Dai Erotic

Dai is a category the Chinese state drew around several Tai-speaking peoples of southern Yunnan, and the people inside it usually name themselves more precisely: Tai Lue in Xishuangbanna, Tai Nuea in Dehong on the Burmese border, Tai Ya and smaller groups along the Red River farther east. What holds the label together is a way of life that does not stop at the frontier. It runs on into Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam: flat valley basins worked as rice paddies, houses of bamboo and timber raised on stilts, a Buddhist temple at the center of the village, and speech far closer to Lao and Thai than to the Mandarin of Kunming.

Their languages sit in the Southwestern branch of the Tai family, and the main branches have long had writing of their own. Xishuangbanna uses the Tai Tham script, which it shares with the old Lanna kingdom of northern Thailand, and Dehong uses the Tai Le script. Chinese linguists simplified both in the 1950s, but the older letters survive in the temples. The name Xishuangbanna is itself a Chinese rendering of Sipsong Panna, a Tai name usually glossed as "twelve thousand rice fields." For centuries it was a small kingdom under a hereditary ruler that sent tribute to both Chinese and Burmese courts. In Dehong, the Tai principality of Mong Mao was a real regional power until Ming armies campaigned against it in the fifteenth century.

Most Dai are Theravada Buddhists, following the same school as Thailand and Myanmar. Boys traditionally spent a stretch as novices in the village temple, which for generations was where a Dai man learned to read, and scripture was copied onto palm-leaf manuscripts. Buddhism never pushed out the older spirits of village, field and household, and they still get their offerings. The three-month rains retreat opens with a Door-Closing festival and ends with a Door-Opening one, and weddings traditionally wait until it is over. The Huayao, or "flowery-waist," Dai of the Red River valley, named for the bright sashes in the women's dress, stand apart: they never took up Buddhism and keep to their older spirit religion.

The mid-April Water-Splashing Festival, which is the Dai New Year, is the picture most of China has of the Dai, along with the peacock dance. The picture leaves out how much the past seventy years have changed. Temples closed during the Cultural Revolution and reopened in the 1980s, often with help from monks across the southern border. Rubber plantations and a heavy tourist trade have since remade much of Xishuangbanna's lowland forest and its towns.