Bouyei of the Guizhou Karst and Their Cloth Drawn in Wax

Across the karst country of southern Guizhou, where limestone hills rise in sharp cones above green valleys, live the Bouyei, a settled people of the water and the rice and one of the larger of China’s ethnic minorities. Close kin to the Zhuang, they have farmed the valleys and terraced the hillsides of the plateau since long before the coming of the Han, and they are famous for their indigo cloth and the ancient art of wax-resist dyeing.

This account follows the Bouyei from their origins among the ancient Yue peoples of the south, through their stone villages and their native chiefs, into their Tai language, their worship of the ancestors and the spirits of the land, and the batik, bronze drums, and coloured rice that mark them. It ends with the Bouyei of today, keeping their crafts and their festivals alive in the dramatic karst country of the Chinese southwest.

The Water-Rice Farmers of the Karst Country
Buyi, Zhongjia, and the Name of the People
The Bouyei Tongue and Its Tai Kindred
The Karst Plateau of Southern Guizhou
The Stone Villages and the Native Chiefs
The Clan, the Village, and the Bonds of the Bouyei
The Ancestors, the Spirits, and the Mo Masters
Batik, the Bronze Drum, and the Ways of the People
The Weavers, the Wax-Dyers, and the Makers of Cloth
Rice, the Field, and the Table of the Karst
The New Year, the Sixth Month, and the Feasts
From the Ancient Yue to the People of Modern China
The Bouyei in Modern China

The Water-Rice Farmers of the Karst Country

Across the karst country of southern Guizhou, in the far southwest of China, where limestone hills rise in sharp cones above green valleys, live the Bouyei, a people of the water and the rice. Numbering nearly three million, they are one of the larger of China’s ethnic minorities, a settled farming people who have worked the valleys and the terraced hillsides of the plateau since long before the coming of the Han.

The Bouyei belong to the Tai branch of the great Tai-Kadai family, close kin to the Zhuang who live to their south, and more distantly to the Dai, the Thai, and the Lao. So near are they to the Zhuang that some scholars have counted them almost a northern branch of that great people, and their languages are closely allied, sprung from a common ancient stock.

Their forebears are numbered among the ancient Baiyue, the many Yue peoples who once spread across the whole of southern China. As the Chinese state pushed south and west over the centuries, the ancestors of the Bouyei settled the karst valleys of what is now Guizhou, where they took up the intensive cultivation of wet rice and built the stone-and-timber villages that remain their home.

To speak of the Bouyei is to speak of a settled people of the southern uplands, farmers of rice in a land of dramatic limestone scenery, keepers of the ancient art of wax-resist dyeing, and honourers of their ancestors and the spirits of the land. Close kin to the Zhuang yet a distinct people with their own name and custom, they hold their own place among the many peoples of the Chinese southwest.

Buyi, Zhongjia, and the Name of the People

The people call themselves by a name usually rendered Buyi or Bouyei, and it is by this name, in its official spelling, that the Chinese state recognises them as one of its nationalities. The name is their own word for themselves, and it binds together the many communities of the karst valleys under a single identity distinct from that of their neighbours.

In older Chinese usage the Bouyei were often called Zhongjia, a name that appears in the records and gazetteers of the imperial dynasties and in the illustrated tribute albums that pictured the peoples of the south. This older name, now set aside, once covered the Bouyei and sometimes their Zhuang kin as well, and it is under it that much of their earlier history is recorded.

Because the Bouyei and the Zhuang are so closely allied in speech and origin, the line between them has not always been sharply drawn, and some communities counted now as Bouyei were once reckoned with the Zhuang, or the reverse. The modern division into two nationalities followed the surveys and classifications of the twentieth century, which fixed the names as they now stand.

Whatever the shifting of labels, the Bouyei know themselves as one people, sharing a common tongue, a common way of life in the karst valleys, and a common body of custom and belief. The name Buyi is their own, and by it they claim their place among the peoples of Guizhou, distinct from the Han of the towns, the Miao of the hills, and the Zhuang of the lands to the south.

A historical illustration of the Bouyei (Zhong) people

The Bouyei Tongue and Its Tai Kindred

The Bouyei speak a language of the Tai branch of the Tai-Kadai family, closely akin to the northern dialects of Zhuang and, more distantly, to Thai and Lao. Like these it is a tonal language, distinguishing meaning by the pitch of the voice, and it shares with its Tai kindred a common store of ancient words for rice, water, and the things of the settled farming life.

