Vietnam and Yunnan ethnic minorities
Introduction
China’s Yunnan Province alone is home to some 25 officially recognised ethnic minorities, while Vietnam lists an astonishing 54 separate groups. These are the respective government figures (1) and somewhat arbitrary as most of these listed Vietnam and Yunnan minorities comprise numerous subgroups and clans – sometimes with just minor variations in language and traditional dress, on other occasions unintelligible and unrecognisable outside of DNA analysis. So, a what point should a subgroup be considered a group?
In much of the large swathe of Southeast Asia – northern Thailand, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam – these minorities are colloquially called hilltribes, or hill-tribes, as they are indeed tribal peoples who commonly occupy upland areas. We’ve never been completely happy with this term and indeed frequently it isn’t accurate anyway. While many groups, such as the Akha, Lisu, Lahu, Yao and some Hmong clans have migrated into the region in recent times, (i.e. moving into Southeast Asia from Yunnan), other ethnic groups have inhabited the region for sometimes millennia and in the case of Thailand and Laos in particular, were there long before the Thais and Laos arrived. (They too, originally, migrated from Yunnan.) Many of these groups, such as the Tai and Hmong of Vietnam formerly occupied lowland regions and valleys but were pushed into remoter mountain areas by subsequent waves of Vietnamese settlers. Certain Vietnam and Yunnan minorities you’ll encounter later on is the tour, such as the Naxi of Lijiang and Bai of Dali, still live in lowland and even urban areas.
Naxi women, Lijiang, Yunnan Although they’re all grouped together for tourism purposes – collect a set of hilltribe coasters or fridge magnets – Lao, Thai, Vietnam and Yunnan minorities comprise widely disparate ethnic families. The above listed groups, along with Yunnan’s Hani and Yi etc, fall into the Tibeto-Burmese linguistic family, Hmong and Yao are Hmong-Mien, Karen Karenic, while widely scattered groups such as the Wa and Palaung in Myanmar and western Yunnan along with the numerous Khmu and associated groups of Vietnam and Laos speak an Austronesian, Mon-Khmer, language.
Furthermore, Tai minorities in Vietnam and Yunnan are considered hill-tribe peoples even though they are identical in origin to modern-day Thais. (Note Thai is the nationality and Tai the ethnic family which includes the Lao, Shan in Myanmar, Dai in Yunnan, Tai Leu in Thailand and groups such as White, Red and Black Tai in northwestern Vietnam.) Many speak a form of archaic, albeit still largely recognisable, Thai or Tai, and all fall into yet another ethno-linguistic family – Tai-Kadai.
Black Tai girls near Vietnam’s Dien Bien Phu Just to complicate matters further, certain groups go by different names in different regions so the Yao in Thailand and Laos are referred to as Dzao in Vietnam (2) while Yunnan’s Hani are closely related to the Akha. In this case, which is the group and which is the subgroup as while southern Yunnan has a large population of Hani they are not present in Laos and northern Thailand where their linguistic cousins the Akha are widespread. (Traditional dress of the two groups differs considerably suggesting the two clans split a while back, even thought they are today only separated by a relatively narrow band of mountains.) Modern Vietnamese doesn’t help in nomenclature as they stubbornly call Tais Thai and have also seen fit to add an apostrophe to Hmong giving rise to the clumsy H’mong. Note, most contemporary, colloquial names for the minorities are provided by the dominant populations, Han Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai etc and indeed certain terms such as Miaow or Meo for Hmong are considered downright pejorative.
Some of the groups you’ll encounter on our tours
The above is a very brief and simplified overview and the subject could easily fill an entire book so we’ll move on to a destination by destination rundown of some of the minorities you’ll encounter on our Vietnam and Yunnan tours.
Bac Ha
This small town in the hills to the east of the Red River Valley is our first destination after the night sleeper train journey from Hanoi and is widely known for its weekly, Sunday market. Apart from the tourists, who not surprisingly flock to the colourful market, the overwhelming number of both shoppers and vendors come from the local Flower Hmong minority. This is a social gathering as much as anything and locals will make considerable efforts to look their best and indeed show off their embroidery skills to neighbouring villagers. Some of the teenage (therefore unmarried) girls are particularly spectacularly dressed as they manage to incorporate such features as high heels and mini-skirts into traditional Hmong gear to demonstrate both their mother or grandmother’s needlework skills, as well as how modern and trendy they are. (They may live in a bamboo hut on a far-flung mountain top but they still get Taylor Swift or Beyonce videos on their smartphones.)
Flower Hmong girl in Bac Ha. Occasional Black Hmong, Red Dzao and Thay, (Dzay or Giay), frequent the market and we’ve noticed that many of the local guides are indeed Black Hmong from Sapa. Sapa has experienced tourism for longer than Bac Ha and some of the enterprising, younger Hmong speak excellent English.
