Mulao of the Luocheng Karst and Their Yifan Thanksgiving

In the karst hills of northern Guangxi, in the mountainous south of China, live the Mulao, a small farming people of the limestone country, close kin to the Dong and the Sui. Dwelling above all in the county of Luocheng among the sharp hills and green valleys, they till the paddies, mine the coal in which their land is rich, and keep their own Kam-Sui tongue and the great festival of the Yifan, a thanksgiving to the ancestors and the gods led by the ritual masters called shigong.

This account follows the Mulao from their origins among the ancient Yue peoples of the south, through their karst villages and their clans, into their Kam-Sui language, their worship of the ancestors and the rites of the shigong, and the coal, the pottery, and the Yifan festival that mark them. It ends with the Mulao of today, a small people of the Guangxi limestone hills keeping their festivals and their identity alive in modern China.

The Farmers of the Luocheng Hills
Mulao, Mulam, and the Name of the People
The Mulao Tongue and Its Kam-Sui Kindred
The Karst Hills of Northern Guangxi
The Villages, the Clans, and the Old Order
The Clan, the Village, and the Bonds of the Mulao
The Ancestors, the Shigong, and the Spirits
The Yifan, the Song, and the Ways of the Mulao
The Farmers, the Potters, and the Miners of Coal
Rice, the Field, and the Table of the Hills
The Yifan, the Ox King, and the Feasts
From the Ancient Yue to the People of Modern China
The Mulao in Modern China

The Farmers of the Luocheng Hills

In the karst hills of northern Guangxi, in the mountainous south of China, live the Mulao, a small farming people of the limestone country. Numbering some two hundred thousand and more, they dwell above all in the county of Luocheng, set aside as their autonomous home, among the sharp hills and green valleys of the region, close kin to the Dong, the Sui, and the other Kam-Sui peoples of the southwest.

The Mulao belong to the Kam-Sui branch of the great Tai-Kadai family, kin in the deep past to the Dong and the Sui who live near them, and more distantly to the Zhuang and the Tai peoples. Their forebears are counted among the ancient Baiyue, the many Yue peoples who once spread across the whole of southern China, and the Mulao are among their heirs in the Guangxi hills.

Settled in the karst country of northern Guangxi, the Mulao became over the centuries a distinct people, keeping their own tongue and customs while living close among the Zhuang, the Han, and their other neighbours, with whom they long shared the hills and valleys. Farmers of the limestone country, they tilled the valleys and the terraced slopes and, in a land rich in coal, mined and burned it for their use.

To speak of the Mulao is to speak of a small farming people of the Guangxi karst, close kin to the Dong and the Sui, keepers of their own Kam-Sui tongue and of customs of great age, above all the honouring of the ancestors and the lively festival of the Yifan. Living among their neighbours in the limestone hills, they hold their own place among the peoples of the Chinese south.

Mulao, Mulam, and the Name of the People

The people are known as the Mulao, or in other renderings Mulam, the name they give themselves, and it is by this name that the state recognises them as one of its nationalities and sets aside the Luocheng Mulao autonomous county in northern Guangxi. The name is their own word for who they are, binding together the communities of the karst hills.

In the old records the Mulao and their forebears appear under various names, for they were long a small people of the Guangxi hills, at times counted with their Zhuang or Dong neighbours, at times noted for their own customs. The modern surveys marked them as a people in their own right, distinct in tongue and custom, under the name Mulao.

The Mulao are close kin to the Sui and the Dong, so near in the Kam-Sui branch of the Tai world that their languages are related and their customs share much, yet the Mulao are a distinct people with their own name, their own home in the Luocheng hills, and their own traditions. The line between them and their neighbours was drawn by long settlement and by custom.

Whatever the rendering, the people know themselves as one, the Mulao, a small folk of the Guangxi karst, keepers of their tongue, their ancestors, and their festivals. The name Mulao marks them among the peoples of China as kin to the Dong and the Sui, a distinct people of the limestone hills of the south.

A street in Luocheng in the Mulao country

The Mulao Tongue and Its Kam-Sui Kindred

The Mulao speak a language of the Kam-Sui branch of the Tai-Kadai family, closely akin to the tongues of the Sui and the Dong, and more distantly to Zhuang and to Thai. Like these it is a tonal language, distinguishing meaning by the pitch of the voice, and it is the everyday speech of the Mulao villages of the Luocheng hills.

