Sedang Erotic

The Sedang are a mountain people of central Vietnam, and their name covers more than one community. Vietnam officially recognizes 54 ethnic groups, and the Xơ Đăng category among them takes in the Xơ Teng, Tơ Đrá, Mơ Nâm, Hà Lăng and Ca Dong. Their speech differs enough that linguists often count separate languages. Their country is the steep, often clouded upland where the Central Highlands meet the Annamite Range. It covers the Kon Tum plateau and the high ground around the Ngọc Linh massif, and it reaches east into the mountain districts of Quảng Nam and Quảng Ngãi. With a little over 200,000 people, they are one of the larger highland minorities.

All of these languages belong to the North Bahnaric branch of the Austroasiatic family. That makes them close relatives of Bahnar, spoken to the south, and very distant cousins of Vietnamese, the language of schools, markets and government. A village traditionally forms around its rông, a communal house with a tall thatched roof where elders deliberate, guests are received and ceremonies are held. Upland rice grown in swidden fields is the old staple, though around Tu Mơ Rông some communities cut terraced paddies into the slopes. Ironwork has a long tradition here. Names follow a simple rule: men's names begin with A, women's with Y. The Ngọc Linh ginseng that now sells for extraordinary prices was a local remedy long before scientists noticed it in the 1970s.

Religious life still turns toward the spirits of mountains, water, rice and ancestors. The major occasions, such as a new harvest or a new communal house, call for gongs, jars of rice wine drunk through bamboo straws, and animal sacrifice. The buffalo is the weightiest offering. The gong music of the Sedang and their neighbors is part of the Central Highlands gong culture recognized by UNESCO. Catholicism has deep roots too. French missionaries brought it in the middle of the nineteenth century, when they founded the Kon Tum mission.

History has mostly come to the Sedang uninvited. In 1888 a French adventurer, Marie-Charles David de Mayréna, collected oaths from highland chiefs and declared himself King Marie I of the Sedang. His kingdom collapsed within about two years, but it fixed the name in European memory. Eight decades later the hills around Đắk Tô saw some of the heaviest fighting of the American war, and the upheaval reached villages across the region. Today most Sedang mix hill farming with cash crops, wage work and Vietnamese schooling. Handwoven cloth now comes out mainly when the gongs do.