Tunbao Erotic

Drive through the karst country around Anshun in central Guizhou and some villages stand out right away. Their walls, roofs and lanes are all gray stone, packed tight for defense, and older women walk them in long blue robes unlike anything else worn in the province. These are the Tunbao, Han Chinese whose ancestors came as Ming dynasty soldiers and stayed. The name joins tun, a garrison farming colony, and bao, a fortified settlement. The identity behind it rests on a shared memory of where they came from.

The story starts in 1381, when the Hongwu Emperor sent an army southwest to take Yunnan from the last Yuan loyalists. To keep the road through Guizhou open, the court set up garrisons along it, and the soldiers farmed the land around their forts with their families beside them. Many came from the lower Yangtze, the Jiangnan region around Nanjing and Anhui. The women's robe is still sometimes called Fengyang Han dress, after the emperor's home district. The Qing later broke up the garrison system and the forts became ordinary villages, but their people stayed distinct. They set themselves apart from the Buyei, Miao and Gelao around them, and also from Han migrants who arrived under the Qing. Outsiders long called them the Old Han.

Clothing is the most visible marker. The wide-sleeved robe has embroidered trim and is tied with a long black sash. It is worn with embroidered shoes that turn up at the toe, with the hair gathered into a bun under a headcloth. For many older women it is daily wear, not a costume. The other signature is dixi, or ground opera, now on China's national intangible heritage list. Masked performers sing and fight their way through war epics of the Three Kingdoms, Tang and Song on open ground instead of a stage. They wear carved wooden masks on the forehead with black gauze hiding the face below, and gongs and drums drive the action.

Belief blends ancestor veneration, Buddhism, Taoism and local gods. Early in the lunar year, some villages carry the image of Wang Gong, a deified figure from Huizhou in Anhui, around the village in procession, a rite that points straight back to the Jiangnan homeland. Their speech is a local form of Southwestern Mandarin, which keeps them inside the Han language mainstream even as their customs set them apart. Tianlong and other stone villages now draw tourists, and most younger Tunbao dress and work like anyone else their age. What survives does so because communities keep choosing to practice it.