanzhao
Fanzhao river
Fanzhao river Nanshao river
Nanshao Jiuyi
Jiulie Taiyong river Yuantong Taiyong river
Taiyong Wusong Liuluo Jianhe county Langhuang Liujin Lantang
Wulai Nanliang Zhengcha
Langdong river
Lilu Liukai (Xiangye) Rongjiang
Taiyong river Zainu county Zhenghan Zhanmo Wengbei
Yangquan Wangjiazhai Pingdi Qinwang Zailian Langdong Zailin
0 800 1600m
County boundary
Map 3. Xiangye.
GEARY_f1_i-xiv.indd xiv 7/11/2007 6:53:57 PM CHAPTER ONE
LOCATION
Eis angs dens lianx lis peep, eis angs geel lianx lis dav. There is no ending without a beginning; there is no middle without the ends.
Near the southernmost point of Jianhe county in Guizhou province,1 there is a village called Liukai in Chinese2 or Xiangye in Kam. The ‘Xiang’ in Xiangye, which means ‘village’ in Chinese, perhaps derived from the Kam word for village ‘xaih’, while the ‘ye’ means ‘foolish’ in Kam. Thus the name in Kam means ‘village of foolish people’. There used to be another Chinese name for the village. It is said that the earliest Han people to have had substantial dealings with the Kam people of Xiangye were residents of the nearby Liujin military establishment. According to legend, the commander in Liujin decided that the name ‘Xiangye’ was too obscure and dif cult to remember. He observed to his subordinates that the villagers seemed to be weeping and wailing every day, and they should call the village ‘Liuai’, meaning ‘Willow Tree Sorrow’. Thereafter, all of cial reports and correspondence mentioning the village used this name. It was easily remembered by Han people and quickly spread to the peripheral Han villages and towns. So sometime after the military outpost was established in
1 Guizhou is one of China’s poorest provinces (see e.g. Bhalla and Qiu, 2006, p. 147 and p. 41). Back in the 1930s and 1940s, its economic situation was much worse. Jenks (1994, p. 10) observes: ‘In the 1930s the geographer J.E. Spencer described the province as follows: “In dealing with Chinese affairs it has been customary to refer to the southwestern provinces as backward and to Kueichou as an outstandingly poor and barren province . . . In spite of . . . hopes for the future, the people of Kueichou today are distressingly poor. Nowhere in several provinces of central and southern China has the writer seen so many abandoned farms and farmhouses, nowhere is there the same pinched, dulled, barely alive look on the faces of so many people; almost nowhere are the villages, towns, cities and the whole countryside so devoid of those cultural adornments characteristic of the rest of China.”’ 2 Throughout this book, the term ‘Chinese’ when referring to the language is taken to mean ‘standard Chinese’ or putonghua, elsewhere sometimes referred to as ‘Mandarin Chinese’.
GEARY_f2_1-8.indd 1 7/2/2007 9:51:33 PM 2 chapter one
Xiangye village.
GEARY_f2_1-8.indd 2 7/2/2007 9:51:33 PM location 3
Liujin—probably sometime between 1737 and 17953—Xiangye was called Liuai in Chinese. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Nationalist government established of ces in nearby Taiyong. They appointed an educated local landowner to serve as the leader of the area. He felt that the character ‘ai’ meaning ‘sorrow’ in the name Liuai was inauspicious so he changed the name to Liukai, where ‘kai’ means ‘to open’. At a public meeting he announced the rationale for the change. Subsequently, starting in Taiyong and spreading to the surrounding areas, the Han Chinese in the region called Xiangye by the new name of Liukai. This Chinese name has survived until today, but Kam people still call the village Xiangye. The village of Xiangye is in the Taiyong township area of Jianhe county, in Guizhou province. The border with Rongjiang county in Guizhou is two-and-a-half kilometres to the south.4 The ‘Border Brook’ serves to delineate the two counties. In times past, this county border was like a national border: if you crossed the barely four-metre-long wooden bridge, you would be under the protection of the government at the other side of the bridge. No one from one county would cross over to arrest anyone in the other. On the southern bank of the Border Brook was a tall mountain, with a path leading to Wangjiazhai, a Han village not far away. Passing through Wangjiazhai over another mountain leads you to Langdong in Rongjiang county, 10 kilometres southeast of Xiangye. The entire journey was through densely forested mountain valleys, with a few scattered Han households or small Miao settlements tucked away in remote corners. But not a single Kam household was to be seen along the way. Langdong used to be a Kam village. During the Ming dynasty and the rst part of the Qing dynasty, from 1368 to 1735, under the government policy to take over the ‘Miao’—i.e. the minority—areas, Langdong almost certainly became an important army garrison.5
3 Twenty-one military outposts were established in Jianhe county between 1737 and 1795 (cf. Ou and Jiang, 2002, p. 41). The author believes one of these was probably Liujin. 4 Note that distances quoted in this chapter are not ‘as the crow ies’ but are dis- tances along country paths, as remembered by Professor Ou. 5 The author is not aware of any written historical records that state this explicitly, but the weight of evidence in its favour is strong. For the background of Chinese migration into the Kam areas generally, from the 1300s to the 1800s, see e.g. Geary et al. (2003, pp. 8–18). For example (p. 10), ‘After Wu Mian’s death in A.D. 1385,
GEARY_f2_1-8.indd 3 7/2/2007 9:51:34 PM 4 chapter one
The Kam people were forced to leave Langdong for the surrounding mountains. Strong city walls were built, streets were constructed, and the town was occupied by several hundred families of of cers and soldiers. A government centre was established there. During the Qing dynasty (1616–1911) Langdong became a county seat, the government and cultural centre for the whole area. Those Kam people who were forced to leave Langdong during the Ming and Qing dynasties relocated to four neighbouring Kam villages: Pingdi, Zailian, Qinwang and Zailin, popularly referred to as the ‘Four Kam Villages’. They wore Han clothing, learned to speak Chinese and had good levels of Han education. Their spoken Kam was different from that of Xiangye. After all, they were under the jurisdiction of dif- ferent county authorities and were cut off from Xiangye by mountains and valleys, covered by virgin forest. The Kam people in Xiangye felt that those in the Four Kam Villages were actually not much different from Han people. Indeed the people living in the Four Kam Villages were not really willing to call themselves Kam. The village of Liujin was situated about four kilometres north of Xiangye. It was called ‘Miaola’ in Kam, meaning ‘bones of the Miao people’. It used to be a Miao village, and right up to the time of Liberation (1949) there were some Miao households in the mountains nearby. In the period from 1737 to 1795, there was an of cial policy of establishing military outposts and it was probably during that time the Liujin garrison was set up (cf. footnote 3). The original Miao inhabit- ants were expelled and the village became a base for soldiers and their families. It was the closest Han village to the north of Xiangye. Probably during the same period, two more Han garrisons were established in the north: Jiuyi, 14 kilometres away; and Zhanghan, about 18 kilometres away. Miao people had formerly lived in both these places.
seventy-two army posts were created throughout the Kam area from Liping [then including today’s Rongjiang] to Jinping to establish military rule and 32,000 Chinese soldiers came to settle in the area.’ Zhang Min (1985, pp. 51–52) also refers to this Han military settlement of the Kam area. The author postulates that Langdong was one of the settlements established as a result of this movement. Xian Guangwei (1995, p. 43) states that in 1737 Langdong was a government post administered from Rongjiang. Apart from this, the author is not aware of any historical records relating to Langdong. This lack of written records relating to Langdong partly re ects the remoteness of the Langdong area.
GEARY_f2_1-8.indd 4 7/2/2007 9:51:34 PM location 5
Residents of Xiangye were strongly in uenced by the Liujin garrison and informally governed by people there, right up until the 1930s when Taiyong of cially became the centre of government for the area. Four kolometres northeast of Liujin there was another Han village named Liuluo. It was probably settled with soldiers at the same time as Liujin. Taiyong, eight kilometres northwest of Xiangye, was a Han market town. Another 10 kilometres northeast of Taiyong was the town of Nanshao, which used to be the seat of the regional govern- ment before Taiyong took over, and was also a Han village. Except for a few families engaged in small businesses like selling oil and salt, most of the inhabitants of Nanshao were descendants of people who once worked in the area government. To the east of Xiangye lay the Langdong river. The surrounding mountains were tall and the river valley was a deep ravine. Every- thing was covered with dense virgin forest. On the banks of the river there were two small Kam villages: Zhengcha with 10 households and Langhuang with 23 households. Some generations before, Kam people had migrated from Tianzhu county and Xiaoguang county and settled there. Since the population of these two villages was small and they were relatively remote from Xiangye, their inhabitants did not have much contact with the people of Xiangye. It seems as if the Kam culture of the people of the two small villages was transformed under the in uence of neighbouring Han people, until the villagers were neither Kam nor Han. Three kilometres to the northwest of Xiangye there was another Han village, named Wulai, with around 20 or 30 households. It was a place that you had to pass through when leaving Xiangye in that direction, as though it was guarding the gateway to the whole region west of Xiangye. Along the Taiyong river six kilometres to the west of Xiangye, were two villages named Zhanmo and Lilu. These used to be inhabited by Miao people, but in the preceding few centuries Kam people had gradually migrated there. Among the original Miao inhabitants, some felt it was becoming too crowded and left, while others decided to stay on and live alongside the incoming Kam neighbours. By the time of Liberation, the villages had become Kam villages. These two villages were therefore derived from Xiangye; Zhanmo with about 20 or 30 households and Lilu with something over 10 households. Many in the two small communities had relatives who lived in Xiangye, but the Kam language spoken among them contained obvious traces of the
GEARY_f2_1-8.indd 5 7/2/2007 9:51:34 PM 6 chapter one
Miao language. Their everyday life and customs were similar to those of Xiangye, though enriched by the legacy of Miao culture. Ten kilometres northwest of Zhanmo was the Miao area of Baidao, still in Jianhe county but bordering the major Miao area of Taijiang county. West of Zhanmo were various Han villages such as Liangwang and Angying, adjoining Leishan county, also a major Miao area. In some ways the development of Zhanmo and Lilu separated Xiangye from strong Miao cultural in uences nearby. No matter which settlement you approached from, you had to scale one or two mountain ranges before reaching Xiangye. The mountain- ous terrain forms part of the Yunnan-Guizhou plateau. There were mountain paths leading out from Xiangye in all directions. One path leading from north (Taiyong) to south (Langdong) was called the ‘gov- ernment road’. You could ride a horse over it, or carry a sedan chair. Every spring, villagers went to remove branches and trees that might have fallen on the road, to clear away overgrown grass, and to repair the wooden bridges and the road surface. The Xiangye valley was long and narrow, 200 or 300 metres wide, and 1.5 or 2 kilometres long. East of the village was the only gap in the mountains. From the west a stream meandered through the valley and paddy elds in front of the village, moving towards the east. About two kilometres away it crashed over a cliff dozens of metres high, forming an impressive waterfall. Then it joined up with the Langdong river. The weather in the valley was warm, rainfall was abundant, the land was fertile, and harvests were plentiful. Xiangye people made their home in this environment, employing nature to their advantage. Over the decades, communications with the outside world were few and far between. In these circumstances, with no regular supply of essential commodities from outside, they became largely self-suf cient: ploughing elds and growing rice; spinning and weaving their own clothes; and using the rich animal and plant resources of the nearby mountains and plains. Down through the years the local resources appeared inexhaustible. Generations of people lived contentedly in Xiangye, accustomed to the daily rhythms of sunrise and sunset, work and rest. They were comfortable staying at home and except for some younger people who frequented the markets in Langdong and Taiyong, generally people did not travel far a eld. In the autumn, a few young people went to the Chejiang plain in Rongjiang county to work as labourers harvesting rice there. In those days, this seemed to them the most distant place
GEARY_f2_1-8.indd 6 7/2/2007 9:51:34 PM location 7
in the world and if they went there it would only be once every few years. Such general lack of contact with the outside world served to preserve village traditions and prevented the traditional Kam minor- ity culture from vanishing through the competing in uence of other surrounding cultures. Qimeng in Jinping county of Guizhou province was the place that language experts in the 1950s chose to demarcate northern and south- ern Kam. Geographically, Xiangye was lower in latitude than Qimeng, and therefore belonged nominally to the southern Kam area. This did not mean, however, that the language spoken in Xiangye was a pure southern Kam dialect, because the language situation in Xiangye was complex and unique. Similarly, although Xiangye belonged to Jianhe county which was home to mostly northern Kam speakers, it was sepa- rated from the northern Kam areas in Jianhe, such as Nanming and Panxi, by a great distance. The village location coupled with the loca- tion of various county borders meant that the Kam people in Xiangye really had very little contact with the Kam from other regions, and thus were detached from the main body of the Kam nationality. If people from Xiangye wanted to visit their northern Kam com- patriots, they needed to cross hill and valley by foot, along rugged mountain roads and through dense virgin forests. They had to tread carefully, quietly and fearfully through one army establishment after another, one village after another, full of people from other nationalities. Once face to face with Kam people from the north, they discovered signi cant differences in language, food and clothing. The language differences were so great that they were not even able to use Kam comfortably for conversing. When people from Xiangye visited the southern Kam in Four Kam Villages in Langdong township of Rongjiang county, it did not feel much different to them from visiting a Han village. Upon meeting people from the Four Kam Villages, there were invariably feelings of mutual embarrassment and unease. The path southwest from Xiangye to Seventy Two Villages, which was also Kam, within the borders of Rongjiang county, and the path east and southeast to Forty Eight Villages straddling the border separating the counties of Rongjiang and Liping, were as hard and as danger- ous as the path to the northern Kam. But in contrast to the north, the language, food and clothing found in those places were similar to Xiangye. It was thus relatively easy to strike up friendships with people from those areas. They were separated, however, by about a
GEARY_f2_1-8.indd 7 7/2/2007 9:51:34 PM 8 chapter one
day’s journey, through unknown land owned by unfamiliar Han and Miao people. There were not many people courageous and motivated enough to make the journey. Thus typically, when from time to time the people of Xiangye met Kam people from other areas, they usually felt acutely aware of some difference or other. Either they spoke a different variety of Kam or they wore different clothing. Sometimes the language was so different they had no choice but to use Chinese. When this happened, people could hardly feel that they had anything in common. In such cases the main point of commonality was often a fatalistic sense of helplessness and hopelessness. When face to face, people could at least sympathise with each other on these grounds. For many generations Kam characteristics in food, clothing, accom- modation and language were tucked away in Xiangye, and were pre- served behind the barriers of the surrounding Han and Miao cultures. Although a government for the area had been set up some centuries before, this government only plundered the area. It was preoccupied with collecting grain taxes and conscripting men for the army. Once these jobs were done, the government paid no further attention to the village. Xiangye was relatively large and its people were relatively well off. Up to the end of the 20th century, however, the name Liukai could not be found on any Chinese atlas, although names of much smaller villages were featured on such maps.6
6 Cf. Zhongguo Ditu Chubanshe (1995) in which Liukai does not appear, and Guizhou Sheng Di San Cehuiyuan (1997) in which Liukai appears.
GEARY_f2_1-8.indd 8 7/2/2007 9:51:34 PM CHAPTER TWO
LANGDONG
Eis jangs il yanc nyenc, eis qamt il dol menc. If they are not members of the same family, they do not go through the same entrance.
Only during the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1616–1911) dynasties did Han people begin to enter the Miao and Kam areas around Xiangye (cf. Chapter 1, footnote 5). The earliest were soldiers. Afterwards farm- ers and a small number of merchants followed in their tracks. At that time, virgin forest covered the mountains and there were not even mountain paths connecting one place to another. If soldiers wanted to enter the Miao and Kam villages, they sent people rst to fell trees and make paths through the forests. In this way they gradually followed rivers upstream. The soldiers followed the Yuan and the Qingshui rivers along various tributaries, building ‘roads’ along the way. Some roads were paved, but generally the road surface consisted of compacted earth. In places at the river banks where a boat could be navigated into a wharf, government centres were established, and with time more such centres gradually appeared upstream. In the Xiangye water system within the borders of Jianhe county, the rst such government centre was established at Nanjia, on the eastern bank of the Qingshui river. Later, a post was created on the northern bank of the Nanshao tributary of the Qing- shui River, probably around 1800. Finally the government advanced to Taiyong on the southern bank of the Taiyong River, where a district of ce was established in the 1940s. The government of ces in Taiyong are the last along the Qingshui river within Jianhe county, and also the highest-altitude government of ces on the Qingshui river. Government rule extended from along the Yuan river in Hunan up to Taiyong over a period of 200 years, starting in the period 1723–1739 up to the Republican period 1912–1945. The history of army garrisons in the area was not quite as long as 200 years. Garrisons such as Zhanghan, Jiuyi and Liujin were probably only nished during the 100 years after the beginning of the Yongqian period (1723–1796).
GEARY_f3_9-19.indd 9 7/2/2007 9:51:44 PM 10 chapter two
Forts in Langdong.
