Bai Bai Baby

Before we talk about the next day of travelling, let's have a brief aside about the Bai people. Throughout their history the Chinese people have always seen themselves as surrounded by barbarians. When the Communists came to power they decided to categorise the ethnic groupings that fell within the country. Now every Chinese citizen must carry an identity card with them, which states which one of 55 ethnic nationalities the person is deemed to fall into. The Han are the vast majority, comprising 94% of the 1.3 billion people in China.

The ethnic groups (or minorities as the Han call them) have some incredible ways of life, fascinating culture, religion, social structures, farming systems and amazing traditional costumes and crafts, music, art and dance.



Still listening? Well the point is this (albeit extraordinarily simplified by me, it's a complex issue and I don't know the half of it): As I mentioned in a previous post, in a country with over a billion people who pretty much can't leave, internal tourism is a huge industry. Of course the Han Chinese love nothing more than to come and experience the way the minorities live (as do all the Western tourists). This means there's a lotta bucks in it and Han entrepreneurs have found it easy to settle in these areas and open hotels, run tours for big groups of gawping sightseers or construct little sightseeing areas with fake traditional houses, waterfalls and totem poles (of all things).

Now the Han population vastly outnumbers the local ethnic groups in all these areas, the gorgeous little local towns are one-by-one becoming streets full of nothing but souvenier shops and it all feels like a bit of a hollow shell. A lot of the local peoples make their money hawking crap imitations of their handiwork to Han tourists or riding chairlifts with people. This scene has been repeated in a lot of places we'll been - groups of old women wearing traditional costumes busk by singing and dancing lethargically whenever tourists stroll by and then demand a handout. Pretty young Han women in Bai headdresses hold flags high and direct their tour groups down the cobbled streets of the old town. Giggling Han women pay a few cents to dress up in ethnic outfits and stike random poses while their boyfriends snap 500 digital photos. Then the boyfriends throw on hats made from the entire pelt of the endangered red panda and try to look indigenous. Oh and gormless Westerners pay local women to watch them pretend to wash their hair...



Oh it's also worth a buck to chain up a yak and have tourists take turns sitting on it and putting their arms up in the air for a photo.


The other moneymaker (apart from camera theft) is when middle-aged Bai women come up to young(ish) Aussie tourists with a little photo album full of awful furniture which they shove in one's face and say "Antique?". Before one can draw breath or lift an arm to wave her away, the lady leans in closer and hisses "Ganja, weed, smoke?" under her breath. This only happened about ten times a day to me in Dali.

Nine of those times it was the same hopeful woman. God bless the minorities!