Zhuang Erotic

The Zhuang are China's largest ethnic minority — somewhere around eighteen million people, concentrated in the karst country of Guangxi in the south. That landscape matters: limestone pinnacles, river valleys, terraced rice on slopes that look impossible to farm and have been farmed for two thousand years anyway. The Zhuang are wet-rice cultivators by deep tradition, and a great deal of their material culture, ritual calendar, and village layout still tracks the agricultural year rather than the official one.

Linguistically they sit on the Chinese side of a much larger family. Zhuang is Kra–Dai, the same branch as Thai and Lao, which means their nearest linguistic cousins live across borders to the south rather than among the Han neighbors who surround them. There is no single Zhuang language so much as a chain of related tongues — Northern and Southern Zhuang are not always mutually intelligible — and the standardized written form using Latin letters is a twentieth-century construction. Older Zhuang writing borrowed and reshaped Chinese characters into sawndip, "raw characters," which scholars are still cataloging.

Religion is where the group's separateness from the Han mainstream is most visible. Moism — the indigenous Zhuang faith, sometimes called Shigongism — centers on a creator figure, Buluotuo, and is mediated by ritual specialists who chant from manuscripts handed down within lineages. It absorbed Daoist and Buddhist elements over the centuries without being absorbed by them. Ancestor veneration runs through everything; so does a working belief in spirits attached to particular hills, rivers, and old trees. The bronze drum, cast by Zhuang ancestors as far back as the Warring States period, is still a ritual object rather than a museum piece.

The annual Sanyuesan festival, on the third day of the third lunar month, is the public face of Zhuang culture for outsiders — antiphonal singing matches between young men and women, dyed sticky rice in five colors, courtship that historically led somewhere. Less visible from outside is the matrilineal undertow in some Zhuang sub-groups, the persistence of buluofujia — the practice of a bride not moving permanently into her husband's household until she becomes pregnant — and the network of geomancers, song-masters, and herbalists who hold authority parallel to the official village structure. The Zhuang have been inside the Chinese state for a very long time, and remain, on their own terms, not quite of it.