GEARY_f3_9-19.indd 10 7/2/2007 9:51:44 PM langdong 11
Settlers followed the soldiers and the roads upstream and small towns and markets were established alongside the rivers. Gradually develop- ment moved away from the main rivers into the mountains, with the formation of villages of various sizes. Xiangye was high up in the mountains, away from any major river. It has always been a dif cult place for outsiders to reach, and to which to extend government control. Historically there has been little in ltration of the village by outsiders. In the distant past, the inhabitants were able to defend themselves, even though surrounded by people of other nationalities, and they were able to live according to Kam culture and tradition. The area around Xiangye was the army-garrison district of Jianhe county. On market days the people of Xiangye went to Nanshao or Taiyong, but these Han garrisons had small populations and did not even constitute towns, much less cities. Langdong was the northernmost town in Rongjiang county, about 10 kilometres south of Xiangye. Thus Langdong was about the same distance from Xiangye as Taiyong, but Langdong was easily the larg- est town in the area. Among all their Han neighbours, the people of Xiangye rst developed relations with people of Langdong, visiting their town on market days. From early times, Langdong townspeople also made the journey to Xiangye, to do business. Economically and culturally, they did not treat the residents of Xiangye fairly. The vil- lagers were exploited more by the people of Langdong than by people from Jianhe county’s local Han administrative centres of Taiyong and Nanshao. Although the people of Langdong were not of cially in charge of governing Xiangye, the residents of Xiangye most feared the people of Langdong. Before Liberation there were 600 or 700 households in Langdong. It was surrounded on four sides by Kam and Miao minority villages, with just a few Han hamlets dotting the nearby mountains. Xiangye people referred to the town as Lang. Perhaps this name came from the Kam word for ‘dragon’ (liongc). In addition there were many other towns more or less nearby, such as Rongjiang (in Kam referred to as Mu), Jianhe (Gemuhe), Taiyong (Derong) and Nanshao (Nanxiu). Originally these towns were perhaps Kam centres, but after the Han arrived, they were given Han names. Records show that during the Song dynasty (960–1279), administra- tive units were established in some minority areas: the biggest were called prefectures, then counties, then ‘dong’ (the same sound as the Chinese word for the Kam people). ‘Lang’ was taken from the Kam
GEARY_f3_9-19.indd 11 7/2/2007 9:51:44 PM 12 chapter two
name for the village, ‘dong’ was the administrative unit appropriate to the village, and hence the name ‘Langdong’. The name thus probably originated during the Song dynasty. The Han people probably only settled in the area and took over its administration after the insurrections around Liping and Jinping coun- ties, led by the Kam heroes Wu Mian (1378–85) and Lin Kuan (1397), had been suppressed by the Chinese Emperor’s troops.1 Han people continued to migrate there throughout the Qing dynasty (1616–1911), right up to the period of the Republic of China (1912–1949). Langdong was originally a Kam village. During the Ming dynasty (1358–1644), when feudalism was rife, soldiers and peasants were recruited to cultivate the land there. When a town wall was built in Langdong, together with of cial buildings and streets, Kam people were told to leave and were forced out to the neighbouring mountains, to establish new settlements there. These new settlements became the villages of Qinwang, Zailian, Pingdi and Zailin, later called the Four Kam Villages (cf. Chapter 1). The construction used in Langdong town is worthy of note. The town wall was built with massive stones, which showed little sign of erosion, being extremely solid. There were two massive wooden doors which closed together at each of the north, south, east and west posi- tions on the wall, each wrapped in an iron sheet to protect the wood. Inside the town a street led up to each gate, with crossroads in the middle. The town was distinguished by huge square buildings, shaped like Chinese seals for ‘signing’ documents and therefore called ‘seals’ by the local people, but actually built like forts. There was a grand temple located at the town centre, which was later requisitioned by the area government to serve as headquarters. On the west of the town were the dilapidated walls of the Chao family fort that had been burned down around 1900. These buildings were all great and ancient engineering accomplishments, then about 400 years old. The forts were unique buildings in this border area. When Xiangye people on their way to market in Langdong reached the hillside at Qinwang, they observed these great square buildings towering over rows upon rows of houses. The buildings were apparently spaced at regular
1 For the legend of Wu Mian, see e.g. Geary et al. (2003), pp. 8–10 and Ou and Jiang (2002), pp. 60–61. For the legend of Lin Kuan, see e.g. Geary et al. (2003), pp. 10–11 and Ou and Jiang (2002), p. 61.
GEARY_f3_9-19.indd 12 7/2/2007 9:51:44 PM langdong 13
distances from one another and built to the same speci cation. From a distance, each seemed brilliant white. This spectacle often frightened Xiangye people, women in particular, and some even did not dare to proceed into the town. The outside walls of the square forts were made of brick and lime- stone, each wall approximately 20 metres in length. All four walls were without windows and there was only one iron-wrapped wooden door. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, it was dif cult for rearms to penetrate or destroy this kind of door. The outside wall was the height of a three-storey building, high enough to be dif cult to scale with a ladder. The inner timber walls were two storeys high, lower than the surrounding walls. In the middle was an open area known as the ‘courtyard’. Stone slabs formed the ground oor and a large stone vat for storing water sat in the courtyard. In some of the forts, a well was also dug in the courtyard. Not only did the forts have the same outward appearance, but the inner wooden oor layout was identical. They were probably designed for the same purpose and built during the same generation. It may be inaccurate to regard them as mainly dwellings for the rich. From the building materials used and the historical background of the time, they were probably built as army stations. The four walls were strong, and the buildings could hold several hundred people. Of cers, leaders and other important people would live on the ground oor. The rst (second in USA) oors were entirely without dividing walls and were perhaps used as a residence for ordinary soldiers. In the event of war, people could hold the place for 10 or 15 days without needing supplies from outside. Langdong was actually shaped like an army garrison. While the forts were small army stations, the town itself was a large army garrison. As soon as the metal door of a fort was closed, people could not enter from outside. In the same way, as soon as the metal town gates were closed, people outside Langdong could not enter. This was the situation until the 1940s. At night-time the metal gates were closed and people were not allowed to enter or leave casually. The gates were opened again in the mornings. These military buildings in Langdong were probably built during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). During the years 1378–1385, the Kam hero Wu Mian from Liping led an uprising, and conquered various counties in the neighbourhood of Liping and Rongjiang. The government sent several tens of thousands of soldiers to quell the uprising, and they
GEARY_f3_9-19.indd 13 7/2/2007 9:51:44 PM 14 chapter two
set up military and civilian garrisons at all the places where the rebel army had been. In times of peace, the garrisons were civilian; in times of war, military. It seems as though the building of the Langdong forts and town wall coincided with these historical events. At the time these constructions appeared, Langdong changed from being a large Kam village to being an army garrison town, inhabited by Han people. It gave the government authorities a powerful foothold in this minority border area. There were 13 great forts in Langdong: four associated with the Qiu family, four with the Jiang family, two with the Wang family, one with Li, one with Zhong, and the Chao fort that had been burned down. In addition there were several other brick buildings, but in a different style from the forts. They were built later as civilian dwellings. They did not have the fort-like surrounding walls. Outsiders at the time generally felt that the people living in Langdong were fundamentally different from those living on the mountains around the town. Middle-aged and older women in Langdong still bound their feet and often wore dark blue ‘four-forest clothing’ imported from Hunan province and worn only by the rich. Those from the mountains all had ‘big feet’, wore dark blue or light blue clothing, and enjoyed singing mountain songs. The language of the people in Langdong was also different from that of the neighbouring mountain Han, especially that spoken by the old men who lived in the forts, who had very strong ‘foreign’ accents. For example, those with the surname Jiang spoke the Fujian dialect. Those with the Qiu and Wang surnames also spoke dialects from another province, probably Jiangxi.2 When they spoke among themselves, even the local Han Chinese could not understand anything that was said. The soldiers who rst lived in the forts had no wives or families when they arrived in the area, and must have taken wives from among the Kam women. These wives lived inside the forts, and all year long did not leave, especially not to visit their parents. If parents came to see them, they were usually not allowed inside. So the women were isolated for decades. Those who gave birth to children were adopted into the
2 It is clear that many of the fort occupants had originally migrated into Langdong from areas far away, but the author is not aware of any formal research into their origins. Local people called them ‘Kejia people’, but they may or may not have been authentic Kejia (cf. Chapter 3, footnote 2).
GEARY_f3_9-19.indd 14 7/2/2007 9:51:44 PM langdong 15
clan of the master of the fort. The children were of Han nationality. Those who did not give birth to children were maids, with the status of slaves. After these Kam women were taken into the forts, they made Han clothing and learned to speak the Han language. Because of the block- ing off of the forts and the disengagement with the outside world, the women’s language and culture were forced to be like those of the master of the house. The children followed in the footsteps of their fathers and passed on these traditions until the time of Liberation, by which time the old men in the forts still retained completely different speech from those outside. The countryside people said that they spoke Fujian or Jiangxi dialects, but actually it was not pure Fujian or Jiangxi. People with the same surnames as the masters of the forts mostly lived in wooden homes clustered around the forts. It seemed as though they were extended family relatives or dependents. Their bodily height and appearance were similar to the people living inside the forts. They spoke Langdong Chinese, however, like their neighbours in the wooden homes. Sometimes they would mimic the pronunciation of the people inside the forts in order to intimidate the countryside people from outside Langdong. Men in the forts normally did not do any physical labour or farming as long as they lived. Their wives were the same. Only their concu- bines—their secondary wives—did any housework. When the men took concubines, they took at least two or three. Then all the work in the forts was done by the concubines, including the work of raising goats, pigs and chickens. All these women originally came from Xiangye and other minority nationality villages, but later there were also some women from mountainside Han villages. Except for when they were washing clothes and going out to fetch water, they rarely emerged through the fort doors. Around 1930 a woman from Xiangye was taken to live in one of the forts and lived there for 10 years. During this time she did not have any contact with other Kam people, and at the end of the time she was unable to speak Kam any more. In fact, at the end of 10 years in the fort she hardly spoke at all and seemed as though she had completely forgotten her former life in Xiangye. All the masters living in the forts owned homes and paddy elds in Kam villages. Historical records from the Ming dynasty show that
GEARY_f3_9-19.indd 15 7/2/2007 9:51:45 PM 16 chapter two
wherever army garrisons were stationed, there was massive con scation of minority land, paddy elds and homes. Such policy was rational- ized by falsely referring to the minority property as ‘property without heirs’. The government rst apportioned minority land to leaders living in the forts. This was called ‘paddy elds for keeping the forts’. More land was apportioned for the descendants and subordinates of leaders living in the forts, and this was called ‘paddy elds for keeping those in the shade’. Among the inhabitants of Langdong, there were these two kinds of owners. Therefore people in each fort owned paddy elds and homes in Kam villages. The con scated elds were planted by Kam tenant farmers and rent was collected from local Kam people for living in the con scated homes. Several times each month, rice had to be carried on shoulder poles to the forts. This ensured that the fort inhabitants had ample food. This arrangement carried on until Liberation. In Xiangye, all the outsiders owning land, property and homes were from Langdong. Among them, those with the surname Jiang owned the most, with approximately 20% of the paddy elds of Dazhai (cf. beginning of Chapter 4) in Xiangye. There were several barns for stor- ing the rice from these elds, specially guarded by Kam tenant farmers who also collected the ‘rice rent’ and sometimes sold it on behalf of the landlords. After possessing this land for several decades, the leader of the Jiang family opened a shop in Langdong to do business, in the years prior to Liberation. He spoke Fujian Chinese and could not speak the local dialect. When Xiangye people wanted to buy salt, or money paper for burning in honour of the ancestors, this man would sell it to them on credit. Whatever it cost, he would charge an equivalent amount of interest after half a year. But after half a year, from where would the Kam people nd double the money? They would typically be even less able to settle accounts at that point. Then, under pressure from the person in charge of collecting the money, the borrowers would have no alternative but to use their only form of wealth—paddy elds—to repay their debts. Five hundred grams of salt, or one pack of money paper, was repaid by one paddy eld. After the title deeds were handed over to the creditor, the Kam farmer became a tenant on what used to be his own elds. The Jiangs thus became the most in uential landlords in Xiangye, with the most tenant farmers.
GEARY_f3_9-19.indd 16 7/2/2007 9:51:45 PM langdong 17
Another fort resident in Langdong named Wang owned land in Xiangye and a big tile-roofed house with three rooms. He had a ten- ant staying in the house and Wang often went there to keep an eye on things. After the Lan family at the northern gate of Langdong had begun to serve as township leaders, they also started to acquire land in Xiangye. The rst time they were involved in acquiring such land was when they exchanged a horse for two paddy elds belonging to the Ou family. Following this, they loaned money at high interest and took over more land. In this way, the number of tenant farmers in Xiangye with landlords in Langdong continually increased. Before Liberation, the residents of Langdong did not work the elds or do any manual labour. Older residents said that in the past, all the food in Langdong was supplied from the neigbouring Kam villages. Wood and charcoal for burning were carried on shoulder poles to Langdong by neighbouring Kam and Miao people. It often happened that people from Langdong would go around the Kam village homes and take whatever eggs, chickens, ducks or sh they saw without pay- ing for them. This was the situation until about 10 years before Liberation, when there was at last some change. From this time on, Kam people no longer had to supply their grain free of charge, but carried it to the markets and sold it there cheaply. Wood and charcoal were also sold at low prices, or exchanged for a couple of hundred grams of salt. By the 1930s, the wooden homes in Langdong were inhabited by people who worked in production, raising pigs, chickens, ducks and geese. Those living in the wooden homes at the northern gate generally planted and farmed rice, leaving home early and returning late. They worked very hard, like the Han people living on the mountains, having become independent land-owning farmers. Most of the people living in the wooden homes near the southern gate had opened small shops, selling oil, salt, money paper, straw sandals and suchlike. Only the people living near the forts spent their time idling around, neither doing productive labour nor becoming involved in business activities. They often went to the Kam villages to eat. On market days, they casually ate the fruit and vegetables brought to the town by the Miao and Kam people to be sold. They often seized several sticks of charcoal or rewood from bundles that were carried in through the
GEARY_f3_9-19.indd 17 7/2/2007 9:51:45 PM 18 chapter two
town gates. At another crossroads, they would take possession of yet more sticks. If the rewood was set outside someone’s home, the owner sometimes came out and took away another few sticks. With good luck, some of the remaining sticks might be sold and some money obtained to buy a little salt to bring home. Often, however, produce could not be sold or exchanged and instead was given away to people on the streets. In such cases the villagers typically went home empty-handed on empty stomachs. In 1946 and 1947, when Yang Sen was the provincial governor of Guizhou, a policy of Sinicisation was implemented.3 According to the policy, minority dresses and long hair were to be eliminated, and there was to be one uni ed Han form of clothing and appearance. Soldiers representing the Langdong government employed those people who were otherwise idle to carry out the policy. So it hap- pened that on market days these people loitered around at each of the four town gates wielding scissors. Whenever a Kam or Miao woman entered, they cut off her hair and cut up her dress, snatching from her any jewelry she wore. When this became known, Kam and Miao women did not dare go into the town to market and even the men stayed away. The govern- ment sent people with guns on their backs and scissors in their hands to invade the local Kam and Miao villages for 10 or 15 days at a time, going from house to house cutting off women’s hair and cutting up their dresses. This was called by the authorities the ‘redressing movement’. After the movement, Kam women living near Langdong had begun wearing trousers rather than skirts. During this time, however, Xiangye people quietly kept a low pro le at home and fortunately were thus
3 Cheung Siu-Woo (2003, p. 111) describes the Guizhou provincial government’s policy of cultural assimilation in the mid-1940s as follows: ‘The policy . . . established Guizhou bianbao wenhua yanjiuhui (Society for Studying the Culture of Borderland Compa- triots in Guizhou) to promote assimilation by prohibiting ethnic languages and customs, harassing the natives in ethnic clothing, even to the point of destroying their clothes by force, and so on . . .’. Again (p. 105), ‘Starting in the mid-1930s, Republican troops in western Guizhou destroyed, with violence, the clothes and hairstyles of natives, especially women, when they came to the public market’. In 1948, after three years of his rule in Guizhou province, Governor Yang Sen reviewed the situation as follows (p. 105): ‘Racial differences among the borderland compatriots (i.e., the Miao [includ- ing the Kam] and the Yi) in Guizhou is the most complex, and their differences in clothing and language are most extreme. Today we should promote the ‘Sinicisation Movement’ to unify their language and clothes gradually, and to encourage cross-racial intermarriage.’
GEARY_f3_9-19.indd 18 7/2/2007 9:51:45 PM langdong 19
able to maintain their traditional culture. For many months they did not dare to go to the markets in Langdong. With time, the people of Xiangye learned to expect oppression from people in both Jianhe county and Langdong town. Langdong, how- ever, was nearer to Xiangye than any other Han town. The forts in Langdong, moreover, lled the Xiangye villagers with a sense of awe. Before Liberation, Jianhe county controlled Xiangye administratively, but Langdong controlled it economically and each ripple of change from Langdong caused the people of Xiangye to tremble with fear.
GEARY_f3_9-19.indd 19 7/2/2007 9:51:45 PM GEARY_f4_20-23.indd 20 7/2/2007 9:51:58 PM CHAPTER THREE
THE NAME ‘KAM’
Jil naemx xenh menv, xodt sungp semh dens. To drink, you need a well; to speak, you need a reason for what you say.
The name ‘Kam’ used by the people of Xiangye to de ne their nation- ality was, according to them, a name handed down by their ancestors. They did not know what it meant.1 Han people of the area called their own children ‘zai’, the Chinese term for ‘sons’. In addition, as a term of affection within the family, they addressed all people in their extended family of a younger gen- eration—including nephews and nieces, and grandsons and grand- daughters—as sons. The term carries the sense of ‘dear ones’ and does not harbour any derogatory or negative meaning. Xiangye people adopted this custom and used it as a means of referring to themselves and other nationalities. When conversing with people from outside Xiangye, including those of other nationalities, most Xiangye residents referred to themselves as ‘lagx Gaeml’, meaning ‘children of Kam people’. This form of self-appellation expressed modesty and courtesy, and no one despised the Kam people for using it. On the contrary, it seemed as though using it actually helped to bridge barriers between the Kam and other nationalities. Based on this understanding, Xiangye people referred to their Han and Miao neighbours in similar ways. They referred to the Han people as ‘Gax’, borrowed from the Chinese term Kejia.2 Another form of
1 For a couple of hypotheses, see Geary et al. (2003), p. 3. 2 Kejia people are known in English as ‘Hakkas’. They are people of the ethnic Han background who migrated from the Yellow River basin to south China during the early 4th century, the late 9th century and the early 13th century. Their descendants are found mainly in Guangdong, Fujian, Guangxi, Jiangxi, Hunan and Taiwan. Note that Clarke (1911, p. 9) refers to the ‘Keh-Chia’ (or Kejia) simply as ‘Immigrants’. The Han people who lived in Langdong or in other towns near Xiangye spoke Chinese with a typical Guizhou accent. There seem to be no written records of research into the origin of the Langdong Han people, though they almost certainly arrived after the
GEARY_f4_20-23.indd 21 7/2/2007 9:51:58 PM 22 chapter three
A Han person talking to a Kam person in the street.