So close is the Mulao tongue to those of the Sui and the Dong that scholars group them together as near kindred within the Kam-Sui world, a reflection of the common origin of these peoples among the ancient Yue of the south. The Mulao language kept its Kam-Sui character through the long centuries of life among the Zhuang and the Han of the Guangxi hills.

For most of their history the Mulao had no writing of their own, and their store of song, legend, and lore was carried by memory and by mouth, while Chinese served for writing and for dealings with the wider world. The Mulao were long in close contact with the Han, and many took Chinese learning and served in the imperial examinations, so that Chinese was familiar to them.

In the modern age standard Chinese has spread through schooling and daily life, and most Mulao are bilingual, using Chinese for the wider world and their own Kam-Sui tongue at home. Living so closely among the Zhuang and the Han, the Mulao language faces strong pressure, and its keeping among the young is a matter of concern for those who cherish this small survival of the Kam-Sui speech.

The Karst Hills of Northern Guangxi

The homeland of the Mulao is the karst country of northern Guangxi, above all the county of Luocheng, set among the sharp limestone hills and green valleys of the region, with communities in the neighbouring districts. This is the classic karst landscape of the south, a country of cone-shaped hills, deep valleys, sinkholes, and underground rivers, of great beauty but often hard for the farmer.

In this limestone country the Mulao settled the valleys 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 the workable land in a land where the porous rock drinks the water. The hills between the valleys, sharp and often bare, framed the fields and the villages of the people.

A gift of the Mulao country is coal, for the region is rich in it, and the Mulao mined and burned coal from early times, both for their own use and for trade, a distinctive feature of their economy among the peoples of the south. The working of coal, the firing of pottery and lime, and the tilling of the valleys gave the Mulao their livelihood in the karst.

Rooted to the valleys and terraces of the Luocheng hills, and gathered in their autonomous county, the Mulao made their homeland in the karst country of northern Guangxi. It is a land of limestone hill and green valley, of terraced field and coal seam, where a small people close kin to the Dong and the Sui kept their tongue and their customs among the hills of the south.

The karst country of Guangxi, homeland of the Mulao

The Villages, the Clans, and the Old Order

In the days before the reach of the modern state, the Mulao lived in their karst villages as farmers of the valleys, under the sway of custom, the guidance of elders, and the bonds of the clan. Each village was a settled community of farming households, ordered by the ties of clan and the authority of the old men, and, above them, by the officials of the empire who ruled the Guangxi hills.

The Mulao were ordered into clans, each bearing its surname and tracing a common ancestor, and the clan was the frame of society, holding the members together, honouring the shared forebears, and ordering the ties of marriage. The village was often the seat of a clan or a group of related families, and the clan hall, where the ancestors were honoured, was a centre of Mulao life.

Life turned on the tilling of the valley fields, the growing of rice and other crops on the terraced land, and the working of the coal and the pottery for which the country was suited, and wealth was reckoned in land, in the standing of the clan, and in the produce of the fields and the mines. The round of the farming year set the rhythm of the community.

Living close among the Zhuang and the Han, the Mulao took much from their neighbours, and many took Chinese learning and even sat the imperial examinations, yet they kept their own tongue, their clans, and their festivals. Governed by custom, by elders, and by the clan, and ruled from afar by the empire, the Mulao lived as settled farmers of the karst hills, keeping their identity among their neighbours.

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

Mulao society rests on the clan and the village, the ties of descent that bind families across the karst valleys. Descent is reckoned through the father’s line, and the Mulao are ordered into clans, each bearing its surname and tracing a common ancestor, and the members of a clan honour the same forebears at the clan hall, owe one another the duties of kin, and marry outside the clan.

The clan hall, where the ancestors are honoured and the affairs of the clan are settled, was a centre of Mulao life, and the clan bound the households of the villages together across the hills. The village, often the seat of a clan or a group of related families, was the everyday frame of life, guided by respected elders and the heads of the clans, for the Mulao built no wide state of their own.

A distinctive feature of the old Mulao world was a grouping within the clan, a body of families that shared in the rites of the ancestors and in mutual aid, giving the people a frame of cooperation above the single household. Marriage was arranged by the families, marked by the exchange of gifts and by feasting, and the ties of marriage bound the clans of a district together.

Women worked beside the men in the fields and, as weavers and workers of cloth, made the goods of the household, and the honouring of the ancestors and the elders ran through the whole of society. Through the clan, the clan hall, and the village, the Mulao individual was bound into a close community of the karst hills, holding to its identity among the Zhuang and the Han.

