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Sani Life
Lunan is a Yi Autonomous County. In 1998 its name was officially changed to Shilin Yi Autonomous County, but the local people still refer to their town and county as Lunan, to distinguish it from the park Shilin. Its main inhabitants are a branch of the Yi called Sani, with smaller numbers of another branch, the Axi, living on the southern fringes of the county. Because of the Stone Forest's tourist draw, the Sani are one of the best known of Yunnan's ethnic minorities, and certainly one of the most publicised. Their colourful costumes are easy to recognise, for the guides don them, the crafts sellers wear them, the performers dance in them, and in Kunming shops sell them and portrait photographers in the parks lend them to customers so they can have their pictures taken dressed in shaoshu minzu style.
The woman's costume consists of a long-sleeved, side fastened jacket with a back flap that reaches to the knees. This is tied with a belt with embroidered ends hanging over the jacket flap and worn with trousers, a turban, and in cooler weather a cape of sheepskin or palm fibre. Younger women prefer bright or pastel colours, older women black or blue. Turbans indicate marital status, for the unmarried wear ones with brighter colours, actually symbolising a rainbow, and two triangular tabs, one above each ear, that the married women's turbans don't have. Arabesques in different forms and colours are appliqueed onto the tabs on the turbans and the tabs connecting the cape to its strap. The same are also attached to their shoulder bags.
Men's costume is less distinctive. The main piece is a white vest with pockets, usually of unbleached hemp or "fireweed" cloth, wide trousers, ordinary shirt and a head scarf. Nowadays the vest may be made from cotton, for making thread from hemp or "fireweed" (so named because it is used as tinder for starting cooking fires) is tremendously labour-intensive. Sani women claim more than sixty steps are required to turn the hemp plant into thread, mostly soakings in various baths and subsequent rinsings. They then weave it on a simple, narrow, bamboo-frame loom, standing up to do the work. The resultant cloth, however, is one of the strongest, most durable to be found in Yunnan. Sani women are also first-class embroiderers, using both the cross-stitch and
the pictorial styles to create patterns on belt ends, shoulder bags and particularly baby carriers.
Getting away from the tourist zone around Shilin, Sani villages usually lie around ponds, sometimes with a stone grove as a backdrop. Their houses are one- and two-story, mud-brick, with tile roofs. Some have a beehive built into the back of the house and gather the honey in spring. They raise rice, maize, tobacco and vegetables and tend flocks of goats, the milk from which they turn into Lunan's mingcai-fried goat cheese (rubin). Some villages are Christian, the results of 19th century French missionaries. The largest church stands in Guishan, in the eastern part of the county.
Guishan stages a modest Sunday market, but most business takes place in Lunan, which holds market days every Wednesday and Saturday. Then tractor-trailers and trucks bring in the villagers, with their animals, vegetables, sugar cane, bamboo poles, straw stools, grain and so on. The town is still rather quiet and pleasant, featuring a statue of Ashima in its centre. The tree-lined avenue running south ends at a huge, red brick gate, marking the entrance to the lanes of the old town.
The Sani are justly renowned for their music and dance. Every Kunming restaurant with a floor show includes at least one Sani dance, even if the performers happen to be Han. For accompaniment the males play three-stringed guitars with a long neck and deep, bucket-shaped box, flutes and gourd-pipes. The girls may play gourd-pipes, too, or else just make music whistling with leaves, making a sound like a high-pitched clarinet.
The visitor may wonder why Lunan displays a statue of the Sani heroine Ashima, why one of the stone pillars in Shilin is named after her, even why her portrait adorns packages of the local cigarette, also named after her. It's because Ashima embodies all the ideals of the Sani woman. In the long poem devoted to her she is an adept spinner and weaver, is so close to nature she can converse with the animals, is respectful and attentive to her parents, and is good at singing, dancing and playing the mo-sheen, a kind of bamboo Jew's harp. Her attributes attract the attention of a local despot, who kidnaps her and tries to persuade her to marry him. With the aid of her brother she escapes,but the wicked chief controls the rivers, which he causes to flood. The pair are trapped in the Stone Forest and Ashima is swept away, then metamorphosed into the rock that bears her name.
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