The Torch Festival

Mid-summer is not a very busy time in the farmer's annual work cycle. The main crops planted earlier are still growing, or at best just beginning to ripen. Since it's still the rainy season construction is put off until the autumn. So it is not surprising that this is the time of the year when people entertain themselves, when some of their biggest festivals take place. Yunnan's major summer celebration, thanks to its large Yi population, is the Torch Festival, held the 24th day of the 6th lunar month (late July or early August). The Yi are not the only ones to observe it. The Naxi, Bai, Lisu, Lahu and even some Hani do, too. But the Yi are more spread out in the province and the Torch Festival has become more associated with them.

Several different stories detail the origin of this festival. The most common tale among the northern branches of the Yi attributes it to the wrath of a deity and the measures taken to counter it. According to them the first Yi ancestor, called Chikareu in Liangshan and Meigo in much of Chuxiong Prefecture, aroused the jealousy of one of Heaven's deities by his success in establishing a lifestyle for his people. The god then challenged the Yi hero to a wrestling match and lost. Angry at this defeat the god dispatched hordes of mosquitoes to plague the Yi. But the Yi hero advised the people to light and wave torches to drive them away. Every year the Yi commemorate their triumph by lighting torches, singing, dancing and staging sporting events like wrestling, pony races and inducing pairs of bulls or goats to square off and duel.

Besides the villages the festival is also celebrated in many of the county seats and townships, often subsidised by local governments, which means lavish entertainment. Chuxiong city authorities bus in Yi performers from many different sub-groups, with hence a variety of colourful costumes, and stages its programme in the new park northwest of the city. Downtown they stage a fireworks show and Yi and Han in the city join in ring dances in the parks.

The Sani of Lunan have a separate origin story. It begins with a fiendish monster riding roughshod over the people. Whenever the Sani rose in revolt the monster massacred all the attackers. Secure in his mountaintop stronghold, possessing magic powers against humans, the fiend carried on his deviltry with impunity. But one day a Yi hero advised his people to fix torches to the horns of all their goats and drive them up the mountain from all directions. Unable to work his diabolic magic against goats, only humans, the fiend was trapped in the flames and burnt to death. On the anniversary of their victory the Sani hold their Torch Festival.

No one makes a grander show of it, for only the Sani have such a magnificent setting for it like the Stone Forest. Hundreds of dancers and musicians perform before tens of thousands of spectators, local villagers and tourists alike. Wrestling matches and bull-fighting contests augment the daytime entertainment, while at night the show is illuminated by bonfires and torches, casting shadows on the stone columns and pinnacles behind the dancers. Elsewhere that night long lines of torch-bearing youths make a procession around the shores of Oblong Lake and in every village bonfires blaze and the youth sing and dance. The Torch Festival is the Sani's greatest sound-and-light spectacle of the year, particularly in the Stone Forest, but to one degree or another, all over Lunan County.