The most commonly heard language in the Qiang region is a type of Chinese dialect from western Sichuan, which the locals call hanhua (Han speech). There is another type of local language called xiangtanhua. Because accents vary greatly from place to place, xiangtanhua is usually used among a small group of people—most of the time those belonging to the same valley. Many Qiang people in the western and northern valleys can speak both xiangtanhua and hanhua. However, most of the Qiang people residing in villages along the Min River can only speak hanhua, especially those below middle age. As for the Qiang living in the Beichuan region, they had been speaking hanhua since their grandparents’ generation. Qiang people who live in the towns and cities generally speak hanhua, and the more educated ones can even speak Mandarin. Only the residents of the villages deep in the valleys or high up on the mountains speak xiangtanhua exclusively.
So-called xiangtanhua is actually what linguists call “Qiang languages,” and is made up of Northern Qiang language and Southern Qiang language, each of which is again divided into five local dialects. In reality, not everyone who belongs to the same language group can understand each other’s xiangtanhua. A Qiang friend said, “Our language does not travel far. Even within the same valley, sometimes the people on the northern side of the mountain speak a different language than what is spoken on the southern side.” Due to the fact that it is difficult for Qiang people from different regions to communicate in xiangtanhua, they usually speak to each other in hanhua.
The Qiang in the east pride themselves on their hanhua, and like to make fun of the hanhua spoken by the Qiang people and Tibetans who live in the west, north, and deeper valleys. They even think that they had acquired their hanhua naturally without having to learn it, while they actually had to learn xiangtanhua. Although the Qiang people in the west and north speak hanhua with a heavy accent, some of the men can speak the Tibetan dialect of neighboring regions. For example, some Qiang men from Songpan’s Aiqigou speak Rewu Tibetan, and many Qiang people in Li County can speak Jiarong Tibetan.
Besides having regional differences, local languages are also used differently by men and women. In general, the men here speak hanhua (or Tibetan) more fluently than the women. They say that this is because the women are more isolated from the outside world. On top of that, they also think that the men speak better xiangtanhua than the women in terms of their knowledge and command of vocabulary, and the language that the women use is more reserved and local. The reason why the men appear to have a better command of Qiang vocabulary is because they use many terms borrowed from hanhua, Tibetan, and the dialects of neighboring Qiang people. In addition, within the same village, people of older and younger generations speak slightly differently as well. Many of the words that the elderly once used are no longer being used, and nowadays very few people can still understand the old lyrics sung by Qiang priests.
To the Qiang people, the main obstacle in identifying with their ethnic group is perhaps the language issue. In the past they defined the term erma as “people who speak our language,” but now that erma has come to be used more broadly to describe the entire Qiang people, it includes many groups of people that cannot communicate with each other. The Qiang people think that their language gradually evolved in different directions due to geographical separation. In daily conversations, they often have to make an effort to comprehend the xiangtanhua of their fellow Qiang people from other regions.
However, the more highly-educated Qiang people were not satisfied with this situation. In 1989, a project to standardize and promote the Qiang language was carried out by the Qiang officers within the Sichuan Province Ethnic Group Committee. After a series of discussions and studies, they finally decided to make the Qugu dialect the standard Qiang language, and invented Romanized Qiang writing based on this. They also compiled a Qiang language dictionary. In order to promote the standardized Qiang language, the Weizhou Normal School in Wenchuan opened a Qiang language course for the purpose of training teachers of the standardized Qiang language. In the process of creating a standard Qiang language, Qiang scholars also put effort into collecting, studying, and promoting Qiang culture.
Promoting the standardized Qiang language was no easy task. By the year 2002, the Qiang language program at Weizhou Normal School had stopped recruiting. The main reason for this was that for at least a century, “hanhua ”(western Sichuan dialect) has been the “universal language” for the people in this region, and because each village and valley had its own identification and distinguishing mechanism, it was difficult to make them give up their own xiangtanhua. Moreover, as chances for the Qiang people of each region to interact with the outside world increased, so did their chances to speak hanhua. As a result, xiangtanhua is disappearing as time goes on. Although the effort to promote a standardized local language ended up in vain, these activities and projects did, as an part of social memory, play an important role in strengthening the Qiang people’s ethnic identity.
The Qiang New Year
It remains a debate among the Qiangs whether the “Qiang New Year” is the traditional new year for the Qiang people. Both Thomas Torrance and Hu Jienmin mentioned in their publications that the Qiang people celebrate the New Year on the first day of the tenth lunar month by sacrificing cattle and sheep. However, according to David Crockett Graham’s book, the customs and practices of villages in Wenchuan and Li County, such as Heping and Mushan, show that the sacrifices take place on the first day of either the sixth, eighth, or tenth lunar month, and there is no universally agreed-upon date. Furthermore, Ge did not consider this holiday as the Qiang people’s New Year. According to the Western Sichuan Survey, the Qiang celebrate the New Year, Qingming, Duanwu, and Mid-Autumn festivals, and like the Han, their New Year takes place during the first lunar month.
