Types of Housing

Most ethnic minority people live in the rural parts of Yunnan, in villages or hamlets. The family house or compound is the norm, rather than the apartment buildings which dominate the cities. On the high plains and secluded valleys of the northern half of the province, minority people's houses usually resemble those of their Han neighbours. The typical rural Yunnanese compound is made of mud brick, with wooden posts, doors, beams and floors, with moderately sloping roofs of clay tiles. Among the Han and those people with Han-style ancestral veneration traditions, inside the front door the family ancestral altar stands against the back wall of the front room. This also serves as a receiving room for guests and sometimes as the family dining room. Besides the kitchen, the other rooms are bedrooms, including a portion of the rooms upstairs. The other second floor rooms are used for storage.

A mud brick wall, 1.5 to 2 metres high, topped by tiles or pine boughs to protect it from the rain, encloses a yard adjacent to the house. Here the farmer keeps his animals, so a cattle shed, pig pen or chicken coop may stand within. In the front part of the wall is the entry gate, usually roofed and sometimes sporting decorative carvings on the struts and brackets. Houses are close to one another in most villages, separated by narrow stone paths, (paved in richer villages), but the enclosed yard affords a measure of privacy.

Variations exist in this pattern. The bricks are not always baked and sometimes they are made of clay. Usually houses stand on stone foundations, but in recent years new houses have begun using cement for the foundation (and sometimes the whole building). In the northwest the walls are constructed of rammed earth. The building crew places two long parallel boards on the ground spaced as far apart as the desired width of the wall. Then men and women bring baskets full of dirt and empty them into the trench between the boards. Other men stand above the filled trench and pound the dirt with poles to pack it tight. When it reaches the level of the top of the boards they remove the boards and remount them one width higher. The new trough is filled, rammed tight and so on until the wall is finished. The last task is to tamp down the sides to give them a smooth finish.

Northwest Yunnan has more architectural diversity concentrated in the two prefectures of Lijiang and Diqing than anywhere else in the province. Every major ethnic group has its own house type. On the Tibetan Plateau two basic house types are in use. On the plains of Zhongdian County the Tibetans build broad, two-story houses with big wooden posts, thick walls, fairly flat roofs of wood tiles, within a yard enclosed by a compound wall. People ascend to the second floor to a capacious receiving room with a fairly high ceiling, fireplace, wooden cabinets and low tables, with wooden water buckets and butter churns in the corners. Yaks and cattle live underneath, ponies, pigs, chickens and dogs in the yard. The outer walls are whitewashed and windows are small, but often covered with carved and painted screens. Tibetans in the more mountainous Deqin County use the same materials and also whitewash the outer walls. But their houses are bigger, quadrangular, often three stories and with two or more cubicles standing at the corners of the flat roof. Homes here look more like fortresses.

Off the Plateau, the Yi and Mosuo traditionally favour the log cabin. First they cut the logs to size and mark them with numbers to indicate their order. When constructing the house they lay the logs at right angles, notched into each other, not nailed. The slightly angled roofs are of wooden tiles and held down with stones. Among the Yi a rail fence encloses a large compound yard, part of which is allotted to vegetable patches, and houses stand far apart. Mosuo cabins are larger but compounds smaller and usually quite close to each other. The biggest building is the single-story main house, while the auxiliary buildings are two stories.

In Lijiang the old town of Dayan is an exhibit of classic Chinese urban architecture-wood and stone, tile roofs, sliding doors, small walled compounds with ornate gate and interior garden. At each apex of the roof a carved, often painted, symbolic pair of fish hangs down. Some are stylised shapes. Some are quite detailed. The fish represents water and is supposed to magically protect the house from the fire of the lightning demon. Occasionally these are yin-yang symbols instead. If they are staunch Party supporters house owners hang up red stars, just as they replaced portraits of the traditional door gods on the front gate with posters of the People's liberation Army soldiers.

Bai architecture is distinguished from Naxi by its preponderant use of stone. Around Dali it could even be marble, for the area was long ago famous for its marble. In fact, the Chinese word for it literally means "Dali stone." Consequently, though the Bai use wood on the front walls and compound gates, the prevailing colour is light grey, in contrast to the dark red of Dayan's homes. Bai houses roof the compound wall with grey tiles and paint arabesques below the house roof apex. The front gate is often elaborately carved and painted and sometimes, especially in the Dali area, so are the posts and doors of the front wall of the house itself.

In the mountains of central Yunnan, particularly Yi villages, the mud-brick houses are quadrangular, with the interior central part open to the sky. The main receiving room is behind this open, and usually sunken, courtyard and the kitchen is to the side. Sleeping rooms are upstairs and the roofs are flat, used for drying crops. It's possible to reach the end of the block by stepping from roof to roof, as Yi houses are packed against each other and have no adjacent yards.

Ailaoshan dwellings, Dai in the valleys, Yi, Hani and others in the hills, are mud-brick houses on stone foundations. Roofs are flat, also used for drying crops, but part of the roof is surmounted by an extra room, with a sharply sloped thatched roof. The hearth and brick oven of the kitchen is just inside the doorway. The first room is the receiving room. Behind it is the parents' bedroom. Other rooms are for sleeping or storage.

South and southwest the proportion of wood increases and bamboo is also employed. The Dai houses of Dehong and Lincang are clay-brick and rest on the ground. But their hill neighbours use wood and bamboo and raise the house on stilts, with thatched or wooden tiles.for the roof. Lincang Wa houses have tall, steeply sloped, thatched roofs that overhang nearly to the ground. A tablet-shaped section is cut away in front of the steps to the front door. But in Simao the Wa roofs are less angled, the houses stand slightly higher off the ground, and have an attached balcony of split bamboo. This is the same model of the Aini houses of Xishuangbanna, which often have wood tile roofs, though, in the manner of the Dai houses in the plains.

Dai in Banna lived in wooden houses on stilts with rail fences around the compound. This is still the style in remoter villages, but the past decade the Dai have replaced wood with brick and installed high brick walls around their yards. The new houses are raised on brick piles, but the general shape and the sloping, wood-tiled roofs remain. The classic, broad wooden house, raised on stilts, is still popular among some of the Zhuang of Wenshan, who also have those on the ground, as well as brick ones in the eastern townships, but smaller and different in appearance from the Han brick houses.