Binglanggu — Li and Miao

Who the Li are

The Li are Hainan's original inhabitants. According to a widely held view among Chinese researchers, they descend from the ancient Yue peoples of southern China and came to the island across the sea around 3,000 years ago — long before the Han Chinese. Their language belongs to the Tai-Kadai family and is thus closer to Thai than to Mandarin. Today the Li number more than a million people, almost all on Hainan, divided into five subgroups with their own dialects.

That's the first thing to understand: Hainan was not a Chinese island that was settled. It was a foreign island that was conquered. The Han came from the north and settled on the coasts; the Li withdrew into the mountains. In remote mountain areas some Li communities lived until the 1950s in social forms going back to old matrilineal clans.

The Miao

The Miao came much later and not by choice. In the 16th century the Ming dynasty moved Miao soldiers from Guangxi to Hainan to put down uprisings. Many stayed and settled in the mountains, between and above the Li. Both groups still live side by side today, with their own languages, clothing and cuisine.

The park

Binglanggu means “Betel Nut Valley”. The park was founded in 1998 and lies in the Ganshiling nature reserve on the border between Sanya and Baoting County, about 28 kilometres from the city centre. It covers a good 300 hectares among betel palms and tropical rainforest at about 500 metres altitude — which is why it is noticeably cooler here than on the coast.

In 2015 Binglanggu became the first minority-culture site in China to be awarded the top 5A tourism rating. It is divided into a village of intangible cultural heritage, the more than hundred-year-old Li village of Ganshi, a Miao village in the rainforest and a farming area. Even the entrance gate tells a story: it has the shape of the character 人, person, and is modelled on Dalishen, the strongman god of the Li creation story.

On show are ten crafts and customs recognised in China as national intangible cultural heritage — from spinning, dyeing, weaving and embroidery to making bark cloth, making fire by drilling wood and primitive pottery, all the way to building boat-shaped houses, bamboo music and the festival on the third day of the third lunar month.

Weaving

Li brocade is considered one of China's oldest textile techniques. In 2009 UNESCO placed the Li techniques of spinning, dyeing, weaving and embroidery on its list of intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding — not the regular list, but the one for acutely endangered traditions.

Weaving is done on a backstrap loom: the weaver sits on the ground and stretches the warp between her feet and a strap around her hips, so that she herself becomes part of the loom. The most elaborate pieces are the “dragon quilts”, large brocades used in ceremonies. Even older is bark cloth: fabric made of beaten tree bark, which the Li produced before they wove.

The patterns are written down nowhere. The Li had no script; knowledge passed from mother to daughter by watching and copying. If a weaver dies without passing it on, her pattern is lost. That's why one of the master weavers in the park has trained more than 150 students and runs courses for young people in the school holidays.

The tattoos

Chinese cultural scholars call them “Dunhuang frescoes on the skin”. Li girls were traditionally tattooed in several stages over the years. One of the last, Fu Jinhua, described it in a report: the face at eight, the neck at eleven, the chest at twelve, the legs at thirteen and fourteen. She started in 1952 — making her part of the very last generation. After 1950 no more girls were tattooed on Hainan. Fu Jinhua weaves in Binglanggu today.

Tattooing took place in autumn on an auspicious day in the girl's parental home, done by an experienced tattooist. The patterns were first drawn on and then pricked in with bamboo or rattan thorns; the blue-black colour was made from plant sap and charcoal. 37 face patterns have been recorded, plus patterns for arms and legs — frogs, snails, insects and the strongman god Dalishen.

There are several explanations for their meaning, which don't exclude each other: the totem of one's own group, recognition by the ancestors and, according to a common interpretation, protection against abduction. By old belief the ancestors would not recognise a woman without tattoos as theirs after death; women without patterns had lines drawn on with charcoal before burial. And a young man could read from a woman's patterns whether she descended from the same ancestor — and whether marriage was allowed.

Around 2010, according to surveys by Hainan University, about 2,000 tattooed women were still alive, the youngest then around 70. It was the largest living group of traditionally tattooed people among the indigenous peoples of the Pacific. Today the youngest are over eighty. In a few years there will be no one left who carries these patterns on their own skin.

What else there is

The boat-shaped houses of the Li, made of bamboo and straw, with roofs reaching down to the ground — the shape of an upturned boat, as protection in a climate with typhoons. The longgui, small houses where unmarried young people lived and courted each other. Granaries more than a hundred years old. The bamboo-pole dance, in which two rows of poles clap together in rhythm and people jump between them. The nose flute, played with breath through the nose, and Shanlan rice wine made from mountain rice.

And the betel nut the valley is named after. It is still chewed on Hainan today — red teeth, a stimulating effect and a considerable risk of mouth cancer that is rarely mentioned. In the afternoon there is also a large open-air show on the culture of the Li and Miao.

An honest look

Binglanggu is a commercial culture park with admission, show times and souvenir shops, not an organically grown village. At the same time the women there are genuine bearers of a genuine tradition, who earn money with their work and pass on their knowledge. Such places may even be necessary for weaving to have a future at all. Both are true — and precisely this contradiction is more interesting than either half alone.