GEARY_f4_20-23.indd 22 7/2/2007 9:51:58 PM the name ‘kam’ 23
address was ‘lagx Gax’, meaning ‘children of Kejia’. In the same way, they referred to the Miao people as ‘Miiul’ or ‘lagx Miiul’. Neighbouring Han people, especially those from the towns, called the Kam people ‘Dong’. They did not say what this meant, but it certainly was not perceived or intended as derogatory, and the Kam people accepted it as a friendly term.3 Han elders from the towns, in order to express kindness, sometimes referred to younger Kam people as ‘sons’. Observing that the Kam tenant farmers were poor, honest and obedient, and feeling sympathetic towards them, the landlords also sometimes referred to them as ‘sons’. In such situations, the term ‘son’ certainly did not imply familial bonds of affection, nor did it have any connotation of slavery. Some people misinterpreted the self-appellation ‘lagx Gaeml’—‘Kam child’—to mean the kind of person who is a slave. They misunderstood ‘lagx’ to mean ‘house-slave’. From this they inferred that historically Kam society was a society based on forced labour and that before Liberation, there were some family slaves among the Kam. There is no evidence to support this view, however, from the history of Kam society generally. In fact, under the in uence and promotion of neigh- bouring Han feudal society, Kam society began about 1,000 years ago transitioning from a system of primitive communal life directly into a feudal society. Today Kam society still develops in parallel with the neighbouring Han society. There have been no signs of any kind of slavery in Xiangye, either in traditional folk legends or in anthropo- logical data.
original Kejia migrations. They might possibly have been Kejia people who moved to Guizhou after their rst migration, and subsequently learned the local dialect. 3 For more on the meaning of ‘Dong’, see Geary et al. (2003), pp. 3–4.
GEARY_f4_20-23.indd 23 7/2/2007 9:51:58 PM GEARY_f5_24-32.indd 24 7/11/2007 6:30:38 PM CHAPTER FOUR
THE VILLAGERS
Miac meix gungc nyinc meix emv baih, donc xaih gungc nyinc lenc biinv senp. Many years after trees are planted, they cover the hillside; after living in the same village for many years, people become relatives.
With more than 150 households, Xiangye was the biggest village in the whole area where Jianhe and Rongjiang counties shared common borders. The inhabitants lived in three separate communities: Dazhai (Big Village, with more than 100 households), Xiaozhai (Small Village, with 30-plus households) and the Dazhai satellite village Wengbei about three kilometres away (with nearly 10 households). Historically, Xiangye was one natural village. In the 1930s, the Nationalist government implemented a new system of local administration (baojia, cf. Chapter 26) and Xiangye became a village administrative unit. The people of Dazhai were predominantly those with the surnames Ou, Yang, Luo and Zhang, among which Ou and Yang were the most common. The Wengbei villagers were from the Ou clan. They had earlier migrated to Wengbei from among the Ous of Dazhai. There were three main surnames in Xiaozhai, each with not more than ten households: two of these were Wu (distinct Chinese surnames written with different characters) and the third was Tian. The people of Xiangye spoke Kam among themselves. Most of the young men were able to use Chinese to communicate. Older men could also speak a little, but the great majority of women and children could only speak a couple of sentences of Chinese. No one could really understand the Miao language. People from the nearby Miao villages generally understood Kam and could speak Kam to communicate with the Kam people. Down through the generations the people of Xiangye lived together in peace and harmony, with suf cient food and clothing. They survived any years of famine. There were few diseases and there was never any major epidemic. The population ourished. Impoverished clans that
GEARY_f5_24-32.indd 25 7/11/2007 6:30:39 PM 26 chapter four
A visitor being invited for a meal by a Kam person.
GEARY_f5_24-32.indd 26 7/11/2007 6:30:39 PM the villagers 27
were on the wane made plans to increase again by migrating. This is what happened with the Ou family who moved to Wengbei. The Ous were followed by the Tians in Xiaozhai, when they migrated west to Zhanmo and Lilu. They grew strong there and after a few genera- tions their presence turned those two Miao villages into Kam villages. Because of unbearable taxes and the gradual weakening of their own clan’s in uence, several households from the Zhang family at the foot of Dazhai migrated to the area bordering with Rongjiang county. After some time, they found it was dif cult to make a living there and many of them returned to Xiangye after Liberation. The relative prosperity of Xiangye and the people’s sincerity, honesty and kindliness were attractive to some outsiders who otherwise had dif- culty establishing a home base for themselves. For example, Bao Luo from Langdong took a concubine and ran away from home to settle in Xiangye, so avoiding frequent disputes with his wife (cf. Chapter 31). Another man notorious in Xiangye, Qi Fu, liked to ‘ sh for young women’ (cf. Chapters 18 and 22). He often groped his way to the door of someone’s house, looking for a woman to irt with. This enraged the men in the woman’s household and he often caught no one. These two people, Bao Luo and Qi Fu, were called ‘old mates’ by some friends in Dazhai, meaning ‘people who share the same adversi- ties’. Afterwards both men’s families moved to live in empty houses among the row of Ou houses in Dazhai and the Ou clan provided food for them. The Bao and Qi family members were naturally dis- posed to be lazy, staying at home and not doing any work. The men waited lethargically for others to invite them to eat and drink. After living in Xiangye for a year or two, the two families moved away of their own accord. There was also once an old man from Langdong who moved in among the Ous of Xiangye. He had moved there to avoid trouble, after starting up a relationship with a young woman. As before, he tried to make a living by making and selling tofu. The Kam people, however, had no money with which to buy tofu, instead bartering soybeans for it. The man piled the soybeans in the corner of his house and was unable to sell them. After living there for three years, he and his fam- ily moved away. Everyone in these three families of Han people could speak some Kam within six months of moving to Xiangye. At rst they used Chinese while the villagers used Kam. In this way, they were normally able to communicate with the villagers. The newcomers’ town-based habits,
GEARY_f5_24-32.indd 27 7/11/2007 6:30:39 PM 28 chapter four
however, remained unchanged. The men were unable to work the elds and the women could not make clothes. In fact none of them did any kind of manual labour and in the end they left Xiangye still wearing Han clothes and speaking mostly Chinese. Xiaozhai was also home to two or three families of Han people who migrated into the village, with the surnames Peng and Deng. They were all farmers from the mountain villages northeast of Xiangye. The vil- lagers from Xiaozhai gave them the lower oors of the wooden grain stores in which to live. The men cut rewood or made charcoal to exchange for rice, while the women made cloth shoes or straw sandals to exchange for clothing or cloth. They worked for their livelihoods and became used to the customs of the local Kam people. Ultimately they were not much different from Kam people themselves. After Liberation they continued to live in Xiangye as, to all intents and purposes, they had become Kam. According to stories handed down by the elders, the ancestors of the Ous in Xiangye lived in Ji’an city of Jiangxi province. They originally migrated from Ji’an to Tianzhu county in Guizhou province and lived there for several generations. Between 1796 and 1820 some of them left Tianzhu and roamed from place to place before settling down in Xiaoguang (a town in Jianhe county, where today Kam people are concentrated), where they lived for one or two generations. Because soldiers arrived, burning and killing, they migrated along the Qingshui river and then branched south along the Nanshao river. They reached Zhengcha on the eastern bank of the Langdong river and lived there for a while, but they did not possess much arable land and it was dif cult to make a living there. They then travelled another three kilometres over high mountains before nally settling in Xiangye, adopting it as their home. When they were leaving Xiaoguang, the ancestors feared that people of other nationalities would come and dig up their clans’ graves and randomly dump the remains of the corpses somewhere, so they carried their relatives’ remains to Xiangye. When they opened the bags, they found that they were short of one leg bone. Anyway, the bones were buried on the mountainside behind the village. One large grave was made and a gravestone was set up there, with an inscription bearing the names of the relatives and the date of the grave. That was ve or six generations ago. As the Ous were migrating from Tianzhu to Xiangye, other Ous from Taigong (in Taijiang county of Guizhou province) and some
GEARY_f5_24-32.indd 28 7/11/2007 6:30:39 PM the villagers 29
from Zaidao (within the border of Zhaihao in Rongjiang county) were also migrating to the village. Afterwards, people originating from these three distinct places united to form the Ou clan in Xiangye. The Ou population was the greatest in the village and the Ous became dominant in the locality. This family history was still told in the 1930s and 1940s to young people in Xiangye. The genealogies remembered from Taigong and Zaidao included some inexplicable names, because they were transmitted orally and there were no written records, but the sayings regarding the migrations from the above-mentioned places can generally be trusted. Thus the origin of the Ous from Xiangye is basically clear: some were northern Kam from Tianzhu, some were southern Kam from Zaidao, and some possibly had Miao blood from Taigong. Afterwards, some of the Ous in Xiangye took local women to be their wives, while others took Kam women from the southern Four Kam Villages, Forty Eight Villages or Seventy Two Villages. Thus the southern Kam element increased. Since the Ous were the biggest clan in the area, with power and in uence, poor families of limited means and connections from Zhengcha, Langhuang and other villages came and settled alongside them. These newcomers then became part of the extended Ou family, making the family background even more complex. The second most common surname in the village after Ou was Yang. There was no legend comparable to the Ous’ about the Yangs migrat- ing from Tianzhu or Xiaoguang. Even if they did migrate from those general areas, then it probably was not from the same villages as the Ous. In Xiangye, the Ou families lived towards the mountain borders of the village. The Yangs on the other hand were concentrated in the half of the village beside the plain where rice was grown, and beside the stream. People of the two surnames intermarried, but among the Yangs many men chose their wives from the Han and Miao areas. Some also took Kam wives from the Four Kam Villages or Forty Eight Villages. Thus the Yangs had more relatives outside Xiangye than the Ous. There was a private school in Xiangye staffed by two teachers who were both local Yangs. One of the teachers was a tall old man who walked with a limp. He spoke in an accent that no one else in the village could understand. It was not local Chinese. Maybe it was the Hakka language, or a dialect from Jiangxi or Fujian. The children were even less able than the local adults to understand what he said. They joked that his teaching was like ‘the bright moon’, meaning that they heard the sounds of his speech but never understood a word. (Formerly the
GEARY_f5_24-32.indd 29 7/11/2007 6:30:39 PM 30 chapter four
Kam people had seen the moon in the sky but had never understood what it was.) His young wife was also from outside the village, though she learned to speak the Kam language of Xiangye. She bore him ve or six children, who grew up just like all the other children in Xiangye, speaking Kam and adopting Kam culture. The Zhangs who lived at the foot of the village and the Luos who lived at the head were not as numerous as the Ous or the Yangs. The Zhangs were about as tall as the average Ous and Yangs, but the Luos were short in stature and their skin colour was comparatively dark. The Luos and the Ous said they were from the same clan, and so generally did not intermarry. People with the surnames Zhang and Luo did not have any migration legend. Were they indigenous to Xiangye? If so, did they crowd into the village foot and head, respectively, only after the Ous and Yangs arrived? The Wus, Wus (a different surname in Chinese) and Tians of Xiaozhai knew nothing about Xiaozhai’s history, nor did anyone else in Xiaozhai seem to know about it. Very few of them chose wives from outside Xiangye. Their skin colour was relatively fair and their physique was similar to that of people from the Miao nationality. According to legend, each autumn after harvest, Miao men came and attacked Xiangye. They said that the village was originally theirs and they wanted to reclaim it. The Kam people of Xiangye, however, defended themselves vigorously and did not allow the Miao people to live there. Often there was ghting. Once the Miao men gathered on the mountain summit and were preparing to charge down. When they looked down on Xiangye in the distance, they saw rows and rows of men standing on the ridges between the elds. The whole plain was full of people. They reckoned that they could not win a battle against so many people and retreated. It turned out that what they had seen was not people but bundles of straw from harvested rice. Until a decade before Liberation, residents of Xiangye bought land from the Miao people in the mountains nearby in order to build graves there. Judging from the origins and the physique of the people, the major- ity of the inhabitants of Xiangye bore the characteristics of northern Kam and Han people. Others had a relatively dark complexion and short stature that is more characteristic of the southern Kam. Then again there was a smaller minority of them who closely resembled the Miao and Yao people. If specialists examined the situation carefully,
GEARY_f5_24-32.indd 30 7/11/2007 6:30:40 PM the villagers 31
they would discover that Xiangye was home to these three distinct sets of people, with ever-increasing blood relations between them. The traditional culture and language of the inhabitants was a mixture of southern and northern Kam, sprinkled with a little Han culture that had in ltrated society. The village was thus a place where the people, languages and cultures of the southern and northern Kam converged. Xiangye people spoke mainly the southern Kam dialect, but there was also some northern Kam and a little Chinese. Some examples of the Kam language spoken in Xiangye are given in the table below, marking with an asterisk words that were most commonly used in Xiangye. In some cases both southern and northern words were com- monly heard.1
Vocabulary Southern Kam Northern Kam sky *m!n55 *m!n35 rain *pj!n55 mj!n35 re *pui55 wi35 smoke (n) kwɐn212 *ʔ!n22 hillside *i33 pja44, ta33 river *a55 *a35 deep pool *mɐŋ55 taŋ22 well *m!n53 *m!n55 level land *pjan53 wjan55 eld *ja53 *ja55 sand * e35 sa11 soil, mud *mak31 ʔ!n33 lead (the metal) *jon212 jen22 salt jim212 *pau22 village * ai33 * ai44 bridge *lo31 iu22 Han nationality *ka31 a31 old person *!n212 lau31 j!n22 lau31 male (person) *lak31 pan55 lo31 wan35 girl *lak31 mjek323 ku35 aŋ33 paternal grandmother *sa31 nai33 father *pu31 a33, kau31 pig ŋu453 *mu25
1 The IPA representations in the table are taken from Long Yaohong and Zheng Guoqiao (1998), pp. 215–244.
GEARY_f5_24-32.indd 31 7/11/2007 6:30:40 PM 32 chapter four
Table (cont.) Vocabulary Southern Kam Northern Kam bamboo *pɐn55 m!i31 kw!n35 cotton *mjin212 mjin22 wa11 salted sh *pa55 w!t55 ta35 w!t55 clothing *ʔuk323 tuʔ31 ladder kwe323 *ʔe33 rope lam33 *au35 plough *khɐi35 !i11 shoulder pole lan212 *ʔan22 eat *i55 e35 tear *jak323 ne35 fat *pui212 pi22 hungry jak323 *peʔ33 thirsty jak323 nɐm31 *so44 ʔo22 foolish *ʔe323 au11 slowly *sɐi453 sɐi453 wan11 wan11
GEARY_f5_24-32.indd 32 7/11/2007 6:30:40 PM CHAPTER FIVE
PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PEOPLE
Jaenx yak wenp yak, jaenx pap wenp pap, jaenx geel bangc nyumx eis bagx hap. If you stay close to red things, you become red; if you stay close to gray things, you become gray; if you stay near the dyeing barrel, you will not be white any more.
The Kam people are a minority nationality of 2.96 million people.1 They comprise people of mixed anthropological heritage. Most of the southern Kam belong to the southern Mongoloid race, either the Tai-Liao type or the southern Chinese type. In ancient times, the northern Kam also belonged to the southern Mongoloid race, but after mixing with migrants from the north their characteristics became closer to the northern Mongoloid race, further sub-classi ed as north- ern Chinese type. Although Xiangye was one administrative village, it was like the Kam nationality at large, possessing similarly complex mixtures of people from different anthropological classi cations and blood- relationships. In 1958 the author accompanied an anthropologist from Moscow University, Professor N.N. Cheboksalow, to survey a Yao village in Liannan county of Guangdong province. After taking measurements of the physique of some Yao men and women, Professor Cheboksalow was sure that the Miao, Yao and Kam were all communities of the southern Mongoloid race. This was consistent with the viewpoint of earlier European and American anthropologists, who even believed that these communities contained Austronesian blood and certain Austronesian physical characteristics. They surmised that the com- munities were originally distributed all the way from southern China throughout southeast Asia: today’s Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand, for example. This is the traditional anthropological viewpoint.
1 This population data is according to the 2001 national census in China.
GEARY_f6_33-38.indd 33 7/2/2007 9:52:22 PM 34 chapter five
Nurtured on glutinous rice.
GEARY_f6_33-38.indd 34 7/2/2007 9:52:22 PM physical characteristics of the people 35
It is worth noting that in 1958 the ‘Liujiang person’ fossil was discov- ered in Liujiang county of Guangxi. The Chinese anthropologist Wu Rukang identi ed this as a direct ancestor of the original Mongoloid race.2 So the ‘Liujiang person’ was a direct ancestor of the southern Mongoloid race in southern China and therefore of many communities in southern China. This includes the Kam people, because 5,000 years ago the ancestors of the Kam people were living within the borders of today’s Guangdong and Guangxi. They were short in stature and dark-skinned and the rate of mongoloid wrinkles was low.3 Later, the northern Mongoloid race migrated to the south. Written records from 215 B.C. show that after Emperor Qinshi quelled the Baiyue minority peoples, 500,000 people were sent from the north to live in the southern minority areas. The people intermarried and races intermingled. From the 4th to the 18th centuries A.D., there were ve more major migrations to the south. Many Han people from the north migrated southwards, leading to large-scale integration with indigenous people. The Kam people who in ancient times originally belonged to the Tai-Liao type of the southern Mongoloid race mostly changed to become southern Chinese type. Because the Han population continuously grew, in political and cul- tural status, the Kam people were forced out and gradually migrated towards remote mountains. This accords with the migration story of the Kam ancestors who left Wuzhou to settle in Rongjiang county.4 It also explains why the southern Kam people retain the characteristics of Tai-Liao and southern Chinese anthropological types. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, the imperial government set up army garrisons in the northern Kam areas, and many ‘garrison farmers’ migrated there from Jiangxi, Hunan and other provinces. Many ordinary farmers and businessmen followed in the wake of the garrison farmers. The Kam areas thus became host to people of dif- ferent nationalities, who intermarried with the Kam, learned the Kam language and culture, and themselves became Kam people. This is the reason why the northern Kam are in the sub-category of the northern Chinese type of the northern Mongoloid race: rather tall, light in skin colour, and with a relatively high rate of mongoloid wrinkles.
2 Cf. Wu Rukang (1959) and Wu Rukang (1989), p. 209. 3 ‘Mongoloid wrinkles’ refers to the phenomenon whereby the eyelid on the inside of the eye curves downwards. 4 Cf. Geary et al. (2003), p. 4.
