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Yi

The Yi Nationality People

The Yi nationality are one of ancient peoples of Yunnan and now have a population of 4.054 million in this province. The ancestors of the Yi can be traced back to the Qiang people living in northwest China who later migrated south. The Yi are a large and diverse group with over 30 different branches, but they are also one of the poorest of Yunnan’s ethnic groups. They are distributed all over Yunnan, particularly in Ninglang Yi Autonomous County.

       
The Yi can be found all over Yunnan, from Ninglang in the north (left) to Yuanyang in the south (right)

Most Yi nationality people engage in agriculture and a small percentage of them raise livestock. The Yi people in southern Yunnan live in two-storey cube-like adobe-brick houses that are warm in winter and cool in summer. The kitchen and cattle shed are usually on the first floor, and the living room is on the second. The flat roof is used as a veranda for drying grain. The Yi have a "Fireplace Culture" - the fire in the hearth (a hollow dug on the ground) is never put out all year round and is the living centre of the family.

The Yi people’s nature is forthright and they are good at drinking, wrestling, archery and singing. They prefer the colour black, so in history (prior to 1940) the Yi noblemen (landowners) were always in black. The colour white represented the wazi meaning the serfs (subordinate tenants and labourers). Fierce warriors, the Yi evolved an aristocratic society. One clan, the Norzu of Lugu Lake, forced many of their people into slavery. Even their slaves had slaves. Many serfs rebelled and joined the Red Army when the Long March passed through Ninglang and Lugu Lake.

               
A diverse range of dress-styles displayed by Yi women in Yongning and Ninglang

Yi clothing is very diverse. Finely embroidered waistcoats and jackets are typical everywhere. Long, banded colourful dresses with frilly hems, and a broad, kite-like hat are typical for women in the north. Men wear a black scarf around the head and a set of black clothes. Further south, the long dresses and hat are replaced by embroidered aprons and a headscarf. Sometimes the women will twist their hair into horns.

               
Yi women are very visible in the southern market town of Xinjie, Yuanyang.

The Yi nationality people believe in a shamanist multi-God religion. They base their religion on the reading of sacred writings. Their main festival is the Torch Festival. Their language is a branch of the Tibeto-Burman Language Group. The Yi have their own written script – the characters, as the earliest syllabic script in China, were formed in the 13th century and are still used today. A number of works of history, medical science and literature as well as genealogies of the ruling families written in the old Yi script have survived, and folktales have been translated in to Chinese and English.

Sani Ethnic People of the Yi Nationality
Inhabiting the well-known tourist region of Shilin (Stone Forest) near Kunming, the Sani are a branch of the Yi nationality. The young men and women are good at dancing with a musical instrument called the dasangxian (a big three-stringed music instrument), especially during the Torch Festival when they also dance, hold bullfights, horseracing and wrestling contests.

Sani dancers performing at the tourist hotspot of Shilin near Kunming