China South of the Clouds

We see them every spring, plastered across Chinese social media: the fields of the Luoping Valley, carpeted with golden rapeseed blossoms, a few karst hillsides sticking up artfully like camels humps. It’s one of the most beautiful sights in China. But Josh and I are not sights people, in that way. I can’t see those photos without wondering just how many other people are surrounding that particular photographer, how many other cameras he had to crane around to get this pristine-looking shot. So when we visit popular spots, we prefer the off-season. We go to Disneyland during the Super Bowl, when it’s half-empty. We hike the Great Wall in the winter, when it’s snowing lightly and everything is empty and quiet and peaceful.

So when we visited Luoping, it was in summer, on one of our last research trips for the cookbook, between visiting ham-makers in Xuanwei and searching for the ideal bowl of Crossing the Bridge Rice Noodle Soup in Mengzi. We knew we wouldn’t find flowers; instead, we were looking to learn about Buyi culture.

A photo of a Buyi woman from the Minority Museum in Kunming.

The Buyi (or “Bouyi,” as it’s sometimes written) are China’s twelfth largest minority group, with a population of roughly 3 million. Most live in neighboring Guizhou province (about 87%) and there are some in northern Vietnam as well as a few thousand in this part of Yunnan, along the province’s border. The Buyi are very similar to the Zhuang people, who live just south, in Guangxi Province and around Babao, in Yunnan’s southeast. They share similar languages and customs, including certain kinds of singing traditions and some festivals.  (Some scholars have even told me that the Buyi and the Zhuang could have been considered the same minority group, but as the Zhuang is China’s largest minority, adding the Buyi population, and the additional autonomous regions that would entail, would have made the Zhuang unmanageably large—and perhaps too politically powerful.)

Like most of China’s official minzu, or minority groups, the Buyi are actually a few ethnic groups with related languages or customs that have been linked together under one name. Many are part of an ethnic group known as the Zhongjia who famously rebelled against the Qing empire in 1797. Some of the best-known Buyi folk stories and songs focus on the heroine of this Nanlong Uprising, the spiritual leader Wang Xiangu (or the “Immortal Maiden Wang”), whose army, lead by a magician and martial arts expert named Wei Qiluoxu, rode into battle waving a white fan in one hand and a white flag in the other, chanting magic incantations to stop bullets.

Sour fish hot pot

When we arrived in the Luoping Valley, the place was quiet and peaceful. Most of the hotels, restaurants, and businesses that must cater to the tourists in the spring were closed. After a few missed turns, however, we found our way to a restaurant specializing in Buyi foods. We were the only customers in the small two-story spot, and the friendly owners recommended a few specialties to give us a taste of their traditional foods, then invited me into the kitchen to watch the cooking. The wife prepared the food, scaling fish, frying pork-filled spring-rolls, and stewing a sour-spicy hot pot, all while dressed in a perfectly pressed shirtdress trimmed with lace and high-heeled sandals.

The main element of the meal, the hot pot, was made with carp, sour pickled bamboo shoots, thick scallions (大蔥, da cong), and potatoes and flavored with ginger, dried chiles, Sichuan peppercorns, and white vinegar. It was served with another Buyi specialty, five-colored sticky rice, a dish made by dying white sticky rice with a variety of flowers and leaves to turn it pink, purple, gold, and black. The rice also came with a bowl of creamy local honey to dip it into, and the sweetness provided a wonderful contrast to the hotpot’s sour, spicy flavors.

Colorful sticky rice with honey

When we had finished eating, the proprietors took us across the street to their second business, as store specializing in Buyi handicrafts. The Buyi are known for a particular kind of batik cloth and for their embroidery, but I was particularly taken with their colorful woven fabrics, which are distinctly different from the kinds of fabrics sold by other minority groups in Yunnan.

Buyi handicrafts and fabric

The owners also offered to escort us to another local Buyi business that they had invested in: a visitors’ center surrounded by a field of colorful flowers that bloomed after the famous golden rapeseed blossoms, so that tourists would have something to see in the off-season.

The fields were still being planted when we arrived, but a dozen or so other visitors were already there, ambling along a walkway strung with tiny, colorful pinwheels that spun in the breeze or wading through the hip-high flower fields to get the perfect vacation selfie.

We followed their lead and headed out into the field ourselves, enjoying the calm, the view, and the mild buzzing of the bees among the flowers, until suddenly the wind picked up, sending the pinwheels whirling, and large raindrops drove everyone back to the shelter of their cars.

Photos: No credit available, Georgia Freedman, Josh Wand (2), Georgia Freedman, Josh Wand