So close is Bouyei to northern Zhuang that speakers of the two can often understand one another, and linguists group them together as near relations within the Tai world. This kinship reflects the common origin of the two peoples among the ancient Yue of the south, and the long centuries in which their ancestors farmed the neighbouring valleys of the southwest.

For most of their history the Bouyei had no writing of their own, though their ritual specialists made some use of Chinese characters, adapted to write the sounds of their tongue, in the books of their religion. The great body of their song, legend, and lore was carried by memory and by mouth, handed down through the generations in the villages of the karst.

In the modern age a romanised script has been devised for Bouyei, and efforts have been made to record and teach the language, while standard Chinese has spread through schooling and the dealings of daily life. Most Bouyei today speak both their mother tongue and Chinese, using the one in the village and the home and the other for the wider world, so that the old language lives on chiefly as the speech of the community.

The Karst Plateau of Southern Guizhou

The homeland of the Bouyei is the southern part of Guizhou, a province of dramatic karst scenery where limestone has been carved by water into a country of sharp hills, deep gorges, sinkholes, and underground rivers. Most Bouyei live in the autonomous prefectures of the south and southwest of the province, in the valleys and basins among the limestone hills, with further communities in the neighbouring parts of Yunnan and Sichuan.

This is a green and broken land of great beauty but hard for the farmer, for the limestone drinks the water and the level ground is scarce. The Bouyei settled the valley floors and the basins where soil and water gathered, and there they led the streams into flooded paddies and cut the lower slopes into terraces, making the most of every patch of workable land in a difficult country.

The karst gives the Bouyei country its famous sights, among them the great Huangguoshu waterfall, one of the largest in Asia, which thunders over a limestone cliff in the heart of their homeland, and the karst forests and lakes of Libo. Among these dramatic landscapes the Bouyei built their villages, often of stone quarried from the very hills, with houses and even roofs of fitted slabs.

Rooted to their valleys and their rice, the Bouyei made of this karst country a settled homeland, its scattered villages clustered by the streams and the terraced fields climbing the lower slopes. It is a land shaped as much by water as by stone, and the Bouyei, a people of the wet rice, learned to gather and guide that water across a thirsty limestone country to feed their fields.

The karst country of Libo in Qiannan, Guizhou

The Stone Villages and the Native Chiefs

In the days before the reach of the modern state, the Bouyei lived in their villages under the rule of native chiefs and the sway of custom. For long stretches of the imperial age the region was governed through the tusi, hereditary native chieftains drawn from among the local peoples and confirmed by the throne, who ruled their districts in the emperor’s name while keeping much of the old order intact.

The Bouyei village was a settled community of farming households, often built of the very stone of the karst hills, with houses of fitted slabs and, in some places, whole villages of stone. At the centre of village life were the ties of clan and the authority of elders, and the round of the rice year, the leading of water, the planting, and the harvest, set the rhythm of the community.

Wealth was reckoned in land and in the buffalo that drew the plough through the flooded paddies, and the bronze drum, an ancient treasure of the Tai peoples, was a mark of standing and a sacred object brought out at the great festivals and funerals. To own such a drum was a sign of a family’s or a village’s worth, and its deep voice sounded at the most solemn occasions.

Life turned on the household, the clan, and the village, governed by custom and by the elders and, above them, by the native chiefs and, more distantly, the officials of the empire. Free rice-farmers of the karst valleys, the Bouyei kept their language, their dress, and their ancient art of wax-dyeing through the long centuries, changing slowly under the settled order of the southern uplands.

The Clan, the Village, and the Bonds of the Bouyei

Bouyei society rests on the household and the clan, the ties of descent reckoned through the father’s line that bind families across the villages of the karst. Members of a clan share a common ancestor, honour the same forebears, and owe one another the duties of kin, and marriage must be made outside the clan, joining families across the village and the district.

The village is the largest everyday unit of Bouyei life, a cluster of stone or timber houses among the fields, guided by respected elders and by the ritual specialists who keep the sacred knowledge of the people. The Bouyei built no kings and no wide state of their own, and authority within the village rested on age, on descent, and on command of custom and ritual rather than on inherited throne.

Marriage among the Bouyei was marked by the work of matchmakers, by the exchange of gifts, and by feasting, and in the old custom a bride might remain for a time with her own family after the wedding before finally going to live with her husband. The songs of courtship, sung between young men and women at festivals and gatherings, gave the young a voice in the weaving of these matches.

Women held an honoured place, above all as the weavers and wax-dyers whose cloth clothed the people and marked them out among their neighbours. A woman’s skill at the loom and the wax-pen was a measure of her worth, and the making of a girl’s dress and of the cloth for her marriage was a labour of years, so that the crafts of the women stood at the heart of the household and the community.