GEARY_f6_33-38.indd 35 7/2/2007 9:52:22 PM 36 chapter five
Judging from legend and from people’s physique, most of the Ous and Yangs in Xiangye originally migrated there from the northern Kam regions. Like the majority of northern Kam people, they claimed Jiangxi province as their ancestral home.5 During the Ming and Qing dynasties, however, Jiangxi was not home to any Kam people, so how did this quirk in people’s historical understanding arise? After the military suppression of Wu Mian’s revolt (1378–1385) dur- ing the Ming dynasty, the policy of army garrisons was implemented. That is, soldiers were sent to be stationed in army garrisons in the rural areas of Guizhou. At the same time, ordinary people were mobilized to go and inhabit the villages. These people were all from Jiangxi. Those who had been involved in putting down the revolt became leaders and governed most of the other inhabitants. Farmers or soldiers who had moved from outside the area into the villages became prosperous and rich, ruling over the Kam people who were poorer. Afterwards, such farmers and soldiers became the Kam people’s governors and gentry. They ‘inhabited the ethnic minority regions for a long time and were coloured by their culture: they began to wear regional clothing, followed regional customs, learned the regional lan- guage, and eventually became ethnic minorities themselves’.6 Their surnames were passed down and became the surnames of the Kam people, who formerly did not have Han surnames. Thereafter, it was dif cult to differentiate the Han from the Kam people. Leaders and gentry in the village had genealogies that traced back to Jiangxi as the source. The Kam people, who simply adopted the surnames of the Han migrants, followed suit and also traced their genealogy back to Jiangxi, assuming Jiangxi to be their ancestral home. Most Ous and Yangs in Xiangye were in this category. It was impos- sible to determine to what extent their original ancestors were Kam and to what extent Han.
5 Samuel R. Clarke (1911, pp. 10–11) observes the following of the ‘New Chinese’ who were living in Guizhou in the early 1900s: ‘The New Chinese are the descendants of those who settled in Kweichow when and since it was constituted a province of the Empire [about 200 years before]. There can be no doubt that the earlier of these immigrants were from the province of Kiangsi [ Jiangxi], and some of them at least were compelled to colonise Kweichow much against their will. Most of the Chinese now in the province would claim Kiangsi as the old home of their family.’ 6 This quotation is extracted from a foreword for the unpublished genealogy of the Long family in Tianzhu.
GEARY_f6_33-38.indd 36 7/2/2007 9:52:22 PM physical characteristics of the people 37
Neither men nor women in Xiangye possessed the characteristic feature of the northern Mongoloid race whereby the outside corners of their eyes curled upwards. Among all the Kam adults in Xiangye, fewer than half had mongoloid wrinkles (see footnote 3). Men from the Ou and Yang clans were generally tall and strongly built, bigger than men with other surnames. They were about 170 cm in height, compared for example with an average in Tianzhu of about 160 cm.7 The women on the other hand were between 140 and 150 cm tall, compared to an average of 149 cm in Tianzhu.8 Their skin was slightly yellow. Most of the other residents of Xiangye were relatively small in physique and their skin colour was relatively dark. They resembled those southern Kam people who were customarily called ‘glutinous rice children’ (see below). When I was a teenager, I went with my mother to Sebian, the place where she was born, to visit relatives. At that time, Sebian was under the jurisdiction of Liping county. (Today Sebian is in Rongjiang county, situated alongside the road from Rongjiang to Langdong.) It was a typical Kam village, situated at the source of the Zhaihao river, only accessible via narrow winding trails over mountains and rivers. Com- munications with the world outside were few and far between, so the minority culture was well preserved. When I arrived in Sebian, what impressed me most was that the people were diminutive in stature, unlike the majority of people in Xiangye. Adult men were about 150 to 160 cm tall and women were shorter, about 140 cm. It was dif cult to guess accurately the ages of the women. When I saw some women wearing front-opening jackets and pleated skirts, carrying baskets on shoulder-poles, and walking along the paddy eld ridges in twos and threes, I couldn’t help asking my mother: ‘How is it that such young girls are wearing skirts?’ She replied: ‘They are all already married and some of them already have children.’ I had thought they were all girls of about 12 or 13. During those few days in Sebian, the initial reaction of everyone who set eyes on me, male or female, was: ‘Such a tall guy!’ (At that time, around age 16, I was about 170 cm tall.) The Kam people in this area
7 Cf. Chen Wengliang (1987), p. 68. 8 Ibid.
GEARY_f6_33-38.indd 37 7/2/2007 9:52:22 PM 38 chapter five
were small in stature and as such were representative of most people in the southern Kam villages. The Han people in Liping and Congjiang counties called these southern Kam people ‘glutinous rice children’. What they meant by this was that the Kam people who ate glutinous rice were not as big and strong as the Han people who ate ordinary rice. These Kam people were native to this region, and for generations had eaten glutinous rice three times a day. They ate pickled food, boiled food and hot peppers together with the rice. Fresh sh was rare and fresh milk even more so. Glutinous rice was enough to make one feel satis ed and the people did not feel short of anything. They did not grow hungry quickly. Though there was no fat to be seen on their bodies, they were still able to grow up and ourish, with strong levels of fertility. On the other hand they were not very strong or vigorous and often felt apathetic.
GEARY_f6_33-38.indd 38 7/2/2007 9:52:23 PM CHAPTER SIX
THE VILLAGE
Ags senl ags bis, ags xaih ags liix. Each locality has its own customs; each village has its own etiquette.
A babbling stream owed through the middle of Xiangye. The main village comprised Dazhai on the south bank of the stream, with the smaller village Xiaozhai on the north. From dawn ’til dusk, these two parts of Xiangye enjoyed equal amounts of sunlight, wind and rain. Everyone in both parts could hear everyone else’s animal sounds: cocks crowing, dogs barking, and so on. There was a wooden bridge over the stream linking the two parts. The population of Dazhai was greater than that of Xiaozhai. Cultur- ally, Dazhai was a typical Kam village, while Xiaozhai was more like a Miao village that had gradually become Kam over time. This book focuses on the study of the former—Dazhai—with the latter providing supplementary interest. There were mountains on three sides of the village. The source of the stream was a high mountain range about 2.5 kilometres to the west. Strangely the author never once heard anyone say which mountain was the source. Did people simply not pay much attention to the source or did they think that those tall mountains were too dif cult and dangerous to talk about? When children asked about it, the elders would point to the west and declare: ‘Over there!’ By this they implied that the stream began in a very distant and remote place over there, too far away to imagine; so far away, they could not even say how far. At the stream’s edge, the water did not reach the knees. The people did not use it for irrigation, only for other purposes related to everyday life. The women used the running water for washing clothes, cloth, food and their own hair. In the summers, the children played in the water, catching sh by hand. When the weather was hot and the water dried up, small sh were kept in deep ponds. People used wooden buckets to collect the pond water and catch the sh. When it rained heavily and water ooded out of the paddy elds, the carp in the elds escaped into
GEARY_f7_39-49.indd 39 7/2/2007 9:52:34 PM 40 chapter six
Escaping from trouble via the mountain path.
GEARY_f7_39-49.indd 40 7/2/2007 9:52:34 PM the village 41
the stream. Then people rushed to the stream with hook and line, and occasionally recaptured a few of the sh from the fast currents. Day and night, season by season, the stream quietly owed through the paddy elds near the village, winding its way towards the east. About two kilometres east of the village, it became a waterfall, and looked like a wisp of yarn cascading into the deep valley. It poured into the Langdong river, and owed out from there into the Qingshui river. The Xiangye river valley was shaped like a pocket. On the southern and northern sides, there were mountains. Dazhai was situated at the foot of the southern mountains. Xiaozhai was situated half-way up the northern mountains. At the western end of the valley there were also high mountains. Only in the east were there no high mountains blocking the way, like the opening in the pocket, allowing the water to ow out from there. The southern and northern mountain ranges were adorned with every kind of tree. Many China r trees had been felled to be used for house-building. Some hardwood trees (such as the oak) were also chopped down to be used as rewood, since they were ideal for this purpose. The forest was mostly of mixed age and species, including bush, bamboo, soft pine and occasional tall ancient trees. Everywhere was densely forested, causing the mountains to be clothed in luxuriant green all year. In many places there were no paths for people or beasts of burden, and only pheasants, hares, wild cats, small tigers and such- like could regard the forest as their home. On plateaus or on gentle slopes, the Kam people had in earlier generations cleared the trees to make space for planting cotton and for vegetable gardens of different shapes and sizes. Some of the cleared areas were scattered in lonely places, while others were joined neatly side by side. Some were more than a kilometre away, but the vegetable gardens were usually close to the village for the convenience of the women who had to gather vegetables daily. Where the slopes were gentle, the paddy elds were terraced.1 Such terraced elds merged into the elds in the plain. Different-sized rice elds could be seen from anywhere in the valley. Whether they were on the mountainside or on the plain, they were full of water all year round, and the water was full of sh and shrimps. Thus Xiangye was located ‘at the foot of the mountains and among the paddy elds’.
1 See plate 4.
GEARY_f7_39-49.indd 41 7/2/2007 9:52:34 PM 42 chapter six
Behind the village, there were some ancient Chinese sweet gum trees, as well as some equally ancient chestnut trees. In the minds of the vil- lagers, these served to protect the village for many generations. Before Liberation, there were only two sweet gum trees remaining, adjacent to and leaning towards each other. Several people together would have been hard-pressed to reach round the trunks of these trees and they were so tall they seemed to reach into the clouds. The small mountain path along which the villagers ed in case of emergency began at these trees. Barren women would often go there to burn incense and money paper as an offering to plead for fertility. Old men and women in the village insisted that the sweet gum trees should not be cut down or damaged. Once some outsiders came to plunder the village and one of them red a shot in irritation at the trunk of one of the trees. Another used his knife to slash randomly at the trunk, whereupon the tree began to discharge a thick sap. Some time afterwards the members of a troublesome village family were caught red-handed in some misdemeanour. They had to leave, but as they were going they took a hatchet and slashed the sweet gum trees several times. Afterwards, the trees constantly wept sap. Often people would go and collect the sap for treating tonsillitis and to counteract in ammation, and such treatment was often successful. When the sweet gum trees shed their leaves, the villagers knew that the hot season was over. When new leaves grew on the trees, this was the sign that spring had returned. Beside the huge Chinese sweet gum trees was a at and open space, referred to as the ‘arena’. The people of Xiangye often met there to discuss village business. Children also played there, chasing each other or wrestling. West of the sweet gums, there was an evergreen Chinese yew tree, shaped like an umbrella, greater and taller in size even than the sweet gums. Below the roots of the tree there gushed a stream of fresh spring water. No one knew just when the Xiangye ancestors had used great stone slabs to build the round well there.2 Legend had it that this spring water was a gracious gift of the ancient yew tree to the Kam people. Thus the yew tree was doubly cherished. No one had ever slashed it and no one ever climbed up to pick the red berries off the
2 For a photograph of the well today, see plate 5.
GEARY_f7_39-49.indd 42 7/2/2007 9:52:35 PM the village 43
tree. Instead, people waited for the berries to fall to the ground before collecting them. Further west another 30 or 40 metres on the hillside, stood yet another Chinese yew, imperiously guarding the whole village. On the opposite side of the village there were also several scattered ancient evergreen trees with huge trunks, shaped like great umbrellas and protected by the villagers in the same way as the gum trees. Although there was no standard punishment, no one dared to damage these trees. It was hard to guess how many generations it had taken for the trees to grow so tall. This created a sense of mystery and reverence towards them, so that in fact they became ‘tree gods’—not really treated as gods in themselves, but as though they had special links with the gods—as well as being ‘scenic trees’ of the village. Not a day passed when the villagers did not depend on the well by the yew tree for drinking water. The well was tightly hugged by the roots of the tree, as though it was an extension of the roots. It was round and mounted with dark blue stones. At the top was the well opening and at the bottom there was a stone slab with a chiseled hole in the middle. The spring water came up through the hole, and day and night did not cease bubbling out. A small pond formed beside the stone well from over owing water and it was used for washing vegetables. The well was always full of pure clear water, giving clear re ections like a mirror. The women who went out to draw water frequently could not help rst drinking to their heart’s content, before going home with buckets of water dangling from their shoulder poles. Whenever there was rain during a ne day, a rainbow would appear in the sky, with its tail in the east, and its head apparently diving into the well. The villagers said that the ‘dragon was drinking the water’, imagining that even the dragon in the sky drank that water, it was so cool and refreshing. The Ous, Luos and Zhangs of Dazhai collected water from that well. People with these three surnames were not explic- itly forbidden to intermarry, but barring some exceptional cases, there were generally no marriage relationships between them. The well used by the Yangs was situated at the north of the village, beside the stream. It was a mountain spring owing from the northern mountains, providing equally pure and clear drinking water. It was a self-replenishing trough-like pond. The women had to walk through the paddy- eld plain and cross a wooden bridge to reach the well, carrying the water back on shoulder-poles. It was somewhat farther away than the round stone well, but since the Ous and Yangs were often related
GEARY_f7_39-49.indd 43 7/2/2007 9:52:35 PM 44 chapter six
through marriage, the Yang women were not willing to draw water from the Ous’ well. Old people often remarked that there used to be a communal sh- pond behind the village east of the sweet gum trees, used for raising carp. Each year, just before New Year, 10 or more water-buffaloes were driven into the pond to stamp and roll around, muddying the water, and causing the sh to oat to the surface. The sh were then caught and distributed fairly to each household. Otherwise there was a strong taboo against buffalo or pigs entering the shpond. In the few years preceding Liberation, the number of old people in the village gradually diminished and there was no one left to tend the shpond by clearing away the silt, so it became instead a deep pool of stagnant water. In spring each year, when the water was plentiful, some sel ess individuals used to go there and deposit some sh fry. But because of dry periods in summer and autumn the sh could not survive. The former taboo against buffalo and pigs entering the pond zzled out spontaneously. Thus Xiangye’s shpond, which used to be full of clear water and jumping sh, became instead a mud-pond in which water-buffaloes bathed. At the head of the wooden bridge joining Dazhai and Xiaozhai, on the Dazhai side, there was a grass eld of about 330 square metres in area. During the forty or so years prior to Liberation, people from both Dazhai and Xiaozhai assembled there to celebrate the Eating Bull Intestines Festival, to organize bull ghting and to convene meetings. According to older members of the village community, ‘retrieving some- thing from boiling oil’ trials (cf. Chapter 26) also used to be performed there, as did executions. The eld was called the ‘bull ghting arena’, because of the frequent bull ghts there.3 At the eastern end of Xiaozhai there was also a grass eld, about 670 square metres in area. It was said that formerly the number of households in Xiaozhai had been much greater and Xiaozhai had been independent of Dazhai. The people of Xiaozhai had then convened their own meetings and bull ghting sessions on their own grass eld. At the end of the Qing dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China (i.e. around 1911), Xiangye lost many people to migration and death, so the population was drastically reduced. One result was that people of Xiaozhai joined with those of Dazhai and convened meet-
3 Cf. plate 6.
GEARY_f7_39-49.indd 44 7/2/2007 9:52:35 PM the village 45
ings together on the eld in Dazhai. The original eld in Xiaozhai was abandoned at that time. About 50 metres east of Xiaozhai, there was a wooden bridge across the stream. The bridge was about 2 metres wide and 5 metres long, with benches and railings on either side. Its roof was covered with China r bark. This was the only bridge in Xiangye that afforded shade from the hot sun and shelter from the pouring rain. People and livestock could cross over. The Kam people of Xiangye borrowed a Chinese phrase for the bridge and called it the ‘ ower bridge’. Formerly most Han people came to Xiangye from the east—especially from Nanshao—and had to cross this bridge to enter the village. When they arrived, they would be welcomed by the villagers at the bridge. When they departed, the villagers would go there to see them off. In the 1930s, when government of ces for the township were moved to Taiyong, more Han people came to Xiangye from the north, via the Liujin military base. Thereafter, the ower bridge became a place where farmers from the nearby rice paddies took shelter from rain, or where people with time on their hands would go and sit to shelter from the heat. For many years the bridge was not renovated, so it became damaged in many places. Before Liberation, the bark on the roof was worn out. Some railings on either side had broken and fallen into the stream, so it was no longer possible to sit there safely. In addition, some wooden planks on the bridge were almost rotten. Despite all this, people still felt sentimental towards the bridge. You just had to mention the ‘ ower bridge’ and everyone knew what you were talking about; male and female, old and young would immediately start to smile. Another important landmark was the small path behind the village leading deep into the mountains. Every day there were people who ventured into the ‘big mountain range’ from there. They passed the two great sweet gum trees and made their way along the small path to a mountain pass. From there they would disperse over the mountains to work the elds, chop down trees and gather rewood. There were many paths merging at the mountain pass, leading to many different places. All were made by generations of people tramping along bare- foot. None was the result of any formal construction work, but each was formed naturally and became like a narrow winding cord leading to and from the otherwise undisturbed mountains. The special signi cance of this particular path behind the village was that it served as an escape route in times of crisis. For many genera- tions, as soon as the villagers heard reports of intruders, they gathered
GEARY_f7_39-49.indd 45 7/2/2007 9:52:35 PM 46 chapter six
bedding, clothing and food on their shoulder poles, led young and old away, amidst much weeping and wailing, and marched along this path over the mountains. On the mountains they built dwellings of cogon grass. Upon reaching the many alternative paths, intruders who pur- sued as far as the mountain pass would be at a loss to know which way to go. If they continued the chase, the villagers ran for safety further into the deep valleys and virgin forest. After the intruders had left, the villagers slowly returned with children and parents. This kind of emergency evacuation happened practically every winter, and some winters it happened several times. In those days, looting of Xiangye by outsiders was quite common. The people had no defense system and did not even try to resist. Each generation, like the previous one, ed from one set of intruders after another. As long as the people escaped along this mountain path and reached the rst mountain pass, they felt con dent that the intruders would be shaken off, as they them- selves had entered their very own safe and free environment. They no longer needed to fear being captured and killed. The houses in the village were ‘ganlan’ houses. What is meant by ganlan? The historical remains of the houses of the ancient Yue people from the Hemu port culture (in Yuyao county of Zhejiang province) of 6,000 years ago show that their wooden homes were built on stilts leaving an open space at ground-level, with people living above this level.4 This space provided separation from the damp ground. There are different explanations of the term ganlan. Some Chinese records, more than a millennium old, say that: ‘People live up above. Cows, sheep, dogs, pigs and poultry live below. This is called ganlan.’5 Some reckon that it means ‘building that hangs over water’. Others think it means ‘living in treetops’. Unfortunately no one really knows for sure. Three texts6 refer to ganlan buildings as follows: ‘Make platforms between trees and live on the platforms. This is called ganlan.’ What is meant by this is that several feet above the ground horizontal timber beams were fastened to tree trunks (shugan) to form a hanging platform. On this platform, logs were tied vertically or horizontally to make a surrounding wall. Some people called this ‘living in treetops’ and imag-