The town of Luocheng in the Mulao country

The Ancestors, the Shigong, and the Spirits

The religion of the Mulao is rooted in the worship of the ancestors and in a rich belief in the spirits of the karst world, the spirits of the hills, the caves, the rivers, and the fields. The forebears of the clan are honoured at the clan hall and the household altar, for their goodwill is held to guard the family, and the bond between the living and the dead is carefully kept through the rites of the ancestors.

Around this ancestor worship the Mulao took in, through their long contact with the Han, much of the Taoism and the folk religion of their neighbours, and the shigong, the Taoist ritual masters, held an important place among them, performing the rites of healing, of funerals, and of the great festivals with their chants, their masks, and their ritual objects.

The shigong of the Mulao kept the sacred knowledge, the chants, and the ritual implements, among them the carved wooden dragons and other objects used in the rites, and they stood between the people and the world of gods and spirits, leading the great ceremonies of the community. Through them the Mulao blended the honouring of their own ancestors with the Taoism of the Han.

The Mulao held a host of gods and spirits, and among their most honoured festivals were those tied to the deities that guarded the people and the crop. In the modern age the old faith has weakened under the pressures of change, yet the honouring of the ancestors, the rites of the shigong, and the belief in the spirits of the karst remain at the root of the Mulao sense of themselves.

The Yifan, the Song, and the Ways of the Mulao

The greatest festival and tradition of the Mulao is the Yifan, the festival of thanksgiving held every few years to honour the ancestors and the gods and to pray for the welfare of the people and the crop. Held over several days with the whole community, led by the shigong with their chants and masked dances, the Yifan is the fullest expression of Mulao tradition, a great gathering of devotion, feasting, and song.

The Yifan, kept once in three or five years by each village or group, draws the community together for the honouring of the gods and the ancestors, the giving of thanks for the past years, and the prayer for the years to come, with the sacrifice of animals, the performing of the ritual dramas, and the sharing of the feast. It is the heart of the Mulao religious and social year.

Song and dance run through Mulao life, in courtship, at weddings, and at the festivals, and the people share in the antiphonal songs and the festivals of the wider Guangxi world, above all the third-month festival kept across the region. The honouring of the Ox King, the beast that draws the plough, has its own festival, a thanksgiving to the ox for its toil.

Around these run the customs of the year and of life, the courtship and the weddings, the rites of the ancestors and the shigong, and the festivals of the crop and the gods. Through the Yifan, the songs, and the honouring of the ancestors and the ox, the Mulao mark the passages of life and the turning of the year in ways carried down from their forebears in the karst hills.

The Farmers, the Potters, and the Miners of Coal

The crafts of the Mulao are the crafts of a farming people of the karst, and they were suited to the gifts of their limestone country. The mining and burning of coal, in which the Mulao country is rich, was a distinctive skill of the people, who used the coal for their homes, their kilns, and their trade, an unusual feature among the peoples of the south.

The firing of pottery and the burning of lime, using the coal of their hills, were crafts of the Mulao, who made the vessels of daily life and the lime for building and for the fields. The Mulao were noted for their pottery, and the making of jars, pots, and the wares of the household was a skill of the karst country, drawing on the clay and the fuel that the land gave.

The women of the Mulao wove and dyed cloth, favouring a deep blue-black, and sewed the dress of the household, adorning it with embroidery, and the making of a woman’s dress was a labour of care and a measure of her skill. The building of the houses of the karst villages, the plaiting of bamboo, and the carving of the tools of daily life rounded out the crafts of the people.

The shigong made and kept the carved wooden dragons, the masks, and the ritual objects used in the rites, a craft in the service of the people’s faith. Yet it is for the mining and burning of coal and for the firing of pottery and lime, along with the weaving of the women, that the crafts of the Mulao are best known, an art bound to the limestone country and its gifts.

Terraced fields in the Guangxi highlands

Rice, the Field, and the Table of the Hills

The food of the Mulao is the food of the Guangxi karst, built on rice grown in the flooded paddies of the valleys, with maize and other crops on the terraced slopes. Rice is the heart of every meal, boiled or steamed, and among the Mulao the glutinous sticky rice is especially prized for the festivals, when it is steamed and often coloured with the juices of plants for 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 welcome. The Mulao share in the food ways of Guangxi, a land fond of the sour and the pungent, and the sour and pickled dishes, the chilli, and the fermented foods of the region have their place at the table. Pork is the everyday meat of the household.

