Basha Miao Village

Basha Miao village is a pure Miao village with more than 300 families. Because of its remote location, it still retains the ancient and primitive way of life.

The wooden buildings in the village are simple and simple, surrounded by dense forests, and the villagers are all Miao people. Their clothes are primitive and their hair is strange. They are known as the hair style of Han fashion in Qin Dynasty.

The most distinctive feature of Basha is the makeup and hairstyle of Miao men. Basha men attach great importance to their hair bun, which is the most important gender symbol in men's clothing.

There are many children in Basha who like to ask tourists for money and don't recommend it.

Basha Miao Village

Basha Miao tribe is located in five stockaded villages at the foot of moon mountain, 6 kilometers south of Congjiang County, Guizhou Province.

Basha Miao village still has such ancient customs as wearing a firearm (Basha's holding a gun has been specially approved by the public security organ), shaving head with a scythe, and worshiping ancient trees. There are 505 households and 2548 people in Basha Miao village.

Basha Miao village is known as "the last gunner tribe in the sunshine".

Historical evolution

It is said that Chiyou, the ancestor of the Miao people, had three sons, and the Basha people were the descendants of the third son. At that time, Chiyou was defeated by the Yellow Emperor and led the tribe to start the millennium long march to the southwest. The ancestors of the Basha Miao people are the forerunners of the great migration, a branch of the Jiuli tribe. They are brave enough to carve the road and fight against the bear. Basha men advocate military force. They usually wear self-made right cardigan with no collar, copper button and blue cloth clothes, straight trousers and blue cloth clothes. All the year round, they carry waist knives and fire guns on their shoulders. They go hunting in the mountains and fish in the rivers. He is very good at mountain climbing and hunting. His clothing, food, housing and transportation are taken from the mountains and valleys. They attach great importance to their physical strength, hunting and farming skills, but also with special emphasis on clothing and body signs.

Basha men attach great importance to their hair bun, which is called "hugua" in Basha Miao language. It is the most important gender symbol in men's clothing - shaving most of the hair around men's head, leaving only the middle part of the hair as a bun, and maintaining this style for life. It is said that this kind of dress is handed down from the age of Chiyou, and it is also the oldest male hair style that can be seen in China so far. Some Japanese ethnologists and folklorists came to Qiandongnan, and the Basha people also aroused their strong interest. Because the Japanese samurai costumes are almost the same as those of the Basha people, some people think that the ancestors of the Japanese are Basha people. Basha women's dress is also very exquisite, with antique embroidery patterns, silver collars and bracelets. The bun on Basha's head symbolizes the trees growing on the mountain, and the green cloth clothes on his body symbolize the beautiful bark. Basha people believe that such a comfortable life is mainly due to the precious land chosen by their ancestors, especially the shelter of the forest where they were born and raised. So Basha people especially worship trees and worship them as gods. Basha people said: "man comes from nature, belongs to nature; life does not bring a silk, death does not take an inch of wood." Since ancient times, Basha has never felled trees indiscriminately. Sometimes it is not allowed to think that it is also limited to the needs of life and production, and the rest are restricted. Although national highway 321 was completed in 1965, no one dared to go to bashalai to pull a truck of timber. The villagers were short of oil and salt. They just went up the mountain to trim branches or cut down some dead trees. They walked to the county town to retail. They never used a car to pull them.

Basha's unique "action" of cutting down trees was in 1976, when the memorial hall of Chairman Mao was built in Beijing, and people of all ethnic groups all over the country enthusiastically contributed materials. With boundless respect for the chairman, Basha people resolutely decided to present a thousand year old Cinnamomum camphora tree with a diameter of 1.2 meters, which is regarded as a great God in the forest, to the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall. When the camphor tree leaves the village, all the people in the village run to the two sides of the road to watch until the dust has cleared. To commemorate, an octagonal Memorial pavilion was built at the site of the tree, which is "dedicated to Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, camphor wood Memorial Pavilion."

geographical environment

position

Basha Miao village is located in an elevation of 550 meters on the outskirts of Congjiang County, Guizhou Province.

climate

The best tourism season of Basha is subtropical humid climate with mild seasons. July is the hottest, with an average temperature of 25 ℃; January is the coldest, with an average temperature of 5 ℃; the annual average temperature is between 14 ℃ and 18.5 ℃. The best tourism season is spring, summer and autumn.

Cultural tradition

festival

There is a new festival of eating in Basha. On the 13th or 14th of the seventh month of the lunar calendar, every family goes to the fields to pick up the ears of grain, shell them into rice, cook them into porridge or dried rice, offer sacrifices to their ancestors with ducks and fish, and then have meals with the whole family. There are also Lusheng Festival, ghost festival and other festivals. There are bullfighting, acacia, swing, collective pig, adult shaving and other customs, especially the tool for hair shaving is sickle. Ethnic crafts include bamboo lunch boxes, copper needle boxes, embroidered hunting bags, horn powder cartridges, etc.

