Tujia Erotic

The Tujia call themselves Bizika — "the local people" — a name that carries the weight of their argument with history. For centuries the imperial bureaucracy in Beijing classified them as Han, or as some indeterminate frontier population; official recognition as a distinct minority came only in 1957. They number around eight million today, concentrated in the folded ridges where Hunan, Hubei, Guizhou and Chongqing meet, a country of limestone gorges and terraced hillsides drained by the Wu and You rivers. The terrain shaped them: Tujia villages historically clustered in defensible valleys, the wooden stilt-house or diaojiaolou cantilevered out over slopes too steep to build on flat.

Their language sits awkwardly in the Sino-Tibetan family. Linguists place it in the Tibeto-Burman branch but cannot agree on closer relatives, and it has no traditional script — Tujia history was sung, not written. The language is also disappearing. Most ethnic Tujia now speak only a regional Mandarin or the local Xiang and Southwestern Mandarin dialects; perhaps seventy thousand still command Northern Tujia, and Southern Tujia survives in a handful of villages with a few thousand speakers at most. The recognition that arrived in 1957 came late enough that the cultural marker most groups guard hardest was already slipping.

Religious life runs through Nuo, a pre-Buddhist exorcistic tradition the Tujia share with several neighboring peoples but have made particularly their own. Nuo masters wear carved wooden masks to drive out illness, settle debts with ancestors, and open the new year; the ceremonies are theatrical, percussive, and old enough that scholars treat surviving Nuo opera as a living fragment of pre-Han ritual culture. Layered on top are ancestor veneration, white-tiger worship — the white tiger is the Tujia totem, descended in legend from their founding chief Lin Jun — and a steady undercurrent of Han Buddhist and Daoist borrowing.

Two customs are worth knowing. The baishou or hand-waving dance, performed at lunar new year, is a long collective choreography that mimes hunting, planting, weaving and war, and is the closest thing the Tujia have to a national epic in motion. And the crying marriage: a bride traditionally weeps, formally and at length, for days before her wedding, joined by her mother, sisters and aunts in a structured lament that is part grief, part performance, part political commentary on the marriage itself. Brides judged insufficiently tearful were once thought ill-mannered.