In Guangxi’s Lihu, All Things Can Enter the Market

At eight o’clock on the morning of 19 April, I stood on the central street of Lihu Yao Ethnic Township, Nandan County, Guangxi, feeling like a piece of scrap.

I had come all the way from the county seat to Lihu on my own; I was here to attend the market. The word 圩, also written 墟, is what people in the two Guang provinces (Guangdong and Guangxi) call a traditional market. My friend Guan Qi once mentioned that Lihu’s market days fall on dates ending in 3, 6 or 9. The Fourth Nandan Music Festival closed on the 18th, so there happened to be a market today, and I had to come and have a look. But over the previous five days, as a music festival staff member, I had been working continuously at high intensity, and I was like a bowstring pulled too tight — I had slept less than four hours the night before; now my sight was blurred, my mind was hazy, my head was wrapped in a layer of fog, and my walk was a little unsteady, as if floating.

To catch the market opening, I made a point of taking a taxi. The driver drove extremely fast, covering the winding mountain road in half an hour. The county seat of Nandan County lies in a mountain basin in the upper reaches of the Hongshui River, while Lihu is set deep in the karst mountains where Guangxi and Guizhou meet. The mountain road, more than 20 kilometres long, was not far, but it quickly shed the urban landscape, replacing it with the order and scenes of Yao life as the Yao people have lived it for generations.

This is one of the most concentrated settlement areas of the White-Pants Yao — the name comes from the white knee-length shorts worn by men in the group as part of their traditional dress. Across China, the White-Pants Yao population is about 50,000, and Lihu together with neighbouring Baxu is home to more than 30,000 of them. As a branch of the Yao people, the White-Pants Yao still preserve a relatively intact traditional culture and way of life. Going to the market is part of daily life for locals. Lihu market is not only an important place where people from surrounding villages exchange goods and meet relatives and friends, but it is also said to retain a relatively traditional look of a Yao market. On major festivals, the crowds here reach their peak.

And I, a tourist who had rashly rushed over on the strength of a few words from a friend, knew almost nothing about the White-Pants Yao. At that moment I carried only a slightly ridiculous, not very proper, even somewhat offensive thought: I wanted to come and see what Guan Qi had mentioned — locals attending the market in their best clothes, their dresses and attire, and also their food, clothing and everyday items.

All Things Can Enter the Market

At eight o’clock in the morning, the stalls had already begun to open one after another. A few older villagers sat on the steps of the veterinary station chatting, occasionally casting sidelong glances at me, a tired outsider. Across from the veterinary station is the main space of the market: a semi-open-air produce market sheltered by a roof. Standing on slightly higher ground, one can see the whole market; it has clear sections: vegetables, fruit, meat, live poultry and live pigs, textiles, miscellaneous goods… Inside, concrete-built stalls are arranged throughout the space, with fixed small shops on both sides and scattered temporary stalls dotted through several surrounding lanes.

Everything in sight can enter the market. When my eyes had nowhere to settle, I first fixed on the most familiar things. There are about two or three fixed stalls selling vegetables and fruit here: maize, chillies, green beans, aubergines, cucumbers, stem lettuce, tomatoes, and all kinds of leafy greens — Chinese cabbage, greens, cabbage… Most can also be found in supermarkets in northern China.

Many of the temporary stalls had clusters of vegetables with their roots wrapped in leaves. The leaves looked like lotus leaves, and the wrapped parts were so fresh that they could even stand upright on the ground. At first I thought this was a local way of preserving freshness, but I soon realised that not all leafy greens were given such treatment. I tried asking the stallholder, but couldn’t quite make out the strong accent, and let it be.

As I walked on, I saw bundles of sweet potato vines laid out on the ground. I was not sure, and went on asking in a low voice, “Is this for feeding pigs?” The other person looked at me with a half smile: “This is for taking home to plant.” So it wasn’t for eating. My earlier question was cleared up in an instant: the “vegetables” whose roots had been carefully wrapped (mostly chillies and aubergines) were, like these sweet potato vines, bought to take home and plant. The roots are wrapped to keep them moist.

The vegetables sold at the market are not just food, but also seeds and seedlings.

Do You Know How Expensive This Dyed Cloth Is?

