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Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, is a modern city of more than three million and it is growing fast like all Chinese cities. I stayed in the Kun Hu hotel on Beijing Lu (red building on the right). It was conveniently close to the train station, to a bus station and to a post office. The latter was of particular interest to me for most if not all Chinese post offices now offer internet e-mail service at the very low rate of 10 yuan per hour (1.25US$/hr).
There are a couple of showcase supermarkets in Kunming but most of the city's food is supplied by small open air markets like this one just behind my hotel.
Kunming has a couple of fine museums and some ancient pagodas and temples that are worth visiting but I was especially interested in the "Yunnan Nationalities Village" which, although built for tourists, would give me at first overview of the architecture and traditional dress that characterize a dozen of Yunnan's minorities.
Following my Hangzhou friend Cathy's suggestion, I called up her friend Lilian Ji who knew all about me and who quite generously took time off from her work to show me around. One day we visited the minorities' village I mentioned earlier. Chinese parks are beautiful and every big city has at least one. Kunming has several. The pagodas behind Lilian are replicas of three very famous and much larger pagodas built in Dali in the 9th century when the Nanzhao kingdom of the Bai people was at its zenith.
The Bai people are one of the more sophisticated minority nationalities of Yunnan. They have a long history of cultural development quite distinct from the Chinese. The buildings shown here are representative of Bai architecture found in Dali and around Erhai Lake in western Yunnan (which you will see on page 5).
I was lucky to have Lilian with me for she pointed out and explained many details I would have missed by myself. This was a ceremonial courtyard inside the enclosed Bai model village.
And here is a Bai Temple. The Bai are poly-religious like the Chinese, those that bother with religion, venerate Buddhist and Taoist symbols as well as local deities and their own ancestors.
This elaborate gateway led from the Bai village to the Naxi area (pronounced Na-hsi). The Naxi people are descendants of tibetan nomads who settled in northwest Yunnan. They are now concentrated around Lijiang some 150 kms north of Dali.
The Naxi pavilion gave us a good sampling of Naxi traditional songs and dances. You will see more about these interesting people when I get to Lijiang.
The Yi pavilion also had a song and dance spectacle. The Yi people are the most numerous of south-west China's minorities. There are about seven million of them spread over Yunnan, Sichuan and Guizhou.
The Yi are generally tall and athletic so this cute and delicate Yi girl posing with Lilian was an exception. Traditional Yis are animists and have a special reverence for the tiger, shown here by the bas-relief on the wall behind my models of Yi and Han pulchritude.
Moving now to the southern part of Yunnan we come to Xishuangbanna where the Dai nationality predominates. Whereas the Bai, the Naxi and the Yi speak Tibeto-Burman languages, the Dai idiom belongs to the Tai family of which Thai, Lao, Shan, Dong and Zhuang are also members.
The Dai are generally Buddhists of the Therevada school just like their Thai cousins in Thailand, the Shan in Myanmar and the Lao in Laos. This is a replica of a Dai temple.
And here is a Dai stupa.
Xishuangbanna is the warmest part of China and the Dai have garnered all the best agricultural land in the valley bottoms, leaving the slopes and the hilltops for the less fortunate and less developed minorities (Hani, Lahu, Wa and Bulang). I don't blame them, I don't like the cold either.
I didn't care too much for the Hani model village so I'll skip that to show you the idealized representation of a Lahu house and a Lahu ceremonial courtyard.
The Lahus live in the hills along the Mekong river upstream and west of Dai areas. They are closely related to the Yis and speak a Tibeto-Burman language. They are generally animists.
The ceremonial courtyard behind Lilian replicates the sacred places in the centre of Lahu villages where the shaman offered sacrifice to the local deities to ensure the community's prosperity.
The Wa people live west of the Lahu straddling the Myanmar border. There are about 400 000 in Yunnan and 300 000 in Myanmar.
The Wa's origin is completely different from a that of the Dai or of the Tibeto-Burman Bai, Naxi, Yi and Lahu. They are probably amongst the first still identifiable people to have migrated into Yunnan. Genetically they, and their related Bulang neighbours, are thought to be the descendants of Pue'hk tribes that migrated south from the lower Yangzi but their language is related to the Mon-Khmer family which centered further to the south and which is related to dravidian languages of India. The Bulang are called Palaung in Myanmar.
The Wa are said to have been headhunters but the two Wa ladies below did not appear threatening to me at all. On the contrary they seemed as friendly as Ann Wang, the Wa librarian from the Yunnan Minorities Institute who helped me research this report.
The Jingpo people live on the border with Myanmar north of the Wa. They number less than 100 000 in Yunnan but there are more than a million of them in Myanmar where they are called Kachin. These colourful painted posts have a religious signification as they represent the relations between the various forces of nature worshiped by the Kachin-Jingpo.
Finally, here is an example of typical tibetan architecture. The odd 200 000 Tibetans living in Yunnan are called Zang but they speak Tibetan and those who are religious generally adhere to the lamaist tantric Buddhism practiced in Tibet and Mongolia.
Now that we have had a tourist's preview of some of Yunnan's minorities, lets go see what it's like in the field!
On the day before my departure to Xishuangbanna in the south, Lilian invited me to a party given by her company, (a Hangzhou lighting fixture manufacturer), to celebrate the opening of a fifth store in Kunming. I enjoyed meeting the work group she supervises and was favourably impressed by the enthusiasm and friendliness of the 100 or so participants.
There is a world of difference between this positive atmosphere of healthy human relations and what I had observed in Russia three years earlier and what I saw in India two months later!
