Kucong Erotic

The Kucong are the people the Ailao Mountains kept hidden. Until the 1950s most of them lived deep in the forests of southern Yunnan, between the Red River and the Vietnamese border, moving camp every few seasons, hunting with crossbows, and clearing small swiddens for corn. Their neighbors knew them mainly through silent trade: Kucong would leave rattan baskets, game or forest herbs beside a path and withdraw, and Hani or Dai villagers would set down salt, cloth or iron in exchange. Across the border in Vietnam, where their relatives are registered as the La Hu of Muong Te district in Lai Chau, lowlanders called them Xa La Vang, the yellow leaf people, because they abandoned a shelter once its leaf roof dried and turned.

They are, by language and by their own reckoning, a branch of the Lahu. Kucong speech belongs to the Loloish branch of Tibeto-Burman and sits close to Lahu proper, closer than to the Hani and Yi languages spoken around it, and the internal divisions follow Lahu color names: Yellow, Black and White. One common account holds that their ancestors were Lahu who retreated into the high forest after failed uprisings against the Qing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, trading farmland for safety. China's ethnic classification left them in limbo for decades as an undetermined group; in 1987, after their own petitions, they were formally folded into the Lahu nationality. The name Kucong is a Chinese one, written with the character for bitter, which is one reason many now simply call themselves Lahu. They number a few tens of thousands in Yunnan, and about twelve thousand La Hu live on the Vietnamese side.

The move out of the forest was not a single event. Government work teams built villages, handed out tools, grain and cattle, and watched many families walk back uphill; it took several rounds of resettlement, and later poverty programs, before settled farming stuck. Today most Kucong live in villages in Jinping, Luchun, Zhenyuan, Xinping and Mojiang counties, growing corn, upland rice and cash crops, and they remain among the poorer communities in a poor region. Older habits persist under the new roofs. Religion is animist: spirits of mountain, forest and hunt are fed and placated, ancestors are honored, and ritual specialists handle illness and misfortune. Fire carries special weight, a legacy of camps where the hearth was never allowed to go out and embers were carried from site to site. Hunters traditionally shared game by fixed rules rather than keeping it, and bamboo and rattan work remains the craft Kucong are known for locally.