Undiminished forests are mainly found in mountainous areas with an altitude of 2,500 to 4,000 meters, and consist mainly of pine trees. Various types of fungi can be found growing at the foot of the pine trees. Besides timber and mushrooms, the entire mountainous area produces many medicinal plants, such as cordyceps, rhubarb, gastrodia, Notopterygii Rhizoma, and fritillary bulbs, etc. In the past, this region was also a paradise for wild animals such as giant pandas, golden monkeys, and wildebeests, which have been listed as Class 1 protected species, as well as three types of bears, two types of leopards, little pandas, leopard cats, roebucks, muntjacs, deer, wolves, dholes, and boars, etc. The numbers of these animals have greatly decreased due to over-hunting and poaching. Chickens, pheasants, and other types of wild fowl inhabit the fields, forests, and mountainous plains, and are often hunted by the local people.
Beyond the forest at altitudes of 3,500 to 4,000 meters are mild slopes that stretch close to the peak. During the winter, due to harsh, snowy conditions here, trees are sparse and scattered in small clumps. However, during the summer when sunshine and grass are plentiful, this region becomes a good place for grazing cattle and horses. The area below the forest, with altitudes of 2,000 to 3,000 meters, is often made into terrace fields for agriculture. The river dam near the valley provides better and wider farmland with more sun exposure. Here the altitude is around 1,000 to 2,500 meters, and because transportation is convenient, in recent years this area has become the main source of economic crops. Mao County and Wenchuan County are famous for high-quality apples, pears, plums, and chili peppers. On the one hand, the terrace fields, forests, and grasslands vertically distributed in the valleys provide abundant economic resources that satisfy the daily needs of the local people, allowing the “gou” to be a self-sustaining ecosystem. On the other hand, because each “gou” is separated by tall mountains and communication is limited, the villagers of each “gou” are considerably isolated. Only in recent years have the Qiang people from each area begun to be in more frequent contact with each other due to the development of roads along the valleys. Because of this, villagers are also able to export their farm and forest products to outside communities.
What Thomas Torrance and Hu Jienmin described is the Qiang people in Wenchuan and eastern Li County. In these regions, the so-called “Qiang New Year” was originally known as the “Festival of the Ox King.” Sometimes it was called the “Little Lunar New Year” because it overlapped with the Chinese holiday Dongzhi. The Festival of the Ox King and the practice of worshipping the Ox King Bodhisattva is held at different times in different regions by means of different ceremonies, and even have different meanings. In the Wenchuan and eastern Li region, where the local people’s main activity is agriculture, this festival serves as harvest celebration to thank the gods. However, in the Chibusu region of western Mao County, where cattle-raising is more common than agriculture, only the households that own more cattle and sheep worship the Ox King Bodhisattva. In other words, the importance of the Festival of the Ox King gradually fades as one goes towards the west and the north. Both Dongzhi and the Festival of the Ox King are linked to the Han people’s folk religion, and their popularity is also related to the degree of Han influence in each region. In reality, since the first half of the twentieth century, the most important holiday in all the Qiang regions has been the New Year, which is also based on the lunar calendar. The Qiang also partake in Lunar New Year activities such as a family dinner, worshipping ancestors, and the lion dance. Most importantly, in the Qiang language there is no concept of “month” and “the start of a new year,” and therefore there naturally would not be the existence of a “Qiang New Year.”
Nonetheless, because celebrating the “Lunar New Year” is seen as a Han custom, the Festival of the Ox King eventually became recognized as the “Qiang New Year.” Local autonomous governments played an important role in promoting the concept of a “Qiang New Year.” In 1988, the Mao County government held Qiang New Year celebrations for the entire Qiang population. Wenchuan County, Li County, and Beichuan County hosted celebrations for the following years, respectively. It is unclear exactly how these festivals came to be known as the “Qiang New Year.” Descriptions of the Qiang people’s “New Year” festivities made by Hu Jienmin et al may have influenced the process to a certain degree. Most Qiang people understand that in the past there were no “Qiang New Year” customs, and therefore they usually attribute the forming of this tradition to a single influential branch of the Qiang people. As a Qiang elder from Qingpian, Beichuan County describes:
Nowadays in some of the zhaizi in Li County, for some reason people call what used to be the “Little New Year” (the first day of the tenth lunar month) the Qiang New Year. When people from Mao County asked me how the first day of the tenth month became the “Qiang New Year,” I replied that I had been wanting to ask them the same question. In 1987, He Yulong, an old Communist soldier, dispatched a few people to inform the Qiang residents of Chengdu that the first day of the tenth month was to be the official “Qiang New Year.” The celebrations were held in Mao County in 1988, Wenchuan County in 1989, Li County in 1990, and Beichuan County in 1991, and eventually it became a tradition. However, the local residents do not like this, because they do not think it should be on the first day of the ten month.
