By Supalak Ganjanakhundee
KUNMING, CHINA – China’s rapid development has changed the lives of its many minority tribes forever. Many, living in tourist showcase villages, no longer really know where home is.
Singing at the Yunnan Nationalities Village, a Kunming cultural exhibition centre, is not really her job, but Nie Ma Jo Ma has to do it many times a day to lure tourists into an artificial Tibetan monastery.
Her sweet singing voice and the mysterious Tibetan songs she sings are exotic enough to draw passing tourists into the monastery-like building at the exhibition centre. Then, she briefs them about Tibetan Buddhism and traditional culture.
She doesn’t take questions about the Dalai Lama – not because it’s a political taboo, but because the subject is beyond her knowledge.
“I am not from Lhasa,” she says.
The 18-year-old Tibetan girl in traditional Tibetan dress tells stories to visitors eight hours a day, six days a week.
She gets 12 days for an annual vacation to go back to her hometown of Zhongdian in Deqing Tibet Autonomous Region – now better known as “Shangri-la”.
Deqing is one of the 10 regions inhabited by Tibetans in China. Many people in western Yunnan province believe that the earthly paradise of the novel “Lost Horizon” by British author James Hilton was set somewhere in Deqing.
However, many people say Hilton’s Shangri-la does not exist, and he only borrowed the term from the name of a mountain pass near Mt Everest.
Whatever the case, the Chinese authorities have put great efforts into making the “Lost Horizon” into a real place, renaming the old city of Zhongdian in Deqing to Shangri-la in 1994 as the tourist trekking industry began to boom.
It was there that Nie first worked in the cultural tourism industry, at a Cultural Centre similar to the one she now works in before being reassigned to the Yunnan Nationalities Village.
“Living at home in Shangri-la is a part of real life but here it is all about my work which pays me 800 yuan (Bt4,000) a month,” said Nie Ma Jo Ma, whose name means “daughter of the sun”.
She says the term “human zoo”, used by human rights activists, sounds very impolite – even insulting. This, after all, is her workplace.
“I have my days off and can enjoy my free time with my salary. What you see is an exhibition, an example of our real life. Please visit Shangri-la if you want to see the real thing,” she says.
For Nie, the Yunnan Nationalities Village is an opportunity for tourists to get a glimpse of Yunnan’s rich minority cultural heritage without having to go to the trouble of the long journey to Shangri-la.
The 90-hectare village is on the west bank of the Lake Tianchi, some 8km from downtown Kunming, to demonstrate the life and culture of some 26 minorities who live in this southwestern province. So far, only 13 participate, but officials say all 26 will eventually join the project in coming years.
In a sense it is a Disneyland of minority culture. Each minority has its own area, which takes the form of a small village in the varying styles of their cultures.
Wa-built bamboo houses are decorated with animal skulls, rather than human skulls as the head-hunting tribe did in times past. The Tai have furnished their compound to make visitors feel as if they had suddenly been transported to the ancient kingdom of Xishuangbanna on the banks of the Mekhong River.
Every tribe puts on traditional shows for an extra fee of 15 yuan for a 15-minute dance. And anyone who cares to sip a drop of the Yi minority’s maize spirits can buy a sip-sized cupful for 5 yuan while watching folk dances.
Anthropologists are not recommended to collect data for research here since everything in the centre is shown for commercial purposes. And nobody here seems aware of the abnormality of life in the artificial villages, as it is teenagers who live here and perform for the tourists. Indeed nobody much older than a teenager can be found in the villages.
Most of the indigenous peoples of Yunnan went into the inhospitable mountains only during the Ming Era (1368-1644) and later. In the past, they had lived in fertile valleys. But from the 14th century on, the Han, the main ethnic group of China, began their colonisation of Yunnan.
Today the Han are the majority in Yunnan. The former rulers of the region have become a minority and foreigners in their own home.
Yunnan province’s many tribes, with their cultural variety, were preserved under special rules during the Mao Zedong era but they suffered during the difficult time of the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976.
Vorasakdi Mahathadhanobol, an expert on Chinese affairs at Chulalongkorn University, says this nationalities village reflects China’s confused vision of development due to political change.
During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards banned traditional minority customs as “feudal relics”, he noted, until Deng Xiaoping took the helm and issued laws of autonomy in 1984 aimed at allowing minority culture to flourish again. Unfortunately modernisation since Deng’s reign has slowly changed the way of life of these minorities. The authorities, on the other hand, want to preserve tribal cultures for commercial purposes.
Beijing designated Yunnan and its capital city of Kunming as the southwestern gateway to Southeast Asia and established a huge budget to modernise the province. Infrastructure has been developed to facilitate trade and tourism.
Kunming has now changed into a modern city with high-rise buildings, and the Yunnanese now enjoy new life styles and consumer materialism.
The Sars epidemic has not yet inflected Yunnan. Sars may cause a pause in rapid economic growth but will not stop the changing of life of the province, said Vorasak who spent a month in Kunming when the killer virus first hit China.
The shift in Beijing policy that has brought the changes was that China’s rulers decided the “spiritual civilisation” championed for generations as the core of Chinese values could be achieved only if people possessed adequate material goods, he said, quoting former Communist Party chief Hu Yaobang who made the statement in a speech in 1982.
Meanwhile, Nie a girl from Shangri-la who sings for the tourists, may live in a world that looks like the one she hails from, but it’s in fact a place far removed from her roots.