4 Cf. Geary et al. (2003), p. 266, note 2. 5 Le Shi (975). 6 Wei Shou (556), Li Yanshou (643) and Ou Yangxiu (1060).
GEARY_f7_39-49.indd 46 7/2/2007 9:52:35 PM the village 47
ined that the buildings were like birds’ nests. But this kind of building resembled the porches of the Kam people’s wooden ganlan buildings. Most of the people of Xiangye lived in wooden ganlan homes, char- acterized both by the people living above livestock, and by the ‘hanging building’ structure. They also retained the ‘living in treetops’ style of porches. Most worthy of note is that the Xiangye people referred to the porches as ‘ganlan’. The structure of these porches was similar to the historical tree platforms. Perhaps the word ‘ganlan’ was retained as the name for the homes with the porches because the porches preserved the tree platform characteristics. The houses in Xiangye were constructed using wood from China r trees. The roofs were made with bark from China r. Only two homes had tiled roofs. The residence of the ‘original female ancestor’ was at the centre of the village. This was a large mound of about 200 square metres, used by children for playing on and by women for drying clothes. (In many other Kam villages, the original female ancestor was and still is worshipped by the Kam people, but not in living memory in Xiangye.7 The only vestige of some respect towards the ancestor was this mound and its name.) Surrounding it were rows of wooden ganlan houses. To the south, east and northeast was the group of Ou homes. To the northwest were the Yang homes. To the west was the Luo housing. Two Zhang homes were at the most eastern point, tightly huddled against those of the Ou family. Often there were small one-storey buildings beside the ganlan build- ings. The occupants were too poor to build a second or third storey. They were related to or supported by the people who lived in the adjacent ganlan homes, who had a common surname. Beside the homes were barns for storing rice grain. Built on pillars a metre high, to prevent dampness, usually these buildings had two storeys. Some were only used for storing rice, but in some of them, people lived on the ground oor and rice was piled up on the oor above. Those families who lived in the grain stores were certainly the poorest in the village. In the area just above Dazhai near the houses, two or three rows of racks were occasionally erected, to be used for drying glutinous rice grain in the sun. There were more such racks in Xiaozhai than in
7 For more about Sa Sui, the original female ancestor, see e.g. Geary et al. (2003), pp. 155–156.
GEARY_f7_39-49.indd 47 7/2/2007 9:52:35 PM 48 chapter six
Dazhai. People complained there were too many house sparrows and there was too much loss of the glutinous rice when it was left on the racks to dry. So instead they often dried the rice by hanging it from the ceilings inside their own homes.8 The practice of drying on the outside racks gradually died out in the 1930s and 1940s. Houses in the village were clustered together according to clan surnames but otherwise without a set pattern. Rows of houses were huddled so closely together that the eaves of one house often touched the eaves of the house in the next row. In this way many narrow tun- nels were formed between the houses and even in torrential rain you could make your way through the village without getting wet. Cows, pigs, dogs and domestic fowl roamed throughout the village at will and on rainy days the village passageways became like bogs. Then you could only go barefoot. There was animal excrement everywhere; it was very unhygienic. The toilets were generally situated on the ground oors of the homes. In most Kam ganlan wooden homes, domestic animals and fowl were kept on the ground oor. The treadmill or tilt-hammer for pounding rice was also there,9 not far from the toilet and urine bucket which collected manure. Firewood was stored on the ground oor. Hygiene was generally poor. The rst (in USA second) oor was reached via stairs. An open porch, a kitchen, bedrooms and guest room were all located there. The women frequently swept the oor and the rst oor was clean enough for people to live in. The second (in USA third) oor was used for storing rice, hang- ing glutinous rice, and keeping farm implements and miscellaneous belongings. Some bedrooms were also found there, to be used by men only. It was considered unlucky for women to sleep on the second oor (probably because women traditionally wore skirts and it was considered unlucky for men to look up and see under a skirt). Formerly the railing of the porch was made from vertical wooden planks, circular or rectangular in shape, up to breast-height. These were spaced along the porch at intervals depending on the thickness of the strips. During the 20 or 30 years before Liberation, the specially-shaped planks of wood forming the railing were replaced by ordinary boards
8 Cf. plate 9. 9 Cf. plate 10, or Geary et al. (2003), plate 13.
GEARY_f7_39-49.indd 48 7/2/2007 9:52:35 PM the village 49
joined up together, and it became like any ordinary railing. This made the porches resemble the new-style Han balconies. Following these changes, people sometimes began to sleep and live on the porches, whereas formerly the porches were not used for living in, but only for sitting in and passing through. So gradually the special features of the ganlan wooden homes faded somewhat, but Kam cloth still hung in the porches to dry, blowing to and fro in the wind as in former days.
GEARY_f7_39-49.indd 49 7/2/2007 9:52:35 PM GEARY_f8_50-60.indd 50 7/11/2007 6:49:44 PM CHAPTER SEVEN
FARMING
Xenp liangp jens, oux sox jaens. If you work hard in the spring, the grain stores will be full in the autumn.
For centuries people in Xiangye had been engaged in cultivating rice. Formerly the main staple was glutinous (sticky) rice, and this was also used to brew alcohol. More than half of the paddy elds used to be planted with glutinous rice. In the 40 or 50 years before Liberation, the volume of ordinary rice production overtook that of glutinous rice. Nevertheless ‘the Kam people cannot do without glutinous rice’ and every household still grew some glutinous rice to maintain certain elements of the traditional lifestyle. Most of the paddy elds were in the plains, while the rest were in the mountain valleys and in terraces on the mountainsides. Around each of the elds a ridge was constructed for hemming the water in. Throughout the year the elds were brimming with water, and sh and shrimps were in endless supply. There were also loaches, paddy eels and snake sh. For each shoulder-load of rice there was half a basketful of sh. The water raised the sh and the sh guarded the elds. The captured rainwater was believed to fertilize the soil. Only in times of extreme drought would people use water from the stream to irrigate the elds. The paddy elds were different shapes and sizes and the villagers classi ed them according to how many loads of rice they would yield. An adult could routinely carry two wicker-baskets of rice using a shoulder-pole, together weighing about 50 kilograms. This represented one ‘load’. Fields often yielded between 20 and 50 loads of rice. Some elds yielded less than 10 loads. The smallest terraced elds yielded around one load. At the end of the 1930s, the county government dispatched of cials to assess the area of rice-growing land. The of cial who arrived in Xiangye was an opium-smoker. Day and night he lay in bed. He did not go to the elds to inspect them or measure their area. He simply
GEARY_f8_50-60.indd 51 7/11/2007 6:49:44 PM 52 chapter seven
Threshing rice in the paddy elds.
GEARY_f8_50-60.indd 52 7/11/2007 6:49:44 PM farming 53
stipulated that one Chinese acre (667 square metres) should yield six loads of rice. The farmers knew their elds according to the number of loads yielded. Sometimes, however, ve loads were produced from one acre, and sometimes seven loads, according to the harvest. Some allowance ought to have been made for differences in harvest—whether poor or abundant. Although the Kam people were straightforward and would not dare to make a false report, the room for confusion arising from the of cial’s estimate of total area—based on the yield-declarations of the villagers—was enormous. The government was not interested in ne distinctions, however, and only wanted an overall estimate of the area which could be used to levy grain taxes. To add to the confusion, the Han nationality landlords from Langdong did not live in Xiangye. Most of their rice paddies were not declared, with the result that there were many unregistered paddy elds in Xiangye. Thus before Liberation no one in Xiangye could say with any con dence how many acres of paddy eld belonged to the village, or belonged to any given household. People only knew that the village was generously endowed with rice elds in which sh could be raised, the best so endowed in the vicinity. The people of Xiangye lived by the lunar calendar, calling it ‘the imperial calendar’. The hard-working farmers always asked an educated fortune-teller to examine the imperial calendar before embarking on their farm-work. Once one farmer began work, everyone followed suit. No one needed a special summons and no one ever seemed to be too late or too early in beginning their farm-work. Some farmers ploughed their elds immediately after harvest. This allowed frost to seep into the overturned soil. At the beginning of spring they ploughed once more. They thus farmed intensively, ploughing twice and harrowing twice, so loosening the top layer of soil and improving the effect of fertilizer. People who were not strong enough to plough twice, or who were too lazy to do so, ploughed only once in spring, and after ploughing they harrowed. This was called extensive cultivation, resulting in lower yields than from elds that had been ploughed and harrowed twice. Over three-quarters of the village elds were farmed using the latter, easier form of farming. No matter whether intensive or extensive cultivation was used, the timing of the spring ploughing and harrowing could not be delayed. The shaft of the plough was made of wood and curved like a bow. The old farmers found wood in the mountains that was naturally curved and worked with it a little to make the shaft. The ploughshare was a
GEARY_f8_50-60.indd 53 7/11/2007 6:49:44 PM 54 chapter seven
purchased implement, made by iron casting, about 20 centimetres long, shaped like the upturned palm of a person’s hand. The plough was pulled by a water-buffalo and ploughed the land to a depth of 20 or 30 centimetres. The farmer followed behind the plough whipping the water-buffalo, moving forwards slowly. The ploughshare was expensive and was regarded by people as part of their overall wealth. After use, it was hung on the wooden beams of the house and kept there carefully to avoid losing it. The harrow was likewise respectfully maintained. Hence the saying: ‘Even in ten years ploughs and harrows would not be traded for anything’.1 After Chinese New Year and the onset of spring, farmers took the cow dung piled up beside the cowsheds and carried it on shoulder poles to be spread over the paddy elds.2 Then they ooded the elds and ploughed them. In early spring it was still bitterly cold and the water in the elds cut to the bone, so the farmers built bon res on the ridges between the paddy elds. At intervals they would stop ploughing, get out and warm their feet and hands by the res. In one day, the most that could normally be ploughed was one Chinese acre of land, and the farmer would be moaning and groaning all day long. At that time many people were unwilling to endure such suffering, and such people waited until after sowing the rice seeds before com- mencing this work. In that case, the work of carrying and spreading the cow dung, ploughing and harrowing the elds, was done uninter- ruptedly and was completed within a month. Before rice seedlings were transplanted into the paddy elds, the earth in the elds had to be levelled out. This was done using a harrow, a rectangular implement constructed from four wooden staffs and pulled by a water-buffalo. Iron nails or wooden pegs (about 10 centimetres in length) were attached to the low horizontal staff, which held 10 or more such ‘teeth’ in place. The high horizontal staff served as an arm-rest for the farmer.3 Such harrows were the same in shape and application as those used by Han Chinese farmers. A special feature of Kam harrowing was that during harrowing, young women and girls from the farmer’s clan would assemble by the eld with sh-baskets tied round their waists. As soon as the farmer
1 Cf. plate 11. 2 Cf. plate 22 3 Cf. plate 13.
GEARY_f8_50-60.indd 54 7/11/2007 6:49:44 PM farming 55
took harrow in hand, a jubilant and exuberant scene unfolded. When the water was stirred up by the harrow and sh oated towards the surface, the women rushed to catch the sh and shrimp in bamboo funnels, competing playfully with one another and shouting, laughing and calling to each other. Only after the farmer pulled the harrow up onto the ridge around the eld would the women also get out and put their catch in order, before going home contentedly. This custom was observed throughout the village, a preface to transplanting rice seedlings about a month later. The people of Xiangye relied on their water-buffaloes for growing rice, especially when it came to ploughing and harrowing, as only water- buffaloes were t for such work. Therefore except for some poor tenant farmers who used buffaloes belonging to their prosperous landlords, every household raised ‘farm buffalo’. The buffaloes were like family and they would not be slaughtered or sold, instead being held in general affection. When a buffalo died of old age, the villagers would weep and the buffalo’s horns would be hung on the beams in the household porch as a means of remembrance. The sentiment built up by the buffalo’s great contribution to farm work was understandable. Ploughing and harrowing with the water-buffalo was a man’s work. It was said that if a woman tried to wield a plough or a harrow, the buffalo would refuse to move, look towards the side of the eld and return to the bank. If the father in a family died or was seized from the community to go and work as a soldier, his brothers or his broth- ers’ sons would be asked to do the ploughing and harrowing. They understood it to be their duty to help in this way. Ever since ancient times, women had not tilled the land in Xiangye. There were certain poverty-stricken families who did not own farm buffaloes. To cultivate the land they did not use ploughs or harrows, but instead called the whole family into the elds to ‘plough’ them by tramping over them. Each person would lean on a walking stick and slowly kick the soil in the eld loose with his or her feet. After treading the eld in this way, they transplanted rice seedlings. When the cuckoo’s call was heard, as summer began, the season for planting rice seedlings had arrived. Each household chose a plot of land near the village as a seedling eld where seeds were sown fertilized by human excrement. After a month or so, women pulled up the seedlings and passed them on to be transplanted. Transplanting was done with- out tools by men wearing bamboo hats, who set the seedlings in neat rows about 20 centimetres apart, with about 20 centimetres between
GEARY_f8_50-60.indd 55 7/11/2007 6:49:44 PM 56 chapter seven
rows. Their skill in transplanting was entirely down to the experience of doing the job repeatedly from an early age—there was otherwise no special training for the job. An area yielding about three loads of rice (i.e. about 50 square metres) could be transplanted per person per day. The transplanting season lasted about two weeks. As with ploughing and harrowing, so transplanting rice seedlings was a man’s job and families without men would ask clansmen to come and help. In those days you never observed women in the elds transplanting seedlings. Such a taboo did not exist among the Han. At midsummer, it was important to weed the elds where the rice shoots were growing. Usually the elds were weeded twice, until there were practically no weeds or grass left. This was the time when red bayberries were ripening. People stood between rows of rice shoots wearing straw hats or using towels to cover their heads and, without special tools, bent over and used both hands to loosen the soil and pull out any grass or weeds. The weather was usually sultry and because such work caused back-pain, frequent breaks were necessary. Since women’s backs were generally more supple than men’s, the job of weeding the rice-paddies usually fell to the women. Instead, the men cut away grass and weeds on the ridges of the rice- elds. In one day a woman could weed an area capable of yielding two or three loads of rice. This was the period when leftover grain began to run low and life seemed dif cult. Women weeding the elds prepared themselves a small helping of rice, containing some pickled vegetables or spicy dip, to have for lunch. Breakfast and dinner was eaten in their own homes. People shared the work of transplanting and weeding in each other’s elds, but the owners of the elds did not provide any food for such work. The Kam people used to say: ‘During this period there is nothing to eat.’ The practice of sharing labour was regarded as ‘overcoming a crisis together’. After the rice budded, there was no further weeding. Instead, each day there was light work to be done around the elds: weeding the surrounding ridges, keeping an eye on the water levels, and checking that the plants grew normally, as harvest approached. When the ears of rice began to emerge, this was called ‘seeing the grain’. According to the climate in Xiangye, 40 days after ‘seeing the grain’, the rice was ripe for harvest. The usual harvest time in Xiangye was late August or early September.
GEARY_f8_50-60.indd 56 7/11/2007 6:49:44 PM farming 57
The rice-threshing period was the happiest and most satisfying time of year for the farmer. The harvest represented the fruits of a year’s hard labour and the realization of a year’s hopes. The period of food shortage was over. Appetites could once again be sated with rice and carp. At harvest time, the year was transitioning from summer to early autumn and the days were ne and dry. Men walked around carrying large rectangular threshing containers on their backs, while women could be seen carrying big wicker baskets on their shoulder poles. The rst step in harvesting was to release about half the water from the paddy elds. In shallow water it was easier to cut the rice and easier to catch the sh. The women went into the elds with sickles in hand to cut the rice and leave it in bundles on top of the rice-stalk stubble. The men collected these bundles and beat them against the inside walls of the threshing containers to extract the rice grain. Then the leftover straw was tied together in a great bundle about the size of a person and was stood up on the ridge of the eld to dry in the sun. A wooden pole was set up or a tree trunk was chosen around which such straw- bundles were closely packed together and built into a round pile.4 This straw was later used as fodder for farm cattle in the cold winter. The rice grain was transferred from the threshing containers into wicker baskets and carried back home on shoulder poles. One load might weigh about 50 kilograms. This rice was piled on the top oor of the three-storey homes or poured out into the grain-storage barns. Early each morning for the rst 20 days, the stored rice was turned over with a wooden shovel. Thereafter, it was turned over every ve or six days to prevent it from going mouldy. The rice could only be threshed on ne days, not when it was raining, for fear of subsequent mould. The numbers of men and women involved in harvesting rice were approximately equal. Women cut the rice and men threshed it. This division of labour was clear and usually respected, but typically there was happy banter between men and women. The owner of the eld often placed sh traps there, so that when everyone went home for lunch, a feast of boiled and fried sh often adorned the table. New rice was eaten and rice wine was drunk. The evening meals were even more sumptuous. These were the best days for eating throughout the whole working year.
4 Cf. plate 15.
GEARY_f8_50-60.indd 57 7/11/2007 6:49:45 PM 58 chapter seven
About 100 kilograms of rice could be harvested per person per day. Threshing was satisfying work, but at the same time it was very intense and needed to meet de nite deadlines. The weather had to be ne for the rice to be brought back home. In Xiangye, the autumn rains began after the Mid-Autumn Festival around mid-September. After that, it tended to keep on raining, which meant that the harvest had to be completely gathered by mid-September. Malaria invariably seemed to strike the village in the ten days leading up to the autumn rains and it always af icted the adult men. For several hours each day they would shiver and shake, feeling alternately freez- ing and feverish. People had heard that quinine could cure the disease, but no one had enough money to buy the drug. Everyone was braced for the torture of malaria, during which no food could be kept down and only a drink made from fried rice could be drunk. Convalescence could only begin after 10 or 15 days in bed. Therefore many people were unable to thresh the rice and gather the harvest. In such circumstances, the ripe rice leaned over into the water and began to sprout. Women stood there weeping and tying the drooping rice stalks together to try and stop them leaning into the water. They waited for their male relatives to recover so that together they could reap the harvest. If the delay was prolonged, their patience was to no avail: the season of continuous rain arrived with the rice still in the elds. Even if that rice was eventually harvested, there were enormous losses because some of it would have sprouted and some of it would become mouldy. Many people suffered this misfortune every year. Therefore the autumn harvest season was both a time of celebration and a time of anxiety, with the constant dread of falling ill with malaria. Glutinous rice was mainly planted in paddy elds high in the moun- tains or low in the valleys. In such sheltered land the water was colder and glutinous rice was more resistant to the cold than ordinary rice. Glutinous rice straw was also more resilient than straw from ordinary rice and even after the autumn rains began, it did not immediately droop into the water. Therefore gathering of glutinous rice was always arranged for the time after the ordinary rice had been harvested, usu- ally around October. The people made their way unhurriedly to their paddies, carrying crescent-shaped knives for cutting the glutinous rice stalk by stalk. On average one pole-load—about 50 kilograms—could be cut per day per person. The women excelled at this work, being quicker than men with their hands and on their feet, and more ef cient. Therefore women took the leading role in harvesting glutinous rice.
