K'Ho Erotic

The K'Ho are the highland people of Lam Dong, the cool plateau of pine, tea and coffee around Da Lat and Di Linh in southern Vietnam. There are roughly 200,000 of them. A shared language holds them together, and so does a family system that runs through the mother: children belong to her line, a new husband traditionally moves into his wife's household, and property has passed down the female side. The K'Ho are split into several named branches. The Sre, whose name means wet rice field, farm the valley paddies around Di Linh. The Chil kept to the steeper uplands and their shifting hill fields. The Lach live beneath the Lang Biang massif, and smaller groups such as the Nop and Co Don make up the rest. Local legend holds that Lang Biang's two peaks are a Lach man and a Chil woman whose families would not let them marry. K'Ho is a Mon-Khmer language, closely related to Ma, Mnong and Stieng. The Churu and Raglai next door speak Chamic languages from an unrelated family, so the plateau is also a border between language families. K'Ho is written in a Latin alphabet, and most speakers are fluent in Vietnamese too.

Outsiders arrived early and stayed. The French built their hill station at Da Lat on Lach ground in the early twentieth century, and the city's name is commonly traced to a K'Ho phrase meaning the stream of the Lach. Missionaries came after, and today most K'Ho are Christian, Protestant or Catholic. Church life sits alongside an older belief in a world full of spirits, the yang, who once received buffalo and jar wine at the great communal rites. French administrators and later American advisers grouped the K'Ho under the catch-all label Montagnard, and some who fled after the war rebuilt their lives in North Carolina. Since 1975, lowland settlers and the coffee boom have remade the plateau, and many K'Ho households now live off coffee grown on their own plots. Some customs have lasted. Personal names still show gender at the front, with men carrying the prefix K' and women Ka. Gong ensembles, part of the Central Highlands gong culture that UNESCO recognizes, still play at community celebrations. People still draw rice wine through long bamboo straws from a shared jar, and women in Lang Biang villages still weave brocade on backstrap looms.