The streams and paddies of the karst give fish, and the forests and hills yield wild plants, herbs, and game to enrich the table, and the raising of pigs and poultry gives the meat for the great occasions. The firing of the household pottery over the coal of the hills gave the vessels in which the food was cooked and stored.

Rice wine, brewed in the household, is the drink of hospitality and of ritual, poured for guests, shared at every festival, and offered to the ancestors and the gods at the Yifan and the other rites. From the terraced rice and the coloured festival rice to the sour dishes of Guangxi and the home-brewed wine, the food of the Mulao is rooted in the valleys and the customs of the karst hills.

The karst farmland of the Guangxi highlands

The Yifan, the Ox King, and the Feasts

The greatest festival of the Mulao is the Yifan, the festival of thanksgiving held every few years to honour the ancestors and the gods and to pray for the welfare of the people and the crop. Led by the shigong with their chants and masked dances, and held over several days with the whole community, the Yifan is the high point of the Mulao year and the fullest gathering of the people.

At the Yifan the community makes its offerings to the gods and the ancestors, gives thanks for the years that have passed, and prays for the years to come, with the sacrifice of animals, the performing of the ritual dramas, the sharing of the feast, and the singing and dancing that fill the days. The festival binds the community to its forebears and its gods and renews the life of the people.

The Ox King festival, honouring the beast that draws the plough, is kept with the resting and feeding of the ox and offerings in thanks for its toil, and the third-month festival of the Guangxi world, with its songs and gatherings, is shared by the Mulao with their neighbours. These festivals gather the community for feasting, song, and the honouring of the gods and the land.

The passages of life, birth, marriage, and death, gather the kin for ceremony, and the weddings are marked with feasting and song. At all these occasions the dress and embroidery of the people, the songs, the masked dances of the shigong, and the rice wine bring colour and devotion, so that the Mulao meet the great moments of life and the year with feast, song, and the honouring of the ancestors.

The terraced highlands of the Mulao country

From the Ancient Yue to the People of Modern China

The Mulao are counted among the descendants of the ancient Baiyue, the many Yue peoples who once spread across the whole of southern China, and their forebears, close kin to the ancestors of the Dong and the Sui, settled the karst hills of northern Guangxi in the deep past. There they took up the tilling of the valleys and became, over the centuries, the distinct people known today.

Through the long centuries of imperial rule the Mulao lived in their hills under the officials of the empire, at times through native chiefs and at times under direct rule, and living close among the Zhuang and the Han they took much from their neighbours, above all Chinese learning, so that Mulao scholars sat the imperial examinations. Yet they kept their own tongue, clans, and festivals.

Like other peoples of the Guangxi hills, the Mulao knew the disorders and risings that swept the south in the days of the later empire, and they shared in the turbulence of the region. Yet their small numbers and their close ties to their neighbours led them through the centuries without the great upheavals of some peoples, and they held to their identity in the karst.

After the founding of the People’s Republic the Mulao were recognised as one of the official nationalities of China, and the Luocheng Mulao autonomous county was established in their homeland. The modern age has brought roads, schools, and the reach of the market to the karst hills, drawing the Mulao into the wider life of the country, while the Yifan and the honouring of the ancestors remain the marks of their heritage.

The Mulao in Modern China

Today the Mulao number some two hundred thousand and more, living still chiefly in the karst hills of northern Guangxi, above all in the Luocheng Mulao autonomous county, with communities in the neighbouring districts. A small farming people of the limestone country, they remain rooted in the valleys and terraces where their forebears settled, close kin to the Dong and the Sui.

Modern life has come to the Mulao hills in the shape of roads, schools, and the reach of the market, and the coal and the minerals of their country are worked with modern means, while the same forces that touch all of rural China, the pull of the cities and of migrant labour, draw many younger Mulao away to the factories and towns.

Living so closely among the Zhuang and the Han, the Mulao face strongly the pressures that blur the lines between peoples, and standard Chinese has long been familiar to them, so that the Mulao tongue, set among larger languages, is among the more fragile parts of their heritage. Efforts have been made to record and keep the language and the customs.

Yet the Mulao carry their heritage with quiet pride. The great Yifan festival with its masked dances, the honouring of the ancestors at the clan halls, the rites of the shigong, and the songs and customs of the karst endure as marks of who they are. A small people of the Guangxi limestone hills, close kin to the Dong and the Sui, the Mulao keep their festivals and their identity alive in modern China.