Live pigs and live poultry can no longer be seen in Beijing’s markets, but here there were rows of local black piglets, chickens, dry-land ducks, and even dogs, being traded in bamboo cages of various shapes. With the earlier experience in mind, I guessed the piglets were mostly for rearing, not for putting straight on the table — the pork stalls were next to them, with whole pieces of meat hanging up for sale, weighed by the jin. One meat stall also sold bean products, and the stallholder had set up a grill and was grilling tofu. I had wanted to buy a piece to taste, but seeing raw meat all around me, I shrank back.

There were also a great many cloth stalls. The White-Pants Yao are a mountain people, and farming and weaving are their main forms of production; cloth-weaving, dyeing and printing occupy an extremely important place in their lives. I saw many cloth stalls, mostly displaying plain white undyed cloth, as well as bundles of cotton thread, silk thread, plastic bags of white powder, small blue bottles, brushes, beads of various colours… and golden and gold-red silk threads twisted into strands. The White-Pants Yao’s golden-silk silkworms are famous, and it is common to see golden silk cloth rolled up like Xuan paper on the stalls; that is the flat silk fabric made from the silk spun by golden-silk silkworms.

“That’s it,” I thought. Isn’t this the silkworm-rearing culture of the White-Pants Yao? I had heard Guan Qi mention it.

By the cloth stalls stood White-Pants Yao women in beautiful clothing, chatting and selecting goods with confidence. I, meanwhile, wandered between piles of undyed cloth and balls of thread without much confidence; the language was unintelligible to me, and I was too embarrassed to ask much. At last I saw a stall displaying bolts of dyed cloth, and I went up to ask the price. The young woman who ran the stall hesitated for a moment: “This is very expensive; it is handmade, and it costs over a thousand.” Her words were not forceful, but the meaning was clear — I was not a local, nor one in the know, not a suitable buyer in her eyes.

By some of the cloth stalls there were also plant roots and rhizomes I did not recognise. Sure enough, I, facing the shan shao and shu liang used for weaving and dyeing cloth, posed the laughably absurd question to the heavens: “Is this taro?”

I moved around the market, stealing glances and taking photos. Lacking both production knowledge and local experience, I could not say what exactly I was there for. My curiosity was strong, but I could not go any deeper, and I only felt waves of internal friction.

Buying Groceries in a Maze

Suddenly I heard someone behind me calling my name; to my surprise, it was Meng Fang, whom I had met at the music festival: “Come with us to eat hemp-seed chicken hotpot!”

So it turned out she had also brought a group of friends to Lihu for the market. Meng Fang works at a social work agency in Guangxi, is a core volunteer at the Nanning Urban Farm Market, and is also very familiar with Lihu. This time they had come over from the music festival, planning to buy some vegetables at the market and then go to the White-Pants Yao Ecomuseum to cook and eat. I had been planning to go to the ecomuseum too; what a coincidence.

Once I had found my people, the market outing instantly entered a new chapter. As I walked with Meng Fang, my aimless wandering and gaze/counter-gaze disappeared. She moved quickly through the market, as if she had long known where everything was.

She first went to an inconspicuous little stall and, pointing to a bag of grey-brown grains, said: “Let’s buy some of this hemp seed.” The stallholder used an old iron bowl to scoop out a bagful and weigh it for her. Hemp is the main oilseed and food ingredient for the White-Pants Yao. Meng Fang told me that locals grind hemp seed with water, filter out the residue, and generally use the liquid to make soup, while the residue can also be used as feed.

I remembered the Guangxi oil tea I had drunk in Nandan a few days earlier; it is said that some oil tea is stir-fried with hemp seed to give it flavour.

While the stallholder was away grinding hemp seed, Meng Fang casually picked up a bottle of “sour meat” from nearby — clean meat packed in a plastic bottle, pinkish in colour, with small yellow millet grains mixed in. She said that this, too, was a typical local way of eating: raw pork is sealed with salt and millet to ferment; after being left for some time, the meat slowly turns sour and cooked. Sour meat keeps well, and White-Pants Yao households often keep some on hand. When eating it, you can simply slice it and serve it, or steam or stir-fry it in a wok. Later I tried eating it raw, and it did have a refreshing sour aroma, with no gaminess or greasiness at all.

