The Emperor Far Away (24 page)

Few people stayed in at night and my fondest memories of Jinghong are of the evenings spent eating delicious sour and spicy Dai food in open-air restaurants on the banks of the Mekong. We would sit for hours on low stools talking and toasting each other with rice wine. Each glass would be prefaced with everyone shouting ‘
Shuay! Shuay!
’, the Dai equivalent of ‘cheers’, a toast which has been adopted by the other minorities too. Compared to the often insular Han, spending time with Banna’s ethnic groups is refreshing because they are both more outgoing and more inclusive.

As time passed, though, I started to suspect I was being told only so much and that what I was seeing and hearing was somehow censored for foreigners. I wondered at first if I was just being paranoid. But as I widened my social circle, I began to realise that acting one way in public and another in private is second nature for Banna’s minorities. There are invisible barriers erected between the different ethnic groups and the Han and other outsiders. It was as if the hundreds of Burmese jade shops were a metaphor for Jinghong, that everyone here was hiding behind a false front.

16

Dailand

Of all Jinghong’s different ethnic groups, it is the Dai who are the most impenetrable. Alone of Banna’s major minorities, they are not a hill people. The Dai are historically sedentary farmers, valley dwellers who cultivate rice, pineapples and other tropical fruits. And unlike the hill tribes, the Dai did once have their own state, Sipsongpanna, although it spread beyond borders and has left them dispersed on either side of the frontiers between Banna, Myanmar and Laos, as well as northern Thailand.

But Banna remains the heartland of the Tai Lue, the name the Dai from here are known by outside China. From at least the twelfth century until 1953, Sipsongpanna was ruled from Jinghong by a monarch known as the Chao Fa, or the ‘Prince of the Heavens’. He abdicated under pressure from the CCP and lived out his days in Kunming, while many of his relatives moved to Thailand. His wooden palace above the Mekong was torn down during the Cultural Revolution and replaced with a rubber farm.

Rubber, and before that tea, first brought the Han to Banna in significant numbers. In the 1950s, the government started taking over the long-established tea plantations around Simao, a town a couple hours north of Jinghong sometimes called Pu’er after the famous brand of tea grown there. The following decade saw the beginning of the deforestation of Xishuangbanna, as land was cleared for the first rubber farms. They were overwhelmingly staffed by Han migrants from Hunan Province in the south of China.

Many of the Chinese in Jinghong are their descendants and it is they who are behind most of the changes to the city. Until a decade or so ago, Manting Lu in the centre of Jinghong was lined with the same wooden Dai houses which had been there when the street was a village called Ban Tin. ‘In 2008, we were forced to leave Manting Lu,’ a Dai woman named Li Qingmei told me. ‘Our house was demolished and replaced by a hotel run by Hunanese people. It was the last traditional Dai house left on Manting Lu.’

Li Qingmei was actually half Dai: her father was Han. But she had been raised by her mother and considered herself Dai, always dressing in the sarong-like patterned long skirt and embroidered top Dai women wear on formal occasions or holidays. Along with her husband, she ran a restaurant and bar. Shy initially, over time she revealed a teasing smile and personality.

At first, Li Qingmei seemed resigned to the loss of her home and the fact the Hunanese in Jinghong run virtually all the hotels and karaoke bars. Later, she voiced her true thoughts. ‘The local people aren’t happy with all the Han coming here. It’s more competition, so it’s harder for Dai people to start businesses now. And the Han tend to rent land and houses from other Han,’ she told me one evening. ‘You know, Dai people are Buddhist and easy-going and more concerned about their quality of life than the Han are. Han people are more aggressive and more focused on getting rich.’

In turn, the Chinese of Jinghong regard the Dai as indolent, a common criticism of minorities everywhere in China. And it is partly true. Banna’s fecund landscape ensures that farming remains profitable and the Dai have also benefited by renting or selling some of their land to the rubber companies. Their lives are generally far easier than those of Banna’s hill tribes and the minorities elsewhere in Yunnan, as well as most rural residents of inland China.

