By Evan
“You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good.” Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Tiger's Mouth rice paddy terraces
When we left the brand new yet decrepit county capital of Yuanyang (元陽縣) sitting at 300 meters elevation on the bank of the dammed Red River to climb to the mile-high old county capital of Xinjie (新街鎮), we knew we were making a huge down payment of sorts. Fortunately the steep price for entry into the world of the Hani people turned out to pay extraordinary dividends.
After what seemed like an eternity of climbing, including one brief stop to help some women of the Elderly Council (老年協會) plant corn along a mountainside for villagers too old to work their own fields, we rounded the corner of a hill covered with buffalo and beheld the first city. To look at it, Old Yuanyang is just a dense line of dirty old buildings aligned along a winding ridge reminiscent of a Portuguese mountain village. The mountain dwelling Han Chinese of Zhejiang and Fujian tend to build their settlements in valleys near sources of water, and in fact, not a few include the word keng (坑), which means depression. The Hani and Yi of these parts, on the other hand, prefer to cluster villages on peaks overlooking their fields — at night lighting up the valleys like a Christmas tree laid sideways. This living arrangement is convenient for defense and landslide management, but it means that life revolves around permanent cycles of hard work. The difficulty of their situation, like a grain of sand in an oyster, has actually caused them to transform every aspect of daily life into something of pearly splendor. (more…)