Then, after several more twists and turns, we stopped in front of a stall with plastic buckets and glass bottles on display and bought two bottles of local homemade liquor. This local strong liquor is often packed in square plastic buckets that are easy to carry by hand, so locals jokingly call it the “Guangxi briefcase”. I had heard about it at the music festival before, and now I had finally seen it in the flesh at the market.

Finally, we went back to the meat stall that had made me a little hesitant just before. The proprietress was turning pieces of tofu on the grill. When I looked closer, it turned out to be stuffed tofu, with a meat filling in the middle — no wonder the stall was set up beside the meat stall. Meng Fang bought a large bag, and the proprietress, as she placed the fried pieces of tofu into the bag, smiled and chatted with her.

We carried these things out, heading for the next stop. At the time I was just following Meng Fang, buying, buying, buying, without giving it much thought. It was not until I returned to Beijing and started writing this article that I gradually realized: hemp seed, sour meat and the “briefcase” strong liquor all sit right at the heart of the White-Pants Yao’s everyday diet. Lihu’s market belongs to those who truly know life here; only they would instantly home in on their targets in a market like a maze.

A Museum That Does Not Feel Like a Museum

Carrying a load of ingredients, we took the bus up the mountain and arrived at the White-Pants Yao Ecomuseum halfway up the slope.

I had originally come to do some “make-up lessons” — after all, who visits a museum without wanting to learn something? But following this group down, the main thread suddenly became cooking and eating.

This is not just an exhibition space; it is also linked to several surrounding White-Pants Yao natural villages. There is no clear boundary; the exhibition and daily life are intertwined. The things we had bought at the market were carried into the kitchen, washed, cut and put into the pot, and before long became a feast. I sat to one side, eating along, and gradually felt that it was a bit hard to say where “visiting” began.

Outside the kitchen, the open space in front of the door was also busy.

A few wooden stakes were driven into the ground, enclosing a square patch of earth. Yarn was stretched taut in layer upon layer between the stakes, drawn very straight. Three White-Pants Yao women each stood on one side, holding up frames wound full of yarn, and slowly walked along the loop of yarn. The yarn was drawn out from the frames, lay against the original layer, and was then pulled to the next corner. When they reached a corner, they would pause for a moment, turn the frames, and the yarn would go over smoothly.

I stood nearby for a while before I realised that this was “yarn-running”.

The three of them did not say much, but their rhythm matched. When one reached a corner, the other two would follow and change direction; when one slowed down, the whole circle slowed down together. The loop of yarn gradually grew thicker and tighter between them.

I moved forward two steps, wanting to see more clearly. The mother weaving cloth said something quietly, gesturing for me not to come too close. I stopped.

Later, Meng Fang explained to me that the White-Pants Yao had some taboos during “yarn-running”: for example, a person must not step directly over the yarn, for fear of affecting the yarn’s “luck” and “qi”. This was probably a customary, unspoken understanding among the women: if things went smoothly and the yarn did not snag, that was good luck; if they did not, they would feel that their own “luck” was not in tune with the process.

Upstairs in the museum, silkworms were being raised.

A whole room of golden-silk silkworms lay spread out in trays, heads down, chewing mulberry leaves. On the other side, some had already begun to spin silk. They did not form individual cocoons; instead, they spun silk back and forth on the wooden board, slowly laying down a whole sheet. Staff would adjust the direction from time to time, taking advantage of the silkworms’ tendency to avoid light while spinning silk, so that the silkworms would change direction and continue spinning, keeping the silk fabric flat and even. Golden-silk silkworms during the silk-spinning period required close care; staff sometimes kept watch day and night, monitoring the health of the silkworms, and had to remove their droppings promptly so that they would not be woven in and ruin the silk fabric.

I remembered the rolls of paper-like silk cloth I had seen at the market — so this is how it came to be.

The dyed cloth I had seen at the cloth stalls, with a golden strip inset along the edge, was probably this kind of precious silk fabric — processed fabric in pieces that could be used directly to make the pleated skirts worn in everyday life by White-Pants Yao women. At the time I could not see the relationship between them. Now, having personally seen these complex processes, I suddenly understood the dyed cloth at the stall, with its “sky-high” price, and the young stallholder’s hesitant reluctance.