The Ancestors, the Spirits, and the Mo Masters

The religion of the Bouyei is rooted in the worship of their ancestors and in a rich belief in the spirits that dwell in the world about them. The forebears of the clan are honoured with offerings at the household altar and at the great festivals, for their goodwill is held to guard the family and their neglect to bring misfortune, and the bond between the living and the dead is carefully kept.

Around this ancestor worship the Bouyei hold a host of spirits to dwell in the mountains, the rivers, the great trees, the fields, and above all in the water and the springs so precious in the karst country. Offerings and rites keep these spirits content and secure their blessing on the crops and the herds, and shrines to the god of the village and the spirits of the land stand near many settlements.

The ritual specialists of the Bouyei, often called mo masters, keep the sacred knowledge of the people, the chants and the rites for healing, for funerals, and for the festivals, and some make use of books written in Chinese characters adapted to their tongue. These masters stand between the people and the spirit world, reading the causes of sickness and misfortune and performing the ceremonies that set them right.

In later centuries the Bouyei took in something of the Buddhism and Taoism of the Han, and elements of these faiths mingled with the older worship, while in modern times Christianity has reached a few communities. Yet for most Bouyei the heart of religion remains the honouring of the ancestors, the propitiation of the spirits of the land and water, and the rites of the mo masters.

The hills and villages of the Bouyei homeland

Batik, the Bronze Drum, and the Ways of the People

The most celebrated of Bouyei traditions is the art of batik, the dyeing of cloth by the wax-resist method, in which patterns are drawn on white cloth with molten wax before it is dipped in indigo. Where the wax lies the dye cannot reach, and when the wax is boiled away the pattern stands out white against the deep blue, in designs of great beauty handed down among the women of the people.

The bronze drum is another ancient tradition, an inheritance of the Tai peoples from the deep past, a great drum of cast bronze once used to summon and to lead and now a sacred treasure brought out at funerals and the greatest festivals. Its deep voice is held to reach the ancestors and the spirits, and the drums, some of them very old, are among the most prized possessions of a village.

Song runs through Bouyei life, above all the antiphonal songs sung between young men and women in courtship at the festivals, and the ceremonial songs of weddings and funerals. The people are known too for their instrumental music, played on reed-pipes and other instruments at their gatherings, and for the dances that mark their festivals and rites.

The customs of the year and of life, the rites of the rice season, the ceremonies of birth, marriage, and death, and the great festivals in honour of the ancestors and the spirits, bind these traditions together. Through the wax-drawn cloth, the bronze drum, and the songs of courtship and ceremony, the Bouyei mark the passages of the year and of life in ways carried down from their forebears.

The Weavers, the Wax-Dyers, and the Makers of Cloth

The chief craft of the Bouyei is the making of cloth, and it is by their textiles that they are best known. The women grow and spin cotton, weave it on their looms, and dye it with indigo grown in their own gardens, producing the deep blue cloth from which their dress is cut. Weaving is a household art, learned young and carried on through life, and a woman’s skill at the loom was a measure of her worth.

Upon this cloth the Bouyei practise their famous batik, drawing patterns in molten wax with a small copper pen before dyeing, so that the waxed lines stay white when the wax is removed. The designs, geometric and figured, are handed down among the women, and the finest batik, worn as dress or made for the marriage chest, is among the treasures of a household. Embroidery adds further colour to the festival dress.

Beyond cloth the Bouyei work in the materials of the karst country. They build their houses of the local stone and timber, quarrying the limestone into slabs for walls and even roofs, and in some districts whole villages of stone stand among the hills. They plait bamboo and reed into baskets and mats, carve the tools of daily life, and once cast and kept the bronze drums that are their ancient treasures.

The making of paper, the distilling of rice wine, and the forging of iron tools rounded out the crafts of a settled farming people. Yet it is above all for their indigo cloth and their wax-drawn batik that the Bouyei are known, an art of the women that clothed the people, marked them among their neighbours, and carried the patterns of their forebears from one generation to the next.

Rice, the Field, and the Table of the Karst

The food of the Bouyei is the food of a wet-rice people, built on rice grown in the flooded paddies of the karst valleys. Rice is the heart of every meal, boiled or steamed, and the glutinous sticky varieties are especially prized, above all for the festivals, when they are steamed and often dyed with the juices of plants into the coloured rice that is a mark of the great days.