A Qiang man from Songpan’s Xiaoxinggou has a different take on this issue. He says:
After the liberation, a Japanese leader came and asked us why the Qiang had disappeared, because the Qiang are “uncles” of the Japanese. In response to this, the government established a Qiang autonomous state in Mao and Wenchuan, and began the tradition of the Qiang New Year. As for why there are many versions of the date of the Qiang New Year, this was decided later, and has been this way for three or four years. We dance, sing, and drink yellow liquor.
In the memory of many Qiang people, the Qiang New Year is not an old tradition. In fact, they often mention the time when they “first started celebrating Qiang New Year,” which indicated a new start—the start of a better economy, more tourism, and more Qiang music and dance performances.
The Guozhuang Dance
The guozhuang dance is the most important performance in a Qiang New Year celebration. Guozhuang is also known as salang, and is a type of group song and dance performance unique to the Tibetans and the Qiangs in the Aba Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. However, many locals say that this is not a tradition, but something that the younger generation brought in from elsewhere. During New Year celebrations in Mao County’s Niuweiba, the older generation would gather together to do the nisa dance while the young people do the guozhuang dance. The nisa dance has been the local tradition. An elder of Niuweiba says:
We used to do the nisa dance, which only involved twirling in circles and no skipping. I would sing a line, and you would sing a line, like a duet, and the dancing would go with the singing. After the liberation, the younger people brought back the guozhuang dance that they had learned at work. In the past we did not do that dance, and we only understood the lyrics for the nisa dance, not the salang lyrics for the guozhuang dance. Salang was not originally meant to accompany Qiang dances, but these years this has been changed by some bureaucrats. There are special lyrics in the Qiang language for the nisa dance that we do during New Year celebrations.
It should be pointed out that in other regions, practically no one of the Qiang people can understand the lyrics for the guozhuang dance. Guozhuang seems to have come from the west (today’s Jiarong and Heishui regions), and in the past the more eastward one went, the less of this tradition one could observe. During the first half of the twentieth century, researchers pointed out that at the time, the Qiang’s guozhuang dance was not a common practice, and only the Qiangs who lived close to the Jiarong Tibetans had such a custom. According to some elderly people, in the past each place had its own version of the guozhuang dance. Some elders from the Heishui Tibetan people (who call themselves “erlema”) mentioned that in the past they used to do two types of salang dances—the “Chibu” salang and “Erlema” salang. The former refers to the salang that originated in the upper-stream region, while the latter is “our salang.” The erlema that were mentioned by these old people only indicated the people from a small area.
Since 1989, the Aba Tibetan Autonomous government and the local officials under it have been re-choreographing the typical Qiang guozhuang dance and the Tibetan guozhuang dance, and promoting it to the various local regions. The well-educated members of the ethnic minority community in larger cities served as enthusiastic advocates of this project. Nowadays guozhuang performances have become an important item in local tourism activities, and are frequently performed on various public and private occasions, such as weddings, sports meets, or the Qiang New Year. It has also become an activity that young Qiang people do for fun in their free time. To today’s Qiang people, it not only serves as the epitome of Qiang culture, but also symbolizes unity among the Tibetans and the Qiang in the Aba Tibetan region.
Clothing and Accessories of Qiang Women
Most Qiang women have the habit of wearing head wraps, but the styles vary from region to region, the main two categorizations being “dapazi” and “baopazi.” The former is popular in the Qiang region close to the region inhabited by Jiarong and Heishui Tibetans, such as Chibusu and Li County, and the latter can be commonly seen in the other Qiang regions. The way the women arrange their head wraps differs significantly in Sanlonggou, Heihugou, Puxigou, and Yonghegou, etc. More detailed distinctions can be observed within the same valley across different villages. Important features of Qiang clothing can be seen on their shoes, collars, sleeves, and waistbands. Northern and western Qiangs are known for their geometrical cross-stitches, while the eastern Qiangs prefer embroidery in the from of floral designs. Nowadays the ones who wear such colorful and versatile “traditional Qiang clothing” are mostly women who live in the villages.
