Lahu Erotic

The Lahu are hill people of the ridges where southwestern Yunnan meets Myanmar's Shan State, with villages strung south through northern Thailand into Laos and a corner of Vietnam. Shan and Thai neighbors long called them Muhso, meaning hunter, and the name was earned: Lahu men were the crossbow and musket hunters of these mountains. Most of the roughly 800,000 Lahu live in China, where Lancang Lahu Autonomous County in Pu'er prefecture is the nearest thing to a capital. The language sits in the Loloish branch of Tibeto-Burman, kin to Lisu, Akha and the Yi languages and far removed from the Tai and Chinese spoken in the valleys below. Black Lahu, the prestige dialect, is written in a Roman script devised by American Baptists in the early 1900s, and China issued its own romanization in the 1950s.

What sets the Lahu apart from most of their neighbors is how seriously they take pairs. The creator G'ui sha is imagined as a male and female whole. Households are led jointly by husband and wife, the couple rather than the man is the basic social unit, and grooms traditionally move in with the bride's family for a period of service. Anthropologists rank Lahu villages among the most gender-equal in Asia, and the Lahu saying that chopsticks only work in pairs is not a metaphor they had to reach for. The creation epic has the first brother and sister emerging from a gourd, and the gourd has stayed the Lahu emblem: it names a festival in Lancang and forms the wind chest of the reed pipe, a bundle of bamboo tubes, that drives the circle dances of Lahu New Year after the harvest.

Religion has never stood still. The old faith of G'ui sha and the village spirits absorbed Mahayana Buddhism in the 1700s, and the monk-led Lahu polities that followed fought the Qing for a century, lost, and sent waves of refugees south into Burma. The Baptist mission at Kengtung reached the Lahu in 1904, and people who had been told for generations that G'ui sha would send a white man carrying a book converted in the thousands. A large share of Lahu in Myanmar and Thailand are Christian. The sub-groups, named for the color of women's dress as Black, Red, Yellow, White and the strict-living Shehleh, differ in how far they went along with conversion, and Red Lahu villages in Thailand keep temple houses and a line of charismatic prophets who claim to speak for G'ui sha. Farming is swidden rice and maize, with tea and coffee replacing the opium that once paid the bills. The Lancang hills hold some of Yunnan's oldest Pu'er tea gardens.