Few Dai are willing to admit they enjoy a comfortable lifestyle, but Banna’s less fortunate peoples are happy to say so. The 300,000 Dai are the largest ethnic group in Banna and that complicates their relationship with the other minorities, who are jealous of their status as the leading minority. Animosity between the Dai and the hill tribes is longstanding anyway, stemming from the Dai being ruthless about pushing some of them, such as the Akha, Lahu and Wa, to the upland fringes of Sipsongpanna when they ruled it.

‘For the Dai, the big money comes from the selling of their land to the rubber and tea plantations, as well as all kinds of illegal enterprises,’ one Hani woman told me. ‘Jinghong will always be sleepy and laid back because it is sub-tropical, but I think it is more sleepy than before. Easy money makes people lazy. I don’t think there’s ever been as much gambling in Jinghong as there is now.’

Gambling cuts across ethnic boundaries in China. Han high-rollers have made the casinos of the former Portuguese colony of Macau more profitable than those of Las Vegas. In Jinghong, regular cock fights take place on the less salubrious eastern side of town. But the serious betting occurs during mahjong and card games held in private apartments, like elsewhere in China.

More than anything, the Dai are less malleable than Banna’s other minorities because their ownership of valuable land gives them economic power. Local Han officials and companies used to getting their own way with minorities who have nothing to bargain with, like the hill tribes, resent that. And unlike Xinjiang and Tibet, the Chinese cannot impose their will at the point of a gun. In Banna, Beijing is careful to maintain friendly relations with all the minorities, but especially the Dai. The last thing the CCP wants in Yunnan is a repeat of the tension which has polarised the Han from the Tibetans and Uighurs.

Keeping their relationship with the Han outwardly cordial is important for the Dai too. In public, they appear as the cute sidekicks of the Chinese. They smile at the tourists and speak Mandarin, while offering them a diluted, utterly unthreatening glimpse of their traditional lifestyle. Like animals in the wild using camouflage as protection from predators, the Dai have learned to present themselves in a way which is guaranteed to charm the Chinese. It is as if they instinctively know how the Han want the minorities to behave and flatter them accordingly.

That leaves the Han with little alternative but to be bowled over by the hospitality and the alluring women and to accept the Dai as wholly benign. In the unconscious orientalism which informs the Han vision of China’s minorities, the Dai are like a dream of how a subservient ethnic group should act. Many Chinese coming to Banna for the first time wonder why those ungrateful Uighurs and Tibetans can’t accept Han dominion as gracefully as the Dai have.

Out of the gaze of the tour groups, though, the Dai behave very differently. It is as if an unseen veil segregates them from the Chinese. Behind it, they preserve the most valuable aspects of their identity – language and a culture and religion that transcend borders – which would likely antagonise the CCP if put on show. To reveal them could result in officialdom taking a more quizzical view of their ties outside China, or adopting a more forceful attitude towards the acquisition of Dai land.

Their Janus-like approach to dealing with the Han reminded me of their close relatives the Thais, another pragmatic people adept at presenting a smiling face to visitors and quite another one in private. Over time, I came to believe the Dai to be the most Machiavellian of all China’s ethnic groups. By acquiescing in the Chinese appropriation of the most superficial aspects of their culture for the tourist trade, they have created some room in which to preserve their fundamental uniqueness in the face of the increasing Han presence in Banna.

Penetrating the hidden layers of the Dai existence is difficult, because they are so accustomed to hiding much of their lives from view. In public, they speak Mandarin but privately many dislike the way it is slowly replacing the Dai language in Jinghong and Banna’s towns especially. ‘A lot of people in Jinghong don’t speak Dai now. It has a big effect on our culture if no one speaks the language, or they don’t wear our traditional clothes,’ said Yu Shumei, one of my Dai friends. ‘None of the schools teach Dai now, so kids can only pick it up at home, like my son. They can understand what we are saying, but they can’t really speak Dai.’