It was only as I ate and wandered that I realised that the White-Pants Yao Ecomuseum is more than a museum; it also encompasses three surrounding Yao natural villages: Manjiang, Huatu and Huaqiao. What is meant by an ecomuseum is a museum that has no walls, is seamlessly embedded in its surroundings, and protects the natural and human living environment around it. It does not attempt to separate culture from daily life and put it in display cases for preservation — here there are static exhibits, but also real production and everyday life. For the local people, this is first and foremost their home; for an outsider like me, being able to enter such a space and briefly take part in it is in itself a kind of good fortune.

Ripples of the Market

If going to the early-morning market was like dropping a stone into a pond, the experiences that followed were like ripples that kept spreading. The museum was the first ripple. Leaving the museum’s main exhibition area, we began walking towards several of the surrounding ecological villages. The villages were not large, but the paths were complex, and we had to trouble a kind friend to show us the way. Along the way, we saw dense, vibrant southern vegetation. In several places, beneath trees or beside water sources, there were altars and shrines reflecting the White-Pants Yao’s animistic beliefs, as well as dyed cloth, waistcoats and skirt hems that villagers were drying.

In the villages, there were also traces of other forces intervening. For example, there were government-funded pavilions and walkways in a style leaning towards cultural tourism, traditional granaries that were no longer in use but had been compulsorily preserved by policy, and several dry toilets. Some were already in use, while others were in a half-abandoned state.

So far, my impression of the White-Pants Yao people is that they are both steadfast and conservative, while also having a quite gentle and calm openness to outside influences. I think of the so-called “direct-transition peoples”, a concept that now requires reflection — in this concept, history seems like a one-way road heading towards the same endpoint, with some people walking ahead and others left behind. When I piece together the different scenes I have seen in Lihu, I see an interesting pattern of change: within the same valley, different things do not stand in a relationship of replacement or substitution, but are more like layer upon layer of overlap, interweaving, blending and settling. In any case, it is certainly not “linear”.

The “Ripples of the Market” reached their final circle, and we went to a more distant Yao village, a separate natural village in Yaoli. There I saw farmland spread through the broader valleys, as well as intercropping in line with White-Pants Yao farming traditions — maize, legumes and other crops grown mixed together. In early spring, seedlings were sprouting, and as the evening wind blew across the Dashi mountain area, I thought of those roots wrapped in leaves at the market, carrying damp earth, quietly taking root on some hillside. Walking down the ridge path, we also saw village women removing and washing out the gum tree’s sticky resin from the dyed cloth; the resin had to be boiled and washed in lye water filtered through rice-straw ash before it could be removed, and it looked like a harder process than yarn-running.

By the time we left Yaoli in the evening, the mist that had troubled me in the early morning, as if it were a hood over my head, had cleared away. I had tried to use my camera to capture those “spectacles” and to examine those “oddities”, but this day’s market run, cooking and walking had, through the plainest hemp soup and scenes of dyed cloth, told me: there was nothing spectacular here, only Yao people striving to live within the laws of nature.

I thought again of Guan Qi, who had passed away suddenly not long ago, and who had also worked on this land. It was also for this reason that I wanted to come and see the place where he had worked so busily. Guan Qi, Meng Fang and several other companions I had met on this trip were all, through their work, weaving themselves into the daily life of Lihu. What they safeguard is not one or two landscapes or an unchanging “tradition”, but the ability of the people here to continue their own lives with dignity. By this point, the suspended feeling I had as a tourist, that of watching a fire from the opposite bank, had disappeared, because I had truly come to realise that what is called “place-based connection” cannot be gained through a few days of wandering and looking. It comes from being rooted over the long term, from sustained understanding, companionship and shared responsibility. Those who truly change a place are often not those who have been here, but those who are willing to truly leave some of their time here.

*During the process of writing this article, I received help from experts at the Guangxi White-Pants Yao Ecomuseum and the Nanning Meinong Social Work Service Centre, and I would like to express my sincere thanks to them. I would also like to thank the Fourth Nandan Music Festival for giving me the opportunity to form a bond with Lihu.

– This is Foodthink’s 812th original article –

Unless otherwise stated, all images were taken by the author.

Editor: Tianle

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