There were several houses in Pai Ka Miao Village where we watched the local master craftsmen making the Lusheng. This took more work than one would expect – choosing the proper bamboo, cutting, tempering, tuning. The end result – a Lusheng with different tonal qualities.

Everywhere we drove or visited, the local people were harvesting the corn and rice crops. Unfortunately for them, the crops hadn’t been good that year. This would mean food shortages over the coming winter. Two varieties of rice are grown: big grains and small grains (that’s how it was described to us), and almost the entire work of picking, threshing and grinding is done by hard, manual labor.

The rice was drying on photogenic drying racks, dotting the landscape, …View image…along the roads…with villagers carrying their crops up and down the mountains on their heads and backs. When I posed a question to Andy about their very slight and short stature, he replied: “If you put a large rock on a blade of grass, the grass will not grow upright when you take it off.”

 

 

From here, Dazhai Village was a maze of old wooden houses set among the green paddy fields. The Miao people living here are called “Short Skirt Miao.”

Short Skirt Miao Dazhai Village, Guizhou Province, China
They also greeted us with rice wine, songs and a big dancing ceremony which ex-Marine and I had to participate in or create an international incident. …View image… The steps were easy to learn…we shuffled around in this big circle, changing feet every fourth step…and the people really got into it! There were actually two other tourists from Japan visiting at the same time, and joining our circle dance. Japanese tourists were far and few between given past enmities between Japan and China.

The children weren’t allowed to dance but sat on the sidelines enjoying every moment. When one little boy did try to join in, he received a thump on the head from one of the elders!

Andy said the dancing and drinking would go on through the remainder of the day and early evening. With all the hard work in their lives, I certainly couldn’t blame them for spending some time having fun….