The Dai of the Valleys

The Dai in the valleys of the Red River and other streams in Ailaoshan are animist, belonging to three main sub-groups. The Dai in Xinping, Yuanjiang and Jianshui Counties are collectively designated Huayao Dai. Their women wear the most colourful costume of any Dai group in the province. The outfit consists of a long-sleeved, short-front jacket over a long tunic, black sarong and colourful hip-wrapper, plus a variety of headgear. The lapels and hem of the jacket and the body of the tunic is heavily decorated with applique or embroidery, and in some cases silver studs. For festivals they add silver chains and pendants. Lots of colour is also used on the piece covering the hips and sometimes on the hem of the sarong. It is this concentration of colour between the waist and hips that gave them the name Huayao-Flowery Waist.

Some sub-groups wear turbans. Others knot their hair and tuck it inside a round cap, embroidered on top. Some wear conical caps of split bamboo or, as in Xinping and western Yuanjiang, a round one, slightly bowl-shaped, with a small point in the centre. These women frequently tuck small baskets of split bamboo into their belts at the back of the waist when they go to the field or the market.

In Lower Ailaoshan the Black Dai women dress somewhat simpler, but can be just as eye-catching. Their black, side-fastened jackets are short-sleeved, with wide strips of red and white or light blue from the shoulders to the edge of the sleeves. The collar and a broad band below the lapel are also appliqueed with bright silk, some-times embroidered or silver-studded. The jacket is slightly split at the sides and embroidered on the side hem and the bottom. The plain black sarong drops to just below the knees, and on the calves they wear brightly embroidered leggings, in cross-stitch patterns, no two pair alike.

Throughout Ailaoshan the Huayao Dai and Black Dai live in box-like, two-story, flat-roofed houses. They do not have the rooftop storeroom of the Yi and Hani, though. The roof is used to dry crops and laundry, of course, but it sometimes serves as an arena for relaxing or receiving guests. Some Dai villages lie a couple hundred metres above the river, usually sited where the slopes are gentler. But they are terrace-builders, too, like the folks higher up, with water engineered to flow into every field.

The exception is the smaller White Dai sub-group in Laomeng and in the valley of the Tengtiao River in the Mengla vicinity. They build houses on stilts, as in Banna, using wood, bamboo and thatch. Ancestral altars stand in their yards. Ther women dress like the Black Dai in Vietnam, in long black sarongs with a border strip in a bright colour, long-sleeved, pastel-coloured, front-fastened jacket, with silver buckles. The difference is the headgear, which is a simple scarf rather than the elaborate, embroidered black cloth that covers the heads of Black Dai women in Vietnam.

The Dai never choose a settlement site that is not beside running water. Not only do they want their water source close at hand, they channel it to flow though their villages. At Qimaba, a large Dai township in southwest Luchun, whose 100+ families moved here from Shiping County around a century ago, the stream has been directed to flow through a network of channels that runs alongside nearly every house. And from there it proceeds to irrigate the terraces just a little downhill from the edge of the residential area.

With their proximity to streams the life of the Dai includes a lot of fishing. Even the flooded terraces in the dry season are a source of small fish. To catch these, and the somewhat larger species in the streams and rivers, the Dai traditionally use a variety of traps made from split bamboo. Nowadays in some areas the men use battery-operated electric rods to stun the fish and nets to sweep them up. But on a walk though a Dai village one will still see bunches of fish traps of sundry shapes hanging from the house walls.