Tai Nua Erotic

The Tai Nua are the Tai of the upper valleys. Nua means upper or northern, and the name fits: they live at the northern edge of the Tai-speaking world, in the lowland river valleys of western Yunnan around the Shweli, where China meets Myanmar. Beijing counts them within the official Dai nationality, Burmese speakers have long called them Chinese Shan, and they call themselves Tai. A modern border runs straight through their country, with Ruili on the Chinese side and Muse on the Myanmar side facing each other across it. Smaller communities live farther afield in Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.

Their language belongs to the Southwestern Tai branch of the Kra-Dai family. It is a close relative of Shan and a more distant cousin of Thai and Lao. It has its own writing system, the Tai Le script, a Brahmic-derived alphabet of rounded letters that was reformed in the 1950s and again in the 1980s. Most Tai Nua in China also speak the local Yunnan variety of Mandarin. The peoples in the surrounding hills speak languages with no Tai connection at all: Jingpo, Lisu, Achang, De'ang. The valley floors are Tai and the slopes above belong to others, a split between lowland and upland peoples that runs across much of the region.

Religious life runs through Theravada Buddhism, the same school practiced in Myanmar and Thailand. Village monasteries with tiered roofs set the calendar. There is the rainy-season Buddhist Lent, when many older villagers take on extra precepts, and there is the water-splashing festival that opens the new year each April. Buddhism was added on top of older practice rather than replacing it. Villages still honor guardian spirits of the settlement and the land, and those rites go on alongside offerings to the monks.

The valleys once held real power. Möng Mao, a Tai state centered on the Shweli, expanded hard in the fourteenth century, raiding deep into Upper Burma and pushing against Chinese authority. The Ming dynasty answered with a series of campaigns in the 1430s and 1440s that broke it. Afterward the region was run through hereditary Tai chieftains, called saopha in Tai and tusi in Chinese records. They kept their seats under imperial oversight until land reform ended the system in the 1950s.

Some customs have spread well beyond the people who made them. The Dai peacock dance is now a fixture of the Chinese national stage, but it has deep roots in Dehong villages, where men traditionally danced it to the beat of the elephant-foot drum. Dress once showed a woman's marital status plainly. Unmarried women wore trousers with short fitted jackets, married women switched to the long tube skirt, and in some districts married women wrapped their hair in a tall black cloth turban.