A smartly dressed divorcee in her mid-thirties, Yu Shumei ran a jewellery shop. Like Li Qingmei, she was cautious and more than a little suspicious of me when we first met. But after I started helping her nine-year-old son with his English homework, she relaxed and began to show me the Dai side of Jinghong. She was from a well-off family, and I knew I had her seal of approval when I was introduced to her mother, a tiny, elegant woman who always wore Dai garb. I bumped into her often as she trotted around Jinghong collecting rent from the properties they owned.

Shumei invited me to celebrate the Dai New Year with her friends and family. It is a very different festival to the Chinese New Year, which falls in January or February and is known in Mandarin as Chun Jie. Outside the borderlands it is celebrated with a cacophony of fireworks. Chinese New Year in Jinghong, though, was the quietest I had ever experienced. Han restaurant owners set off firecrackers strung together like machine-gun belts outside their premises. But for everyone else it was just a normal day. ‘We’re OK to skip Chun Jie,’ Shumei told me. ‘It’s the Dai New Year that is important for us.’

Following the traditions of the Thai New Year, which both the Dai and Thai call Songkran, the Dai New Year is a three-day celebration in the middle of April. It starts soberly with the statues in Buddhist temples being washed, before ending with a chaotic street party on the final day in which water is hurled around and everyone gets soaked – a symbolic way of rinsing away the old year and its sins and starting afresh.

Celebrating New Year at the same time as much of the rest of South-east Asia offers the Dai another chance to affirm their essential separateness from the Han, as well as revealing how they continue to regard ethnicity as more important than the state. To reject the most significant Chinese festival, the Han version of Christmas and New Year rolled into one, is some statement. But the Dai New Year illustrates also the way less crucial elements of Dai culture have been handed over for public consumption, leaving the essence uncontaminated by Han hands.

Nothing appeared to be happening for the first two days of Songkran, as the locals worshipped at their temples out of sight of the tourists. Only the presence of Dai women walking around in their Sunday best of bright long skirts and tunic-like blouses, with their hair coiled in buns and carefully made-up faces shielded from the sun by umbrellas, gave the clue that something out of the ordinary was taking place.

To the Han, the religious aspect of the Dai New Year is unimportant and largely unknown. They call it the water-splashing festival, a reference to the events of the final day and a way of avoiding having to acknowledge that the Dai choose to celebrate a different New Year to them. The chance to throw water around all day is the appeal for the Chinese. Many buy powerful water pistols and guns, with attached water containers which they wear on their backs like a scuba diver’s air tank.

Emerging from my apartment on the morning of the third day of Songkran, I found the water war in full flow. The Han ran around firing their guns and squealing when they were hit themselves. Women on the streets sold plastic buckets and bowls for those who lacked their own weapons. Groups of Dai drove down the main streets in pick-up trucks, their flat beds lined with plastic sheets and filled with water. They threw it over passing pedestrians, or hurled it through the windows of any car whose occupants were foolish enough to be driving with them open.

By the time Shumei arrived, I was drenched. Foreigners are a particular target, so almost everyone who passed either sprayed me, or sneaked up behind and tipped water over my head. My phone was wrapped in a plastic bag to preserve it – the watching police did the same with their radios – and in the fierce sun the impromptu showers were rather pleasant. I was happy too in the knowledge that the wetter you get at Dai New Year, the luckier you will be over the next twelve months.

I jumped in the car quickly, to spare the other occupants from getting soaked through the open door. We headed out of Jinghong to Man Sha, a village that was home to one of Shumei’s childhood friends. Young Dai lined the road chucking water at the cars driving past. ‘I used to go out and splash water, but I’m older now and don’t want to go to all that trouble,’ said Shumei. ‘Going to the temple to wash the statues and pray for a good year is more important for me. But the kids love it.’

Our destination was a substantial Dai wooden house, raised up almost level with the surrounding trees by its stilts. A concrete wall guarded it and a terrace had been tacked on, where card games were already under way. Inside, the two floors of the house were crowded with people sitting on stools around low tables laden with Dai delicacies. We ate tangy beef that had been hung and dried and cut into long strips, sour bamboo shoots, fish from the Mekong covered in herbs, chicken on the bone and sticky rice which we scooped out of bowls with our hands.