Tropical Displays

Dai villages mostly lie in the plains near a river or stream. Small hills are in the vicinity and occasionally villages spread along the base and lowest slopes, to reserve the flat land for their farms. The tallest and biggest building in Buddhist villages, which is what the great majority of them are, will be the temple. There may be a pagoda mounted on the nearest hilltop, but otherwise religious activity is generally restricted to the temple compound.

Traditional Dai houses were made of wood, raised on stilts a metre and a half above the ground, had large, airy rooms, sloping roofs of wood tiles, sometimes extra gables, and always an attached open-air balcony. Houses stood close to each other and had small yards enclosed by a bamboo rail fence or thick shrubbery.

This is still the norm in the remote townships, but some changes have been introduced with the recent prosperity. Now the Dai, especially in areas along the main highways, are using brick more than wood. New houses keep the traditional shape and wood-tiled, sloping roofs. But instead of wooden stilts the house is elevated by brick columns. Brick is also used for house walls and for the compound boundary, replacing the bamboo rail fence. Piped water has been installed, too, so people now bathe at home instead of in the stream.

Clumps of tall bamboo stand near the villages, providing not only refuge from the sun and heat, but also a handy and useful material for tools, utensils and furniture. At least one well lies just outside the settled area. As the Dai consider such water sources sacred they erect a small religious
monument over the well. The sight of women, in long sarongs, hair tied in a bun, carrying buckets of water on a shoulder-hoisted balance pole, is one of the prettiest vignettes in Xishuangbanna.

Rice cultivation is the main occupation of the villagers. They also raise sundry fruits and vegetables. Women do most of the field work, except for ploughing, and take the surplus to the markets. Most townships have a regular market day especially for this kind of trade. Some of the women dress nicely for market day, putting on their best brocaded sarongs and fixing flowers in their hair. The Dai are never short of flowers, for if they don't grow them at their houses they can fetch them from the forests.

About one-third of the prefecture is covered by forests, with over 5000 species of trees, over 500 medicinal plants and herbs and 100 kinds of oil-bearing plants. Rubber tree plantations take up some of this forest coverage, but they, too, contribute to regulating the weather and holding the soil of the hills. But large swaths of virgin rain forest also exist. The bulk of these are in the east and the easiest to see lies on both sides of the highway from Jinuoshan to Menglun.

Situated at the northern end of the tropical zone, Xishuangbanna's mean annual temperature is a very pleasant 21 degrees C. Cool mornings bring heavy dews and fog descends on the plains and valleys about one-third of the days of the year. The rainy season begins in May or June and lasts through October. Precipitation is greater in the first half of the monsoon but never so heavy as to cause floods. The first few post-monsoon months comprise the cool, dry season. These are the foggy morning days, but the bright sun burns it off by late morning. Skies are generally clear, but progressively hazier as hotter temperatures commence in late February. In the last several weeks before the rains the thermometre hits 35 degrees C. regularly. Yet nature is kind in Xishuangbanna, for just when the hot season demands regular refreshment, mangos, lychees, longans, pineapples and melons start pouring into the markets.