Bo Erotic

The Bo were a people of the limestone gorges of southern Sichuan and the northeastern corner of Yunnan, present in Chinese records from the early imperial period and finished as a people in 1573, when a Ming army destroyed their last strongholds and the survivors scattered into the surrounding Han and Yi population. What is left of them hangs on cliff faces above the Nanguang River in Gong County: more than a hundred wooden coffins set on stakes driven into the rock, or wedged onto natural ledges, some of them thirty meters or more above the ground. Each is a single hollowed log. The ones opened held hemp and cotton cloth, wooden combs, bamboo hairpins, iron blades, bronze bracelets and earrings, and coins that place most of the practice between the Song and the Ming. Painted around them in red ocher are riders, dancers, figures with shields and long knives, acrobats, and a scene usually read as a ball game. How the coffins were raised is still argued about: scaffolding, ropes lowered from the clifftop, earthen ramps long since eroded. The people who knew left no explanation.

Everything written about the Bo was written by their enemies. Han-period texts put a Bo population around Bodao, near modern Yibin, on the trade road running south toward Yunnan; by the Ming, officials were calling the upland communities in the same hills the Duzhang Man and filing them under the standing category of southwestern barbarians. Whether those are the same people is an open argument rather than a settled fact, and so is the question of who the Bo were related to, with the Yi and the Bai both proposed. Their language was never written and never recorded by anyone who thought it worth recording; the usual assumption is that it was Tibeto-Burman, and that is where the matter rests. No priesthood, no cosmology, no named gods come down to us. What comes down is the burial: the dead kept high, in the open, in sight of the living, in places that took real labor and real nerve to reach. The Ming court had spent decades on failed pacification before it sent Liu Xian to end the problem, and the fall of the fortress at Jiusi Mountain in the autumn of 1573 is the last time the Bo appear as a people rather than a ruin. Families surnamed He in Gong County still say they descend from them. The coffins are now a protected monument and a ticketed stop, an odd second life for a people whose final entry in the record is a defeat.