To the rice is added a relish of vegetables, gathered greens, beans, and the produce of the garden, with meat as the food of festivals and of welcome rather than of every day. Pork is the favoured meat, kept by most households and killed for the great occasions, and the streams and paddies yield fish to enrich the table. The Bouyei share with their neighbours a love of sour and pickled foods.

A celebrated Bouyei dish is the five-coloured glutinous rice, steamed and dyed in several bright colours with the juices of wild plants and eaten at the great festivals, above all in the sixth month. Such coloured rice is at once a food and an offering, made for the ancestors and the spirits as well as for the family, and a mark of the festive season.

Rice wine, brewed in every household, is the drink of hospitality and of ritual, poured for guests, shared at every festival, and offered to the ancestors and the spirits of the land. From the sticky rice and the coloured festival rice to the sour pickles and the home-brewed wine, the food of the Bouyei is rooted in the paddy and in the round of the farming year.

The New Year, the Sixth Month, and the Feasts

The festivals of the Bouyei turn on the rice year and on the honouring of their ancestors and the spirits of the land. The greatest is the new year, kept with the whole community for days of feasting, of the wearing of the finest dress, of the sounding of the bronze drum, and of the songs and dances that draw the villages together to greet the coming season.

Among the most cherished is the festival of the sixth month, held in the height of summer, when the Bouyei give thanks and pray for the crop with offerings to the ancestors and the spirits, steam the five-coloured rice, and gather for song and dance. It is one of the great days of the Bouyei year, binding the community to the land and to the forebears who watch over it.

Many festivals centre on the meeting of villages and the singing of courtship songs, when the young men and women of the district gather to sing back and forth, to display their finery, and to find a match. These song gatherings, held at the great festivals and at the markets, weave together the communities of a district and keep alive the bonds of kinship and friendship.

The turning of the seasons brings the rites of planting and harvest, and the passages of life, birth, marriage, and death, gather the kin for ceremony. At all of them the indigo dress and the wax-drawn batik, the deep voice of the bronze drum, and the antiphonal songs of the people bring colour and sound, so that the Bouyei meet the great moments of the year and of life alike with feast and song.

From the Ancient Yue to the People of Modern China

The Bouyei are counted among the descendants of the ancient Baiyue, the many Yue peoples who once spread across the whole of southern China. Their forebears, close kin to the ancestors of the Zhuang, settled the karst valleys of what is now Guizhou in the deep past and took up the wet-rice farming that would shape their way of life, long before the Han reached the southwest.

Through the long centuries of imperial rule the Bouyei lived on the margins of the Chinese state, in a region governed for much of its history through the tusi, the native chieftains confirmed by the throne. In time the empire moved to replace these hereditary chiefs with its own appointed officials, a change that tightened its grip on the southwest and that the Bouyei and their neighbours at times resisted.

Like other peoples of the southern uplands, the Bouyei knew periods of revolt against the taxes and the officials of the state, and they shared in the great risings that swept Guizhou in the days of the later empire, joining with the Miao and others against the pressures of the Han world. Yet through all these turns they kept their language, their dress, and their ancient crafts.

After the founding of the People’s Republic the Bouyei were recognised as one of the official nationalities of China, and autonomous prefectures and counties, shared in some places with the Miao, were established in their homelands. The modern age has brought roads, schools, and the reach of the market to the karst valleys, drawing the Bouyei into the wider life of the country.

The Bouyei in Modern China

Today the Bouyei number nearly three million, living still chiefly in the karst country of southern Guizhou, where autonomous prefectures and counties recognise their homeland. The provincial capital, Guiyang, lies within their old country, and many Bouyei live in and around it, so that the people are found from the remote stone villages of the hills to the streets of a growing modern city.

Modern life has come to the Bouyei country in the shape of roads, railways, schools, and a growing trade in tourism, for the dramatic karst scenery of their homeland, the Huangguoshu waterfall, the karst forests of Libo, and the old stone villages, draws many visitors. This has brought both opportunity and change to communities that were long remote among the limestone hills.

As with other minorities, the pull of the cities and of migrant labour has drawn many younger Bouyei away to the factories and towns of the coast, and standard Chinese and modern schooling have spread among them. This brings strain as well as gain, for the mother tongue, the wax-dyeing, and the old festivals face the pressure of a fast-changing world and of a generation raised in a wider China.

Yet the Bouyei carry their heritage with pride. The indigo cloth and the wax-drawn batik, the bronze drum, the coloured festival rice, the songs of courtship, and the honouring of the ancestors and the spirits of the land all endure as marks of who they are. A settled people of the karst valleys, the Bouyei keep their crafts and their customs alive among the many peoples of modern China.