1. Yingshan red Festival (March 3 of the lunar calendar): it's the day to sow seeds after the Spring Festival, and it's also the day to fall in love (three days in a row).

2. Fresh food festival (June 12 of the lunar calendar): Basha still keeps the tradition of fish farming in paddy fields, which Zhang Wuchang thinks is the traditional wisdom of the Chinese people most in line with economics. At this time, the rice field has finished transplanting seedlings, and the fish are also fat, hence the name. The activity is swing. A rope made of straw is hung on a tree. When it swings, it must face the sun. For five consecutive days, from day to night, it is a festival for young people. At that time, there will be 40-50 swings playing in the forest at the same time.

3. Lusheng Festival (November 19 of the lunar calendar): the rice is ripe and harvested to the barn. The activities are killing cattle (November 18) and bullfighting (November 20). All people must wear national costumes to play Lusheng in Lusheng hall, dance Lusheng dance and participate in Lusheng competition (one Lusheng team for each village). On November 19, the young man picked up his favorite girl for dinner at home. On November 20, he went to see the bullfight together. When he came back, he went to each other's home hand in hand for dinner.

4. Zhehe (September to October of the lunar calendar): at this time, the glutinous rice is ripe and hung on the huge rice after harvest, and it can only be hung by men. In Basha, I've seen pictures about folding rice. It's a scene of bumper harvest. In front of every house, there are golden rice drying.

5. The year of Miao (the first day of December in the lunar calendar): This is the traditional Miao new year, which has gradually declined in recent years, far less lively than the Spring Festival. The activity is killing chickens and sheep. Young men and women go to the mountain to light a bonfire and fall in love for 11 consecutive days.

Love and marriage

In Basha, men and women love freely and freely before marriage, and they have no scruples. They use songs to meet friends and express their feelings. Love songs and flying songs are the skills of everyone. The boys compete with each other when they are on the tour, and try to win the girl's favor like a male bird. During the spring planting and autumn harvest season, Basha's unique "troublemaking girl" began. Each boy and girl took their own bamboo plaques and made an appointment with each other to help transplant seedlings and harvest rice. During the day, I went to work in the fields. At night, I gathered at the host's house to help, drinking, singing and holding girls. A guy can hold several girls at the same time. Girls are also willing to be hugged by young people. Which girl is hugged more by young people shows that she is very attractive. There will be many young men who want to marry her. It's a shame if a girl hasn't been held by a young man. If a girl is hugged by a young man from a foreign country, she is a charming beauty in the eyes of Basha people! Therefore, whenever a young man from a foreign country comes to Basha, the girls will tease him in various ways and ask him to hold the girl in Basha enough. Sometimes some timid people are scared to run away by the generous Basha girl, and the girls will laugh. In the eyes of artists and tourists, Basha is a typical example of cultural "otherness". Row upon row of towering rice racks in the village have become the focus of artists and photographers during the harvest of rice in autumn. The games of women who work in traditional ways and children with "chicken keys" hair can also bring fresh feelings to visitors. Visitors here are surprised by the beautiful and strange environment of Basha village, and are interested in the simple life of Miao people in the village, so they often linger in Basha. Basha is strange and rich. If you go deep into it, you can feel the past, present and future of a nation.

Gourd Pipe Dance

Basha people worship the sun god. They step on Lusheng every time they meet. Men and women line up to face the place where the sun rises. They step back seven steps before playing Lusheng.

Lusheng hall, a flat place on the hillside beside the stockade, is as big as half a basketball court. This is the sacred place of Basha, where major sacrificial activities are held. From afar, I heard the sound of drums and horns from the mountain. Follow the music and walk up to the ancient Lusheng hall on the top of the mountain. Basha people are dancing a group dance with music. The men lined up in a circle, holding large and small Lusheng in both hands, while playing, shaking their bodies rhythmically; the women were outside, holding handkerchief in both hands, moving and jumping with the rhythm. The sonorous and powerful Lusheng ancient music sounds like the sound of swords and spears, the great slashing and the great slashing, and it's majestic, just like the clarion call of charging on the battlefield; the dance of women is quite fast, rotating, jumping, moving and fluctuating, and it looks like a tiger descending from the mountain.

coming-of-age ceremony

Every boy in Basha must hold a rite of passage between the age of 7 and 15. On that day, the boy invited several friends of similar age to go up the mountain to fight birds, go down to the field to catch loach and touch the mountain stream

Chinese PinYin : Ba Sha Miao Zhai