GEARY_f8_50-60.indd 58 7/11/2007 6:49:45 PM farming 59
When doing this work people usually did not go home for lunch. Instead the men used bamboo traps to catch some sh and barbecue them on the ridges beside the paddy elds. Hot pepper and wild herbs were mixed to create the renowned Kam barbecued sh.5 Male and female family members who were working on the harvest together were joined in a large circle by other relatives, and by passers-by, for this traditional lunch. The women ate glutinous rice from their hands while the men wielded large bowls of rice wine. Everyone enjoyed the meal, laughing and joking together. After the ne food, the family returned to the job of harvesting the standing grain. At dusk they went home quickly, shouldering the grain. The rice was hung on the four walls of the kitchen where the re was burning, or high up on the top- oor beams of the house. The evening meal again consisted of glutinous rice and sh, to celebrate the harvest. During that season the only lonely and sad people to be found were those with family members who had fallen sick. In some years, the season for harvesting glutinous rice extended into the month of November. Hanging glutinous rice from the house beams marked the conclusion of the farming year. What followed were preparations for the following year’s cultivation: for example, ploughing the elds before the winter or (re-)constructing ridges between the paddy elds. This was the start of the slack farming season, lasting from November to March. In these four-plus months there was no pressing need to work hard on farm- ing. Men sat idly by the re to chat and keep warm, planning to put some money together and buy cow-heads, bones, hooves, and suchlike to eat together. From time to time, one hoisted a bamboo sh trap on his shoulders and went to his elds to catch a few sh and supplement the family diet.6 During the slack season, the re at home was never allowed to go out. Each day men went to the mountains and chopped rewood, to avoid running out. Some who had greater energy and strength went to the mountains during the slack season and worked on the wasteland there. They carried axes and knives to the designated land and felled trees and foliage, allowing everything to dry in the sun. In spring the following year they burned what was left of the land, and planted seeds
5 Cf. illustration on page 88. 6 Cf. page 16.
GEARY_f8_50-60.indd 59 7/11/2007 6:49:45 PM 60 chapter seven
in the ‘slash and burn’ area. Corn kernels or millet were sown there. Then a small hoe was used to turn over the land. Where the seeds had been scattered, a scarecrow was erected and left, to scare away spar- rows. Fertilizer was not applied and usually no weeding was done. The farmers simply waited until the autumn. Typically in 100 square metres of such cultivated wasteland a harvest of about 33 kilograms of corn or millet was harvested. If, however, it was discovered and destroyed by rats or wild pigs, then only grass was carried back home. It was possible to plant corn or millet on the slash-and-burn land only for two or three years. In the fourth year the land’s fertility was exhausted and the farmers normally allowed it to go fallow. Only those plots that were relatively near the village were used for growing veg- etables or cotton, and such plots might be used for a long period. The Xiangye climate was suitable for a winter planting of wheat or rape. After the wheat harvest, paddy rice could be planted again just in time for the rice season. But wheat farming was unknown in the area at that time and the Kam people had never eaten any food derived from wheat. In that generation people in Xiangye only ever planted paddy rice. They did not imagine that there could be other unusual ways to improve their lives. Instead they clung tenaciously to their paddy elds and farm cattle, ruthlessly driven by the farming seasons. Everything had its season—spring sowing, summer weeding, autumn harvesting—and the villagers did what they must to keep in step. The methods, technol- ogy and farming implements were completely traditional. No major changes occurred in the several decades before Liberation.
GEARY_f8_50-60.indd 60 7/11/2007 6:49:45 PM CHAPTER EIGHT
SPINNING AND WEAVING
Samp nguedx xup samp laos sumx xat, xat touk ngox nguedx lis ngox sinc. Enter the spinning room on the third day of the third month; then by the fth month you’ll have spun 25 grams.1
An extended family might not own any land for growing rice but it would always own land for growing cotton, otherwise the family mem- bers might not have any clothes to wear. (They could always rent paddy elds for growing rice and share the harvest with the landlord.) Rich or poor, every family owned a plot of cotton-growing land. These plots were developed from wasteland in the mountains and they were called ‘mountain land’. Often several families possessed cotton elds in the same general area. The distance from the village varied and the elds varied in size up to about one Chinese acre (667 square metres). The practice of buying and selling paddy elds arrived early in Xiangye, but cotton elds were never bought or sold. They belonged to the women and everything related to cotton was the domain of the women. The men had nothing to do with growing cotton or making clothes. Every year in April, around the time of the Sweeping the Graves Festival, when men were engrossed in their spring work of ploughing the land, women were busy planting cotton. They carried packed lunches to the cotton elds and worked there, using rakes to dig up the ground and turning it over like earth in the rice paddies. The raked soil was normally exposed to the sun for about ten days. The women brought pig-, chicken- and duck-dung, in baskets hung on shoulder-poles, and spread it evenly over the land. Simultaneously, they scattered cotton seed, using the back of the rake to break up lumps of soil, and rak- ing the soil until it was spread evenly. Thus the seeds and dung were buried together in the earth. Finally, a straw marker was erected in the
1 It takes a long time to make just a little thread, especially if the thread is high- quality.
GEARY_f9_61-68.indd 61 7/2/2007 9:52:58 PM 62 chapter eight
Transferring yarn onto bobbins.
GEARY_f9_61-68.indd 62 7/2/2007 9:52:58 PM spinning and weaving 63
centre of the eld to indicate that cotton seeds had been planted and to show that people and livestock should not trample there. Meanwhile, the season of transplanting rice seedlings had arrived. During the four or ve weeks of planting cotton, young women from the same clan usually helped one another to dig the elds or scatter the seeds. Then after two or three months, when the cotton had grown to a height of 8 or 10 centimetres, the women set to work with small hand hoes to weed the elds and loosen the earth. Usually there were two rounds of weeding, during one of which dung from domestic fowl was simultaneously mixed with the earth. The women again shared the job of weeding one another’s cotton elds, doing so in high spirits. The whole process of planting and weeding cotton used only two implements. One was a ve-toothed rake with a wooden handle, the iron teeth each about 12 centimetres long. It was used to dig the earth, to break it up and to rake it. The other was the hand-hoe, with a metal head about four centimetres wide and eight centimetres long, and with a wooden handle about 30 to 60 centimetres long. The hoe was the only tool used in weeding the cotton elds. During the shared labour of planting and weeding cotton, the women brought their own lunch and tools. When evening came the owner of the cotton eld did not need to supply an evening meal. This was a custom commonly followed by rich and poor alike. The rice-threshing season fell at the same time as the cotton buds were opening. The cotton elds looked as though they were covered in snow. The women tied sh-baskets at their waists and carefully plucked the cotton, placing it into the baskets. When a basket was full, its contents were placed on the ground and the collection started up again. Alternatively, if sh-baskets were not used, the women pulled their aprons up and lled them with the cotton. When all the cotton had been gathered, it was taken home. Every day, however, new cotton owers bloomed and the women needed to collect them, or else they might fall to the ground and become dirty. If the cotton was dirty, there was no way of de-seeding, teasing, spinning and weaving it. Each household found time during the rice-threshing season for picking cotton. When the autumn rains arrived, some cotton buds were still unopened in the elds. These were then picked, taken home, and spread out in the room above the kitchen, where the re was burning. There they dried and opened up, and the cotton was taken out.
GEARY_f9_61-68.indd 63 7/2/2007 9:52:59 PM 64 chapter eight
The cotton output varied, but usually the year’s crop, when woven into cloth, was enough for clothing the whole family, young and old. Large families planted more cotton. Families without any women planted no cotton, but typically depended on the generosity of others for their clothes. The slack farming season began as the cotton harvest ended. Those winter days were the days when the women had most work to do indoors. Before spinning and weaving, cotton seeds needed to be removed. This was called ‘gripping the cotton’. After the cotton had been picked and dried in the sun, it was placed into a bamboo baking basket. A gleaming hot block of charcoal was placed in the ash underneath the baking basket and left overnight. The next day the seeds could be removed from the cotton using a gin. The gin was a square-shaped wooden frame, with two horizontal iron rods in the middle, approximately three centimetres in diameter. Between the two rods there was a small slit. When the right hand turned the handle, one iron rod rotated inwards. One foot operated a footboard that made the other rod rotate outwards. Cotton was constantly fed into the small seam by hand and the cotton seeds were squeezed out by the two iron rods. They fell into a container in front of the cotton gin, while the cotton was squeezed through the gin and fell into a cloth sack at the back, thus completing the separation of cotton from seeds. Large families had their own cotton gins, while others could borrow the gins. One or two days of work was enough for a woman to nish de-seeding the cotton for her family. All married women knew how to operate the gins. The next step was to invite an expert to come and tease the cotton. Both Dazhai and Xiaozhai were home to such an expert and both experts were local Kam people. The craft amounted to a family busi- ness and for generations there were only two men—one in each of two families—in the community who were engaged in this work. Between them they shared the work of cotton-teasing in Dazhai and Xiaozhai. They used two basic tools: one was a teasing bow which came together with a stool; the other a wooden hammer about 25 centimetres long. The hammer was used to strike an extremely tough string made of cattle tendon stretched tight on the bow. The women placed straw on the porch oor and spread cotton on top. The teasing expert sat on his short stool and with his right hand
GEARY_f9_61-68.indd 64 7/2/2007 9:52:59 PM spinning and weaving 65
he continually struck the cord strung across the bow. The vibrating cord gradually ripped the cotton owers open one by one and the cotton became like uffy velvet. After repeating the teasing procedure two or three times, the cotton was ready for spinning. The experts could tease about two or three kilograms of cotton per day and so within one day a household’s cotton could be completely teased. The head of the household paid the teasing expert about eight kilograms of rice per day plus good meals. This was established practice and in over a decade no departures from this practice were observed. The woman of the house rolled this teased cotton onto a piece of bamboo about 30 centimetres long. She held the bamboo in her left hand, while with her right hand she pressed a at wooden board against the cotton on the bamboo. She did not stop pushing this down while the cotton was rolled into slivers about 20 centimetres long and of nger-thickness. These were tied with rice straw into one bundle of slivers waiting to be spun. Soon after a woman carried a bundle of cotton slivers into her bed- room, her spinning wheel rotated into action. The women of Xiangye used foot-operated (vertical) spinning wheels,2 whereas only hand-oper- ated spinning wheels were used by Han Chinese people. If someone was seen spinning with a hand-operated wheel, it was assumed that she was a Han woman. The women of Xiangye loved their spinning wheels. When not in use, the wheels were hung from the beams of the house to protect them from damage. Young unmarried women especially cherished the wheels, painting them red or black and frequently dusting them so that they appeared bright and clean. The wheels were in use for as long as the women lived and were then bequeathed to the next generation. Some wheels were still in use after ve or six generations. Only when a house had burnt down and there had been no time to save the spin- ning wheel would the wheel fail to be passed on to a younger woman in the family. In autumn and winter, after household and outdoor chores had been completed, the women sat and worked at their spinning wheels, spinning the uffy cotton into yarn. The yarn was rolled onto a small
2 Cf. plate 17.
GEARY_f9_61-68.indd 65 7/2/2007 9:52:59 PM 66 chapter eight
stalk of straw about the size of a pencil, forming a spool thick in the middle and thin at either end. The usual time for spinning cotton was in the evenings after dinner, after feeding the pigs and boiling the pigs’ food for the next day. Each woman set her spinning wheel up beside the re and worked without a break from 8 or 9 pm to 11 or 12 pm. Working intensely in this way, one woman could spin two spools of cotton a night (approximately 150 grams). With poor technique or poor quality cotton, this amount might be halved. The women worked earnestly, needing to spin a year’s supply of cotton in the space of three or four months. As soon as the spinning was complete, the weaving season began. There was no time for delay. So in spring, shortly after the cotton had been planted and the rice seedlings had been transplanted, the women began to weave the yarn. A square yarn rack was assembled in the porch. The yarn was wound from the spools onto the yarn rack until a bundle weighing about 250 grams was formed. The bundles were taken off the rack and boiled in water made alkaline by adding plant ash. Then they were soaked thoroughly in rice-water, scooped up and dried in the sun. This whole process, called starching, caused the cotton yarn to be tough and smooth. The starched cotton yarn was again wound round the yarn rack, and from there it was wound onto bobbins. A bobbin was made of thin bamboo strips (see illustration). About two bundles of yarn were wound round one bobbin. Then the bobbins, which now held the cotton yarn, were positioned onto the loom. The work of transferring the yarn onto the loom was painstaking, time-consuming and urgent, as it had to be completed within one day for fear of its being spoiled. Usually this work required the women to be on their feet from morning ’til night. Older women trained their juniors—daughters or daughters- in-law. Outsiders were not invited to do this work. The women of Xiangye used a standard loom,3 made from timber beams, one yarn axle or shaft for feeding the warp yarn, two harnesses for dividing the warp, each harness consisting of two rods holding a set of buckles (or heddles), two footboards, one weaving board, one cloth
3 See plate 18.
GEARY_f9_61-68.indd 66 7/2/2007 9:52:59 PM spinning and weaving 67
axle, one seat-board, and one boat-shaped shuttle that drew the weft.4 After starching, the toughened cotton yarn threaded smoothly through the various machine components. Each thread of yarn on the yarn shaft passed through one of the two harnesses. Alternate threads moved to the top while the adjacent threads were separated and moved to the bottom. Top and bottom formed a bell-shaped passage or shed for the weft shuttle. Stepping on the footboard caused the two harnesses to be shifted, and the top threads and the bottom threads were repeatedly intersected and separated. The shuttle drew the weft yarn through the transient space that separated the intercrossing warp threads. Each time it passed through, the woman pulled the weaving board pressing the intertwining threads tightly together to form cloth. The woman leaned on the wooden frame with both hands moving to the rhythm of the footboard, never ceasing to pull on the weaving board. Only when the warp broke was there a pause to tie the thread together. Sometimes the wooden comb from the woman’s hair would be used to comb the warp in the loom and prevent it from becoming tangled up. Summer was usually the main season for weaving, after weeding the rice elds and raking the cotton elds. The women sat on the porches at their looms, weaving thread by thread. The sound of the loom was monotonous. The cloth slowly lengthened before the eyes of the weaver and far from feeling bored, she would feel delighted, even proud. One person could weave about 1.5 metres of cloth per day, about 35 centimetres wide. Thus to weave 30 metres of cloth took about 20 days. An item of clothing for one adult man used about three metres of cloth. The cloth from each year’s weaving was suf cient for the whole family’s needs. Not every family owned a loom, but those with- out could borrow one. One loom would typically be used by several generations of women. In summer and autumn you often saw girls of about ten years of age—still wearing trousers—sitting on the oors of the wooden homes. One end of a bunch of warp yarn would be tied to their waists, while the other end would be tied onto a wooden pillar. The warp yarn would be separated by two horizontal sticks and with their right hands the girls
4 In general, weaving involves the interlacing of two sets of threads at right angles to each other: the warp and the weft. With the warp threads held taut and parallel on the loom, bobbins of weft thread are shuttled through a transient space, or shed, created between alternate warp threads.
GEARY_f9_61-68.indd 67 7/2/2007 9:52:59 PM 68 chapter eight
would thread a small spool of weft yarn between the warp. They used a bamboo strip to act as the weaving board, pulling it to pack the threads tightly together. This was a simple use of loom and weaving principles. The girls could weave strips with beautiful geometric patterns, used as trouser belts for young men or waistbands for themselves. The villagers liked the colour indigo, because it did not show up the dirt. The dark blue dye was obtained by fermenting leaves of plants of the genus indigofera. These thin-leaved plants were grown in the vegetable gardens, like potatoes, furrow by furrow. At the beginning of autumn the leaves were picked and placed in wooden water- lled barrels beside the stream, and left to soak. They rotted within two or three days, releasing pigment to the water. Leaves, branches and other dregs were then taken out and a small amount of lime was mixed into the barrel. Then the liquid was repeatedly scooped up and poured back in, using a wooden ladle. This caused the colour to precipitate, forming sediment at the bottom of the barrel. The next day the supernatant water was poured away and the sediment paste was taken to make the indigo dye. There was a large wooden barrel standing on the porch of each house. The paste was rst dissolved in water in a wooden ladle and then poured into this barrel. Half a litre of rice wine was mixed in. Then the white woven cloth, washed clean, was gradually dipped into the dye in the barrel. Usually the cloth was placed in the barrel in the evening and left there overnight. Early the next morning, it was taken out and washed in the stream. Then it dried in the sun during the day.5 This whole process was repeated for a month or more, with the same cloth. After the cloth had been dyed indigo it was called ‘blue cloth’ and could be used to make everyday clothing—as worn by most adults in Xiangye. Some Kam cloth underwent further processing until it was shiny. The manufacturing process and raw materials used were the same as those used in other southern Kam mountain villages. This shiny cloth was especially precious and was used for a woman’s wedding costume or for a man’s festival clothing. Spinning and weaving were entirely the work of the women. In autumn and winter, only the men experienced a ‘slack’ season. The women enjoyed no such luxury. They worked full-time 365 days a year.
5 Cf. plate 19.
GEARY_f9_61-68.indd 68 7/2/2007 9:52:59 PM CHAPTER NINE
THRIFTY PEOPLE
Ongl qaenp eis yuv jeml, ongl qat eis xup sinc. Heavy work doesn’t cost gold; small jobs don’t cost money.
The fertile soil around Xiangye sustained paddy elds and dense forests. There was an abundance of growth everywhere that helped to satisfy everyday needs. Generations of people depended on the local resources that nature provided, gaining from them a livelihood, an education and an af nity with their surroundings. In and around the mountain-ringed valley, gardens were created and land was opened up for farming. Men farmed the land for food while women grew, spun and wove cotton for clothing. People were thus self-suf cient in food and clothing. They were born into nature and survived courtesy of nature’s endowments. Houses were built with columns and beams of China r, with bark from the trees to cover the roofs. Except for wild vine that tied together the bark on the roofs, everything in the houses was made of China r. If in former ages it was true that in the mountain forests ‘Trees were used as pillars and people lived upstairs’, then in later generations the China r trees from the wild forests were moved to the villages to cre- ate wooden ganlan buildings. Traditionally, houses could not be built without China r. The people did not purposely clear the land and plant China r, but if they ever encountered China r saplings as they were clearing ground around the paddy elds, they left the young trees untouched. Thereafter, they pruned the branches every year and after a decade or more, the trees would have grown suf ciently to be used for building purposes. When people collected rewood in the mountains, they also treated China r saplings with respect. Therefore whether beside paddy elds or by mountain paths, China r trees were ever-present, growing straight up; sometimes only a few, sometimes a little copse with 10 or more, and sometimes a whole hillside. They belonged to whoever took care of them.