Sapa
After a short walk to a local Flower Hmong village we’ll pile back in the bus for a ride down into the Red River Valley and up the other side to mountain top Sapa. It’s less than a 100 kilometres but minorities are completely different with Black Hmong and Red Dzao villages predominating in the valleys around the old French hill station. While many Hmong groups in Laos and Thailand frequently wear Western style clothing, the Black Hmong of Sapa still favour traditional dress and it’s one of the few areas where you’ll even see Hmong men in traditional wear. Red Dzao women are also particularly striking with their red turbans and unusual plucked eye brows.
Striking Red Dzao woman who kindly agreed to pose for a photo in exchange for an orange popsicle. (It was a hot day!) Thay villages are also found in the area, (there are many alternative names including Tay, Dzay Tho etc) and are considered to be one of the earliest groups to have inhabited the area and fall into the Tai-Kadai linguistic family.
Yuanyang
Following a 2-day stay in Sapa, it’s time to cross the border, (Lao Cai – Hekou), with our first stop in Yunnan being Yuanyang District, located in the Ailao Ranges south of the Red River and famous for its thousand year old World Heritage rice terraces. The next Vietnam and Yunnan ethnic minorities we’ll come across then are the resident Hani people – responsible for the construction of these astonishing features. As mentioned, while linguistically and ethnically related to the Akha, their traditional dress bears no resemblance while their highly unusual ‘mushroom’ style houses are, in our experience, unique. (The rounded, overlapping roofs of relatively tall, thin structures creates the mushroom effect.)
Hani vendors in Xinjie Market. Dark blue colours from indigo die predominate. Hani women in traditional dress are ubiquitous among the terraces while you’ll encounter many at the region’s various, weekly village markets. Yi settlements occur towards the north, around towns such as Xinjie, so if the rotating market occurs there on the day of your visit you’ll also see plenty of very colourful Yi market goers. Another Tibeto-Burman group, the Yi are one of the most widespread and numerous of the Vietnam and Yunnan ethnic minorities and include dozens of clans and subgroups. (Lolo being one of the better known.)
Hani woman (left) and Yi (right) at Zheng Cun Market, Yuanyang District Kunming
Surprisingly, the provincial capital Kunming is another location where you’ll encounter plenty of Yi, or to be more precise the nearby Shilin Stone Forest. A very popular World Heritage site, we suspect that the large number of very well-dressed Yi women are there mainly for the benefit of Chinese visitors and indeed we’d suspect some are either local Han girls from Kunming wearing Yi outfits or tourists who’ve hired the gear for selfies.
Colourful Yi guides and souvenir sellers at the Shinlin Stone Forest, Kunming Dali
A short ride on the bullet train takes us west to Dali, home to the large ethnic Bai diaspora. Their language and culture has been heavily sinicised over the centuries to the point where ethnologists debate their original origins and linguistic group. We won’t go down that rabbit hole for now but you’ll certainly see plenty of locals wearing traditional dress as well as plenty of examples of traditional Bai architecture. Both are more authentic in outlying villages such as Xizhou than the tourist centre of Dali City where Bai costumes are de rigeur for supermarket check-out girls, hotel receptionists and even bank clerks.
Lijiang
A drive north takes us to the Naxi (pronounced natchee) heartland of Lijiang, Shuhe, Baisha and surrounding areas. Naxi, or Nakhi are celebrated for their Dongba script – said to be the World’s only living hieroglyphic script. Their spoken language is part of the Sino-Tibetan family and indeed Naxi subgroups occupy a wide swathe of the region including western Yunnan, southeastern Tibet and even parts of Sichuan Province.
Despite the preponderance of Bai and Naxi people, there are other ethnic minorities inhabiting the hills around both Dali and Lijiang and we’ve come across Hmong in Baisha, (possibly itinerant traders or merchants), Akha villages north of Tiger Leaping Gorge and what we were informed were ‘Mountain Yi’ (3) settlements on the eastern limits of the Tibetan Plateau.
Distinctive headdress of the Mountain or Northern Yi Shangri La
The city today has a large Han Chinese population although surrounding villages are, not surprisingly largely Tibetan. In so far as they comprise the majority population of the Tibetan Autonomous Region they hardly fit our Vietnam and Yunnan ethnic minorities list although their distinctive culture; dress, architecture and cuisine is interesting to see and experience.
As we said, just a few examples of Vietnam and Yunnan ethnic minorities you’re likely to come across on our tours of the region. Our offerings include a 16-day Vietnam to Tibet Overland tour, with shorter options being a 9-day Yunnan tour, South of the Clouds, or 10-day Hanoi to Kunming tour, the Red River Valley.
(1) The Encyclopedia Brittanica for example lists more than 50 groups in Yunnan.
(2) There are linguistic differences as well as obvious variations in traditional dress between Yao and Dzao although they are fundamentally the same ethnic group. Dzao in Vietnam are also subdivided into Red Dzao, Black Dzao and smaller sub sub-groups.
(3) One of the lesser known Vietnam and Yunnan ethnic minorities, they are also known as Northern Yi or Nuoso.