Which of the special features of these outfits are passed down from the first half of the twentieth century and can be considered “traditional”? In the early 1900s, Thomas Torrance, David Crockett Graham, Hu Jienmin, and the authors of the Western Sichuan Survey described Qiang clothing as plain and simple in terms of both style and color (images here). In other words, they believed that it was impossible to identify a Qiang person by his or her clothing alone. Both Graham and Hu noticed that the practice of embroidering floral designs on clothing and shoes was more common in regions that were subject to more Han and Tibetan (Jiarong) influence. Therefore, they suspected that the Qiang people learned their practice of embroidering flowers from the nearby Han people or Jiarong Tibetans. Furthermore, in 1928 the researcher Li Guangming already observed that the Qiangs in Wenchuan wore head wraps. However, he also pointed out that “the Han people of western Sichuan were accustomed to wearing head wraps in the place of hats, and this was not a practice unique to the Qiang or other indigenous people.” Chinese traveler Zhuang Xueben’s 1934 description of the clothing of the Qiang people in Wenchuan indicates that “the Hans, Qiangs, and ordinary Sichuan residents all wear the same plain white head wrap.”
Noticeably different from before, modern-day Qiang village women dress in very colorful clothing with large amounts of elaborate designs on the top and skirt. In recent decades the Qiang women’s clothing have been gradually exhibiting more and more local and ethnic uniqueness, but the clothing of Qiang men in both rural and urban areas have been evolving in the opposite direction and becoming more neutral, ordinary, and modern. By looking at their clothing, we cannot distinguish between the Qiang men of different regions, and nor can we tell a Qiang man from a Han man. However, in terms of regional differences in the Qiang women’s outfits, we can infer from the descriptions by Graham and Hu that they have been consistent over the years.
The modern concept of “nation” and “nation-state” contains two major elements—nationalization and modernization. In addition to uniting all members of the nation by emphasizing shared origins, nation stresses pursuit of progress and modernization. This dual characteristic causes people to feel conflicted about their “ethnic traditional culture”; on the one hand “traditional culture” should be promoted because it helps to unite a group of people, but on the other hand “traditional culture” implies backwardness and needs to be reformed or abandoned. Due to the love-hate relationship with tradition and the distinction between core and periphery, the Chinese people think that because the Hans do not wear traditional clothing and that ethnic minority groups do, it means that the Han are modernizing and the ethnic minority groups are regressing. Well-educated Qiang people who live in urban areas do not wear their traditional clothing, but they are proud that their fellow Qiangs who live in rural villages still do. At the same time, urban Qiang people view themselves as more modernized and sophisticated, while they see their counterparts in the countryside as conservative and backward. In rural Qiang villages, the men also do not wear traditional clothing, but they brag about how “the local women still wear traditional clothing.” The village men also believe that they have seen and experienced more, and are therefore more sophisticated, whereas the women are more narrow-minded and conservative. As a result, the Qiang village women become the ones responsible for upholding the Qiang tradition.
Mountain Worshipping and Temple Gatherings
The worship of mountains has long been a religious tradition in some Qiang villages, but is no longer practiced in others. Generally speaking, the villages that are located farther away from urban areas and major transportation facilities are more in need of maintaining the practice. Therefore, we see such events more among the Qiang who live in the villages located deep in the mountains in the west and north. Traditionally, even within the same valley, the people of each village will worship their own mountain god, and the dates of worship and procedures vary as well. The nearby Jiarong and Heishui Tibetans also follow this tradition. These factors mean that the worship of mountain gods is a local village tradition, not solely belonging to the Qiangs. In recent years, due to the encouragement and arrangement by local and non-local researchers of Qiang culture, as well as incentives to revive Qiang culture and promote tourism, some villages have held large-scale mountain worshipping ceremonies. These events attracted many tourists, journalists, scholars, and nearby residents. Text and images that describe these Qiang events have been circulated via all sorts of media; Qiang-related books compiled and published by Qiang scholars especially pointed out that mountain god (or holy forest) worship was a practice that was representative of Qiang religion.
In the past, “temple gatherings” were popular in most Qiang regions. In relatively more sinicized regions, the “temple” replaces the mountain god and inherits the mountain god’s duty of watching over the resources of its own village. Therefore, since the mid-1980s, many villages have been trying to rebuild the temples that were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, and resurrect the custom of holding temple gatherings. However, because these reconstructed Dongyue temples, Guanyin temples, and Chuanzhu temples are not related to the religion and culture of “ethnic minorities,” the reconstruction projects were accused by some local residents of being a “superstition of feudal religion” and oppressed by the local government.