GEARY_f10_69-79.indd 69 7/2/2007 9:53:11 PM 70 chapter nine
Weaving straw sandals in the evening.
GEARY_f10_69-79.indd 70 7/2/2007 9:53:11 PM thrifty people 71
When a house was under construction, the owner would arrange for clansmen and neighbours to fell some of his own trees and carry them back to the village. The owner would not pay money for this service, but would instead treat the workers to a good dinner. Occasionally a family did not own any China r and in this case, the timber was donated by clansmen or other villagers and again there was no nancial outlay. Once the house frame was erected,1 one room was rst completed for moving into. The move would be made when the time and condi- tions were right. The work of house-building typically proceeded spo- radically and often lasted one or two years. Occasionally a carpenter was employed for a few days and was paid using the household grain. Whenever a carpenter came to do such work, family members often worked alongside him, learning how to lay the oors and build the walls, so that they would not need to invite him again. Therefore no one paid money for building a house, from the time the wood was car- ried back from the mountains, to the time the building was completed. Unless destroyed by re, a house was occupied by several generations of people. Even if the columns and beams began to decay, people continued to live there. Unless a family had no heir, the house was not dismantled. Household beds, stools, tables and wooden barrels of different sizes were all made from China r. They were either self-made or obtained in exchange for grain. People took special care of these household items. Some barrels for pickling sh were in use for more than 10 generations and still unspoiled. Dustpan-shaped baskets,2 sh baskets, rice baskets and winnowing baskets were important implements for transportation and storage. Nearly all the men could weave such baskets. First bamboo was chopped and brought down from the mountainside. Then a re was started on the ground oor of the home and chopping knives were used to help peel the heated bamboo, resulting in thin bamboo strips. The basket frame was made from branches of mixed wood, according to the intended use. One whole basket was easily custom-made in only a few hours. People were never short of such baskets, treating them carefully and often using them for a whole generation before they decayed.
1 Cf. plate 21. 2 Cf. plate 22.
GEARY_f10_69-79.indd 71 7/2/2007 9:53:11 PM 72 chapter nine
Each man also knew how to weave straw sandals using straw from glutinous rice, which was fairly tough. A man sat on a low horizon- tal beam of the house, stretching his two feet out to rest on a short wooden stick. The ends of four strands of straw rope were tied on the stick and the other ends were tied round the man’s waist. The man twisted glutinous rice straw in his hands and wove it through the four strands of rope. In this way, a pair of sandals could be made in an evening. They were worn for long journeys or while carrying loads with the shoulder pole. Usually men worked barefoot and the skin on their feet became calloused. During frosty winter days, their heels cracked open and you could see the raw esh. Then in the evenings, they pounded glutinous rice against the stone curb beside the re until it became a gluey paste, and blocked up the heel cracks with it, sticking it on like a plaster. This eased the pain, prevented the cracks growing bigger, and also prevented unwanted bacteria entering the cracks. Every household had a repit (or hearth). During the cold days in autumn, winter and spring, family members sat in a circle warming themselves or doing handicrafts around the re in the repit. In one day, they often burned about 50 kilograms of wood. Chopping rewood in the mountains outside the village was a man’s work. After trees were felled more trees would grow and timber resources seemed inexhaustible. Each day, after working in the elds, the men usually chopped rewood nearby and carried it home to fuel the re. Older people were adept at keeping the res alive at night by covering them with ash. There were still some sparks left after even a day or two. If by chance a re was completely extinguished, a man took an iron slab and struck it with int. Fine straw would be used to intercept the resulting sparks, until smoke became a ame. The local people called this method of starting a re ‘harvesting a re’. They never bought matches (called ‘ocean matches’, from across the ocean). Instead, the home res were generally kept burning and smoke continuously curled into the sky from the roofs (which more often than not were not endowed with smoke-holes), announcing the existence of the villagers. Rice grain was used as payment for carpenters, cotton-teasers or other artisans. It was also sold to buy salt; used to brew alcohol and satisfy the men’s daily habit of drinking; to feed the pigs and so generate meat; to feed household poultry, which provided eggs and meat; to give as a gift; or to trade for sewing needles. Rice was the most treasured currency of the village.
GEARY_f10_69-79.indd 72 7/2/2007 9:53:11 PM thrifty people 73
The paddy elds provided an additional precious resource. Through- out the four seasons of the year, the elds were home to sh and shrimp, loaches, eels and snails. If you wanted a sh meal—for example, when guests arrived— sh were readily found in the elds. Either men or women might go to catch some. There were also many kinds of sh in the village stream and the nearby Langdong river. The water was crystal-clear and you could see into every nook and cranny of the stream. Day or night, shermen used nets to make a catch, up to four or ve kilograms at a time. Women and children could catch two or three kilograms using a bamboo sh trap or even their bare hands. During August, in the midst of the dry season and the summer heat, young men went to the mountains and cut chilli grass. The grass was piled beside the Langdong river and crushed using stones or thick wooden clubs and then pushed over into the river. Once the sh and shrimp tasted the spicy medicinal water, they oated dizzily to the surface, to be caught by the waiting villagers, young and old, male and female, who had been summoned to join in the activity. This spicy water affected a kilometre of the river and people com- peted with one another to catch the sh, yelling and laughing with excitement. For the lucky ones, the catch was heavy. The men who made the spicy medicine were the ones who did the heavy work and deserved the most credit, but they were last to start catching sh and most sh were caught by others right in front of their noses. Every- one was eager to see who had been most successful, but they did not worry about who had caught more or less sh, and they certainly did not argue about it. On one such occasion the author went with his mother to Langdong river to catch sh and suddenly saw a mandarin sh right in front of him. He reached out to grab it, but someone shouted out urgently that it would cut his hand! That was no joke! He withdrew his hand, only for the person who had shouted to catch the big sh in a net. The author still remembers that sh with some regret as the one that got away, but everyone caught something to bring home and to enjoy eating in the evening, so everyone was satis ed. Thanks to the paddy elds, the stream and the river, even the poorest villagers, without a penny in their pockets, could eat sh and shrimp all year round. After marriage, everyone set up house and no matter how poor the family, it possessed a vegetable garden, growing among other things
GEARY_f10_69-79.indd 73 7/2/2007 9:53:11 PM 74 chapter nine
green leafy vegetables, squashes, beans, garlic, onions, radishes, peppers and sweet potatoes. The housewife daily picked enough vegetables for the family’s use. Bachelors, orphans or widows were generously looked after by other villagers, who supplied them with free vegetables every day. No one bought vegetables and no one went without. Many wild herbs grew in the mountains. Wild mushrooms that covered the mountainsides in summer and autumn were delicious. In winter there were special fragrant mushrooms. According to legend you needed to experiment by eating these with silver chopsticks—if the chopsticks turned black, it showed that they were poisonous. For this reason, not many people gathered them to eat, but instead simply observed them growing, sprouting and dying. Plum and pear trees grew beside the vegetable gardens and were taken as belonging to the owners of the gardens, although they had not usually been cultivated. Peach, apricot, bayberry and chestnut trees all grew in the wild. When the fruit was ripe, farmers brought home a parcel of it at the end of every day’s work using straw as wrapping, which was later used to feed the cows. The fruit was poured into a wicker basket for people to help themselves. Leftovers were thrown out and a new harvest was brought back the following day. In occasional years of drought and famine, villagers shouldered their hoes and went to the mountains to dig for a certain herb. It was a kind of fern which was to be found all over the mountains. Fresh tender shoots of this fern could be eaten and its roots were rich in starch. Han people in the area called it ‘brake fern’ ( juecai).3 The roots were dug out, then pounded and broken down, and nally placed in a large wooden barrel where they precipitated. The starch could be taken out and fried. One person could dig out enough roots in a day to make ve kilograms of starch. That was enough to feed a family of ve for a day. With this fern, the people of Xiangye survived the most serious of all famines in living memory, the one in 1926. Not one person died. The salt supply in Xiangye at the time was from Guangxi and Guang- dong. Salt was both scarce and expensive and most people could not afford it. The few households that had some small savings were unwilling to use the money to buy salt. Instead they preferred to exchange 50 kilograms of rice for about 500 grams of table salt. People generally
3 Cf. plate 23.
GEARY_f10_69-79.indd 74 7/2/2007 9:53:11 PM thrifty people 75
ate their food without salt and as a result many people suffered from goiter, as salt was a major source of iodine. In the distant past, a procedure for pickling vegetable, sh and meat was discovered, using alkaline water instead of salt, made by adding straw ash and wood ash to water. With this alkaline water, the food became sour and acidic, and the acid and alkali together simulated salt. There was no salt avour but food processed in this way was at least edible. Such processing was a good substitute for the salt that would otherwise have to be supplied from outside the village. Every day the women treated their hair with tea tree oil, plant oil or pig oil to keep it beautiful and shiny. The wood-ash alkaline water was also their detergent. It was used for washing both face and clothes, with better effect even than soap. Women also picked honey locust leaves from the mountains and used the juice from these to serve as a detergent. People never bought soap. The village only had one sorcerer who liaised with the gods and the spirits to deal with calamities, but this man could not heal illnesses. There was even less chance of being healed by a medical doctor, because there was none in the vicinity. Illnesses were treated using traditional remedies, based on natural plants and herbs. For example, for cuts you could pluck leaves from the mountainside chestnut trees, chew them sodden and apply them to the wounded area. Alternatively you could apply spiders’ webs. In either case, the bleeding would stop. If in ammation of tonsils caused fever and a sore throat, people went to the Chinese sweet gum tree on the outskirts of the village and scraped off some of the sap. This was applied on the tonsils and before long the patient was often fully recovered. Alternatively, a kind of grease oozing from burning wood and collected on a knife blade or on a agstone, could be applied with the same effect. If a child’s belly was sore or the child had fever, people often used tobacco tar from homegrown tobacco to rub on the child’s navel (for stomach ache) or forehead (for fever). This sometimes cured the problem. If an adult caught a cold, the usual remedy was to squeeze the bridge of the nose, the neck or the back, until the skin turned purple. This sometimes relieved congestion or reduced in ammation. Alternatively, a hot coal was placed on an alcohol glass, bamboo tube or buffalo horn. The container was then pressed repeatedly against the affected area, drawing out body heat, until the area turned purple. In the summer and autumn seasons, the men often became hot and thirsty at work,
GEARY_f10_69-79.indd 75 7/2/2007 9:53:12 PM 76 chapter nine
then stripped to the waist and drank cold water. Subsequently they often became ill with colds and other illnesses. Then they used this treatment to good effect. There were two af ictions that could not be treated using traditional methods. One was poisonous snake-bites—dreaded by the people of Xiangye. Normally you simply had to stand by and watch the victim die. The other was malaria, which commonly affected men in sum- mertime. Except for drinking fried rice drink and another refreshing tea made from leaves found in the wild, there was no way of treating malaria. No one sold quinine in the vicinity and even if it had been sold, the people of Xiangye could not have afforded such an expensive medicine. Instead they suffered stoically through the various stages of the disease and some simply did not survive. People did not buy calendars or watches or clocks. Instead they observed the leaves on the trees turning green or falling, and knew when spring or autumn had arrived, respectively. On hearing the sound of cuckoos in the trees, they knew it was time to sow rice seeds. On hearing the sound of cicadas, they knew it was midsummer. On seeing the frost descending, they knew it was the middle of winter. Any day of the year that had no special signi cance, they simply did not need to remember. In special circumstances if someone wanted clari cation about a certain date, he or she had to consult a private teacher. People generally did not even know the year of their birth. Everyone could distinguish the important times in a given day. For example, when the cock crowed once or twice, it was one or two o’clock in the early morning. When it crowed three or four times, it was just before daybreak. When it crowed ve times, it was around seven o’clock in the morning. People’s shadows were shortest and straightest at high noon. When your shadow fell to the west, it was morning; when it fell to the east, it was afternoon. If there were red clouds in the western sky, then it was almost dusk. If the weather was overcast, the children always wanted to eat earlier than usual. Since the adults were unable to distinguish early from late, they had no basis on which to persuade the children to wait. Although the area was rich in natural resources, which were more than enough to sustain people’s life and growth, local knowledge and technology were backward and de cient, and people could only har- ness a small proportion of what was available. Therefore the physical conditions were actually quite poor and life was extremely dif cult.
GEARY_f10_69-79.indd 76 7/2/2007 9:53:12 PM thrifty people 77
People constantly needed to take good care of their food and clothing. From youth to old age they were always economizing. Metal possessions were handed down from one generation to the next: for women a sewing needle, a thimble or a pair of scissors; for men a knife for chopping rewood, a vegetable knife or a steel object for making sparks against int. Wooden jars, stools and barrels were similarly used for generations and were never discarded. Even when house beams started to decay and the house became unsafe, people still lived there cautiously and did not pull the old house down and build a new one just because it was dangerous. Xiangye people believed in living by economizing because without such frugality, they could not have survived. At that time two young men in the extended Ou family, both bachelors, rebelled against their parents’ upbringing. They liked to eat, but did not like to work. They did not economize, but casually bought goods from the market town. Before long, they both came to a premature end. One had a prosperous older brother. After the family property was divided, the younger man set up a new home and lived there alone. He did not do any physical labour, but ate well. It was said that he did not get light from burning pine wood (cut into pieces from branches of pine trees), but instead spent money on a battery torch. Once he used the torch while eating his evening meal. When this was discov- ered, the whole village was shocked. Old people sighed and said: ‘The family is ruined! The family is ruined!’ Before too long he inexplicably vanished from his home. No one knew where he had gone and no one talked about him or even so much as mentioned his name again. It was assumed he was dead. The second rebellious bachelor was in his twenties. After his parents died, he alone inherited the house, the paddy elds and the family property. He liked washing clothes and was often seen beside the stream repeatedly pounding his clothes against the stones. After he had washed them several times, however, the clothes became rags, full of holes. The villagers thought this was very strange and often talked about it. Everyone said the young man had copied the Han people and bought soap for washing clothes and that he was the black sheep of the family. After half a year, he also disappeared without trace. There was no smoke from his roof. No one from the village saw him leave and no one enquired as to whether he was dead or alive. Again it was assumed that he was dead.
GEARY_f10_69-79.indd 77 7/2/2007 9:53:12 PM 78 chapter nine
The people of Xiangye relied mostly on nature and the natural resources around them for survival. The only way they could earn money was by selling rice or home-made cloth. The number of households involved in such trade was very small, less than 5%. Most families were not able to sell more than a few hundred kilograms of rice. Only one or two families were able to sell a thousand kilograms or more. But rice was cheap and became ever cheaper. For one silver coin (about ve yuan in today’s currency) you could buy 50 kilograms. Then it became 100 kilograms, then 150 kilograms. In the years leading up to Liberation, no one sold rice any more. Those fortunate people who had earlier saved a little money were determined to keep it. They wrapped it in clothing and hid it among piles of rice, or buried it in the ground, checking every few days on the security of their savings, until just before death they would bequeath it to their sons. Any unsold and surplus mouldy rice was used to feed the pigs or domestic fowl, or used to brew alcohol. There were about three or four households in each of Dazhai and Xiaozhai whose skilful and hard-working women were able to weave surplus cloth. In each household there were about three to six metres left over to be sold. On market days, this cloth was taken to Langdong, but it was extremely dif cult to sell and sometimes remained unsold. If sold, it earned one or two yuan to spend on jewellery for the women’s daughters. As they did not have much that could be sold and because it was dif cult to sell what they had, many generations of Xiangye people stayed well away from the markets and from any business. They viewed setting up a stall and selling things as tantamount to losing one’s self- respect. They were embarrassed to set a price for their products and to bargain over the price. If others did not like what they were selling, they became yet more embarrassed, even ashamed. Therefore no one engaged in trade full-time and those who went to market to sell a few small surplus items were few and far between, and became fewer with time. People preferred to give things away to poorer neighbours, or to barter. It was common to see travelling salesmen or peddlers entering the village in autumn and winter, carrying their wares on shoulder poles. Villagers exchanged eggs for sewing needles and thimbles. One egg was worth one needle. Three eggs were exchanged for one thimble. A hen was worth a pair of scissors. Miao people from the vicinity, who neither grew cotton nor made their own clothes, also came to the village from
GEARY_f10_69-79.indd 78 7/2/2007 9:53:12 PM thrifty people 79
time to time to exchange cocks or earthenware jars for old clothing. One item of old clothing could be exchanged for one or two big cocks or one jar. Villagers were not ashamed or embarrassed about engaging in this kind of bartering, but were comfortable with it. A small surplus of goods was generally handled by being given away rather than sold, even if the ‘surplus’ was not really a surplus. Some people gave generously to those who were desperately in need, consider- ing it an honour to be able to give. In that impecunious society, unnec- essary spending was generally considered shameful, and big-spenders were denounced as ‘sluggards’ or ‘bastards who ruined the family’.
GEARY_f10_69-79.indd 79 7/2/2007 9:53:12 PM GEARY_f11_80-86.indd 80 7/2/2007 9:53:40 PM CHAPTER TEN
MORNINGS AND EVENINGS
Nyenc yagp yenv maenl tent, nyenc soic guaiv maenl yais. Hard-working people complain that the day is too short; sluggards give off that the day is too long.
In the early morning there were three main activities: hulling rice with the treadmill, cutting grass for the buffaloes and kindling the re in the kitchen. If these three things were not attended to in a given fam- ily, then the likelihood was that the family had no heir. If they could not be done properly or if they were postponed and then done only reluctantly, it showed that the family was starting to decline: composed of either old and in rm, or young and orphaned, without anyone to take care of them. Before dawn, it was customary not to light candles or lamps. The young wife or unmarried young woman climbed out of bed and went directly to the food steamer, from where she poured some unhusked rice into the winnowing basket. From there she hurriedly went downstairs to begin work on the treadmill, hulling the rice. If she rose late, she was not on time to pound the rice needed for breakfast and the day got off to a bad start. While the woman was hulling the rice, the young men of the house- hold got up, clambered downstairs and went to the open country to cut some grass, carrying a sickle and wooden pole. If they were late going out to work, the buffalo went hungry. Motivated by a sense of duty, they did their work as promptly as possible, always rising before dawn and not delaying. The older woman in the household also rose at this time, carrying rewood to replenish the re. Afterwards she woke the children and helped the youngest ones to get dressed, leading them to the reside to keep warm sitting on tree-trunk stools by the re. They were not allowed to sleep in. In order to keep warm, the older man in the family sometimes set his bed beside the repit. Otherwise, he slept on the oor just above the re. Once the older woman had kindled the re, everyone gathered
GEARY_f11_80-86.indd 81 7/2/2007 9:53:40 PM 82 chapter ten
A man carrying bundles of grass for the buffalo while a woman pounds rice.
GEARY_f11_80-86.indd 82 7/2/2007 9:53:40 PM mornings and evenings 83
around the re chatting and laughing. The old man, even though he might have wanted to continue sleeping, was unable to rest peacefully any more. In any event, if he was sleeping on the oor above the re he soon noticed smoke lling the room, slowly spreading around the top oor from the hole above the repit, then again slowly dispersing through the roof of the house, where there was a special hole for that purpose, which could be closed over if it was raining. If he was sleeping there, the old man was soon forced by the thick smoke to get up. So throughout the year, people rose at daybreak. Apart from orphans who had no one to wake them, the in rm and a few opium smokers, no one stayed in bed until the sun had risen. In the mornings, smoke curled its way into the sky from the kitchen res in Xiangye. The sound of treadmills pounding rice—some faster, some slower—gradually spread around the village. The bustle of life was beginning again. Housewives let chickens and ducks out of their cages. Pigs and dogs ran everywhere, scavenging food. Some housewives went to the vegetable gardens. Others went to the ancient wells to collect water; stood in the open porches taking cloth out of the dye- ing barrels to wash; washed clothes or cloth by the stream; or nursed their babies. The old men unhurriedly led buffaloes to graze on the ridges between the paddy elds. After warming themselves by the re, children ran downstairs to play under the buildings or in the lanes between the buildings. At this time of day there was much hustle and bustle and there hardly seemed time to sit down. If by some misfortune burglars had stolen someone’s chickens, ducks, clothing or sh from the paddy elds—events that had seldom happened in earlier times—the stricken housewife stood at her house entrance calling curses in a loud and protracted voice. She plaintively cursed the burglars, calling trouble and ill fate on them. Villagers called this ‘chicken-cursing’, as chickens were most frequently the objects of the theft. Such abuse typically lasted 20 or 30 minutes, but it happened only rarely in those days. One moment the housewife was yelling and screaming, the next she was ridiculing and reviling, and the next weep- ing loudly like a child. This torrent of despair was always accompanied in the background by the crowing of domestic fowl and the pounding of pestle and mortar. With all the noise going on, the whole village seemed to be seething with excitement, uniting in a cacophony of activity. This continued from around 5.30 am to 9 am. At about 8 am, the sound of hulling rice
GEARY_f11_80-86.indd 83 7/2/2007 9:53:40 PM 84 chapter ten
gradually began to tail off and men returned home one after another carrying great loads of grass for the buffaloes. Noise subsided into silence and around 9 am people everywhere would begin breakfast. The lively morning activities thus gently faded into tranquility. After breakfast, many men went to relax on the ground oor of the home of one of the Yangs, which was spacious and centrally located, draping coats round their shoulders and patting their bellies as they went. Some sat smoking their bamboo pipes, listening respectfully to others and throwing in a few sentences from time to time. Some waxed loquacious in a ood of information about matters from yesterday or the day before. They remarked upon which sections of the rivers were full of sh or which fruits on the mountains were ripe. Tales related after trips to the markets attracted the most attention. The men mused over how some townspeople sat around idly, yet had plenty of good food to eat; how some sticks of charcoal were pulled out and stolen from the bundles carried into town to be sold by the Miao men; and how some people were ogged and beaten by township of cials. Around 10 am, people dispersed. In the busy farming season, men and women picked up their tools one after another and went to the paddy elds or the countryside to work. Visitors to the village then only observed a few old people and children. Otherwise, the village was deserted. As the sun set, the villagers stopped work for the day and made their way home. Some of the men carried rewood on shoulder poles, others directly on their shoulders. Some bore ploughs or harrows on their shoulders, while others carried grass for the water-buffaloes to eat. Women carried dustpan-shaped baskets stacked full of duckweed or wild vegetables, dangling on shoulder-poles. Some hung grass or cloth bundles from their shoulders. Others secured sh baskets around their waists or carried baskets by the handles. Some had their hands full car- rying baskets of vegetables. Everyone returned with a full load. Even the older folk, who drove home the cattle, carried at least a bundle of rewood on their shoulders. Anyone entering the village empty-handed in the evening was certainly not Kam, but of another nationality. At dusk no one remained out in the wilds. Men and women, young and old, returned home. Broods of ducks and hens clucked and quacked their way around the village, and squeezed back into their pens for the night. Housewives scattered rice grains on the ground while calling out to the birds, simultaneously counting them to see if they were all there. Men securely closed the pens for the pigs and buffaloes. Afterwards
GEARY_f11_80-86.indd 84 7/2/2007 9:53:40 PM mornings and evenings 85
the men busied themselves splitting pine branches to prepare some illumination for the night. Women went to the wells to collect water, or gathered rewood from piles on the ground oor of the house, to start a re and make a meal. When the res were blazing, men sat nearby chain-smoking their pipes full of home-grown tobacco. Chil- dren also assembled together, watching the housewives working, and waiting for dinner. Some people lit pine wood chips and itted in and out, upstairs, downstairs, through this house and that. In some places there were streams of light, in others only specks here and there. The village was full of activity again. As the curtain of night drew across the desolate day, everything was full of excitement again. Matchmakers usually chose to visit at this time of day, to discuss a potential marriage alli- ance. Brides who had stayed for a while at their parental home usually returned to their husband’s home at this time of day. People assumed that no outsiders would enter the village so late, so they could comfort- ably spend the night at home relaxing. As far as the men were concerned, the day’s work nished at din- ner-time. In the cold season, men huddled round the re after dinner and relaxed. In the hot season, they gathered on the porch to enjoy the cool air. As far as the women were concerned, preparing dinner was not the end of the day’s work. While men and children were resting, chatting and playing, women were busy boiling pig food for the next day, soaking cloth in dye barrels, or sitting at their spinning wheels, spinning cotton. They worked on one hand, and laughed and chatted on the other, as though they were simply relaxing. Men liked to visit one by one, smoking their pipes. (Women did not have time for such visiting.) As soon as a visitor took a seat by the re, the housewife presented him with a bunch of leaves for smoking. Visitors chatted and smoked until after 10 pm, then left. Men and women, old and young alike often sat together around the re. There was mutual respect between older and younger generations, and everything was quarrel-free, peaceful and harmonious. It was the happiest and most tranquil time of day, and helped establish warm bonds and relation- ships among family members. It was also at this time, while young women were at their spinning wheels, that young men came by to visit in twos and threes. The men were attracted by the penetrating sound at each rotation of the small ‘cat’s ear’—a piece of bamboo the size of a pen-tip—attached to each
GEARY_f11_80-86.indd 85 7/2/2007 9:53:41 PM 86 chapter ten
spinning wheel by its unmarried owner. The men whistled in the dark- ness outside to announce their presence. Some accompanied the sound of the cotton-spinning on the erhu (a two-stringed bowed instrument having a low but mellow sound, its resonator being made of wood and covered with boa skin—the bow is pulled between the two strings), the pipa (a plucked, three-stringed instrument made of wood, with a ngerboard shaped like a melon-seed, and a long bending neck) or the niubatui (the ‘cow’s leg’, also known as niutuiqin, a two-stringed instru- ment played with a bow like a violin).1 As far as they were concerned, the night air was lled with feelings of romance. Such evening activities continued until around 11 pm, before gradu- ally diminishing. Six or seven hours later, the bustling morning began again and so the cycle continued. Mornings and evenings were the two most spirited times of the day for the people of Xiangye.
1 For a photograph of the niubatui, see plate 24 in Geary et al. (2003), adjacent to p. 171. For a description in Chinese, see Ou Chaoquan and Jiang Daqian (2002), p. 395, the entry for 果吉.
GEARY_f11_80-86.indd 86 7/2/2007 9:53:41 PM CHAPTER ELEVEN
FOOD
Daens eis liic seel, jil eis douv semt. When dressing you need a belt; and when eating you can’t do without sour food.
Residents of Xiangye ate whatever it was possible to eat from the plant and animal life surrounding the village. Except when poisonous, there were no taboos against eating any particular thing. Three hundred and sixty- ve days a year there was food to be found from the paddy elds, the vegetable gardens, the stream and the mountains. Some of the rich variety of food is discussed below according to categories based on means of production.
Boiled food. Boiling was the most popular method for making the two main daily meals and people typically referred to ‘preparing a meal’ as ‘boiling a meal’. Usually rice, sh, meat, vegetables and mushrooms were all boiled. Wok-shaped pots made of earthenware or crude iron were used. Food and water were placed in a pot, covered with a lid and boiled on a tripod over a wood re.1 Care was taken not to overcook and make the food mushy. Stewing was used to prepare mushy food, but few items were stewed and these became ever fewer over the years. In the early twentieth century, villagers began to use ordinary rice as their staple food. Every day one meal of rice was cooked in the morn- ing and one in the evening. First water was boiled in the pot. Then unwashed rice grain, enough for the whole family, was added. Three or four minutes after the water boiled again, any surplus water was scooped away from the rice. The lid was then placed on securely and the pot was placed beside the re. It was turned occasionally and baked all around. After about half-an-hour the rice was ready to be eaten. Rice could not really be eaten without cooked vegetables, so each house had at least two pots: one for rice and one for vegetables. Once
1 Cf. plate 25.
GEARY_f12_87-96.indd 87 7/2/2007 9:53:51 PM 88 chapter eleven
Barbecuing sh in the elds.
GEARY_f12_87-96.indd 88 7/2/2007 9:53:51 PM food 89
the rice pot was taken off the tripod, it was replaced by the other pot. In this second pot there was placed lots of water and a little rice to improve the avour. When the water boiled, the housewife twisted the vegetable leaves apart with both hands and put them into the boiling water for about ve minutes, until cooked. No salt or seasoning was added. Instead, the vegetables were eaten after dipping into spicy sauce. This was the essential cooked dish without which no meal in Xiangye was complete. Vegetables were never stir-fried, probably because of shortages of salt and oil, but instead they were cooked in boiling water and eaten with spicy sauce. The main meats were pork, chicken, duck and beef. Usually people did not kill water-buffaloes for beef—except at the Eating Bull Intes- tines Festival (cf. Chapter 29). Only if the buffalo, old or young, had accidentally fallen in the mountains and died was its meat eaten. Some villagers hunted wild animals in the mountains, such as pheasant, porcupine, wild boar and mountain goats. All kinds of birds were also hunted and snakes were killed on the mountain paths. Meat was normally boiled in spring water, but some meat was pro- cessed or cured. Only rarely was meat barbecued or fried. The heads and hooves of large animals such as buffaloes or wild boar were usually stewed until soft before being eaten. Meat was generally in short supply. Except at New Year or other festivals, or when hosting guests, people ate meat less than once a month and even then they did not eat much. Often a whole family shared the meat from one chicken or duck, or shared 500 grams of pork. Each person had to be content with a few scraps. The main treat was eating vegetables cooked in the broth. To improve their diet, women often went to the paddy elds or to the stream to catch sh by hand. Fish and shrimps were cooked and eaten together with rice and sour soup or sour vegetables. A small proportion of such sh was dried or barbecued. In those days, when salt was scarce and expensive, there was usually no salt added when cooking meat or sh. Instead the cooked food was dipped in a spicy sauce. Only a few, relatively wealthy, families could afford table salt. Spicy sauce was provided at every table, usually including a little salt and so providing avour for the cooked vegetables and other foods. For generations people ate mainly cooked vegetables, with very little meat or sh. This nearly-vegetarian diet was healthy in some ways. For
GEARY_f12_87-96.indd 89 7/2/2007 9:53:51 PM 90 chapter eleven
example, heart disease was unheard of, as was any problem related to the blood vessels of the heart or the brain. Rice, vegetables, sh and meat were all boiled by the women. The men sat around the res watching and smoking, waiting for the meal. Meat was placed in the pots in large chunks, which after boiling were cut with scissors into smaller pieces. Each household had a pair of kitchen scissors dedicated for this purpose. The smaller pieces of meat were placed into bowls and set on the table. Women never used knives to cut meat, while men on the other hand, used knives and not scis- sors. If asked why they did not use knives for cutting, women replied: ‘We don’t know how.’
Fried food. The mostly impecunious residents of Xiangye were usually short of salt and cooking oil, and usually did not possess a metal frying pan. Therefore they did not generally fry their food. Only the more prosperous residents could afford the utensils for frying: usually a poor- quality frying pan and a kitchen knife. Beef and pork were stir-fried, but chicken and duck were boiled not fried. Sometimes sh and shrimp were fried, as were chicken eggs, duck eggs and soybeans. Glutinous rice cakes made at New Year and brake fern roots ( jueba) eaten in years of drought were also sometimes fried. Sweet glutinous rice cakes eaten in spring (cf. Chapter 29) and bianmi (fried rice kernels) eaten in autumn were also traditionally fried. Despite this wide variety of fried food, it was only on special occa- sions that food was fried, such as when guests were present, or when celebrating New Year, other festivals or weddings. Fried food probably represented less than 2% of the year’s food intake. Frying was the job of the men, especially the heads of households. Women prepared the frying pans, but it was a time-honoured tradition that men did the actual frying. It was said that frying was not originally practised in Xiangye but that some village men had observed Han men frying in the towns and they had come home and experimented, adding hot pepper and salt. The women regarded frying as a Han custom. Being rmly committed to traditional cooking, they were unwilling to try it out, so that frying became the special domain of the men. It was only practiced in relatively prosperous households or in households where the education levels were close to those of the Han nationality.
Steamed food. Until around the end of the nineteenth century, the staple food of the people of Xiangye was glutinous rice. For centuries rice
GEARY_f12_87-96.indd 90 7/2/2007 9:53:51 PM food 91
steamers had been used for steaming glutinous rice. In the decades before Liberation, each household still owned a rice steamer. The steamers were made of China r. They were barrel-shaped, over a foot tall, covered by a lid, and bottomless but with a ledge in the bot- tom third, supporting a tray made of woven bamboo or palm tree strips. On the evening of the day before it was to be eaten, glutinous rice was soaked in clear water. Early the next morning the rice was placed in the rice-steamer, which had its lid on and was placed in a large metal pot of boiling water above a large re. The rice was cooked in about half-an-hour and then transferred into a wicker basket to cool down, so preventing it from sticking together too much. After cooling it was returned to the rice-steamer, to be stored there until meal-times. One steamer-full was enough to provide a family with rice for two days. After two days the rice started to turn sour in any case. In the 1930s and 1940s, glutinous rice was only steamed when entertaining guests or celebrating Chinese New Year, other festivals or weddings. Steamed glutinous rice was also used as food for long jour- neys. It was no longer the staple food, representing only about 5% of the total rice consumed during the year. Sweet potatoes were also steamed, although only about two or three times a year, for children to use as snacks between meals. Ordinary potatoes did not grow well in the village. During the New Year celebrations, cakes made by the men from steamed glutinous rice—baba—were eaten. A few families used the steamers to make bamboo-leaf cakes—rice, corn or millet wrapped in bamboo leaves. Traditionally the woman’s domain, the practice of steaming diminished as glutinous rice became less popular.
Barbecued food. Barbecuing sh was popular during the autumn season, when harvesting glutinous rice. The family head would use a bamboo trap to catch several carp, often weighing as much as 500g each, from the paddy elds. He would light a re beside the paddy elds and pierce the sh through the mouth to the belly with a sharp stick. The sh were turned over the re on the stick, until oil seeped out and they were ready to eat. Spicy sauce was prepared in a big bowl, adding wild onion, garlic and herbs. The barbecued sh were cut into pieces and mixed together with this sauce. At other times, men would occasionally catch one or two sh from the river and set up a barbecue right there.
GEARY_f12_87-96.indd 91 7/2/2007 9:53:51 PM 92 chapter eleven
For small sh a different barbecuing method was used. The sh were wrapped in large leaves or reeds which were then tied together, and the package was placed on the smouldering re and cooked for about half an hour. Then the leaves were removed and the small sh were dipped in a spicy sauce and eaten. They were delicious, although they smelled as though they had not been cooked, as the oil had not yet seeped out of them. Catching small sh was the work of the women and women usually barbecued such sh, assisted by the men. Spicy dips were a favourite in Xiangye, accompanying every meal. The woman of the household prepared such dips. First, she placed dry red peppers on the hot ashes in the repit, rolling the peppers back and forth two or three times. They were then placed in a small mortar and pounded. If the peppers were fresh, they were rst roasted in the red ame for a moment, then cut into pieces with scissors and pounded in the pestle. Preserved sh and meat, and dried sh, were all sometimes roasted over an open re. Fresh pork or beef could also be cooked in this way. Glutinous rice cakes were often barbecued. Sweet potatoes and tubers from the kudzu vine were buried in hot ashes for two or three hours and then eaten. Barbecuing was perhaps the earliest method of cooking used. Boil- ing and frying only became possible with the introduction of clay cooking pots and other utensils. Barbecuing was generally replaced by other cooking methods because it was relatively troublesome and time-consuming.
Preserved food. There were two categories of preserved food in Xiangye: sh or meat, and vegetables. Generally the food was steeped in salt, then placed in a vat to ferment and turn sour. It was therefore also called sour sh or meat, and sour vegetables. By harvest time in autumn, carp in the paddy elds had grown to about 500g in weight. Some farmers were able to harvest a hundred kilograms of sh or more. The sh were cut open and internal organs taken out. They were then salted and left overnight for the salt to soak in. A little glutinous rice, ground spicy pepper, raw ginger and Chinese prickly ash were mixed thoroughly and 50 to 100 grams of this mixture was placed inside each sh. The sh were closed up again and placed inside a clay jar or wooden barrel, one layer upon another. A clay jar would have a trough around its neck and this was lled with water. A lid was then
GEARY_f12_87-96.indd 92 7/2/2007 9:53:52 PM food 93