Yi Torch Festival

The Torch Festival is observed across Yi areas of Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou, around the twenty-fourth of the sixth lunar month: three days and nights in Liangshan, up to five in Chuxiong and elsewhere. In the Yi language it is Duze — the worship, honouring and sending off of fire — and people also speak of it as the New Year. The Yi ancestors lived in cold high mountains and depended on fire absolutely, so fire worship runs through their beliefs and daily life.

Some scholars connect the festival's origin with the Yi ten-month solar calendar: the ancestors watched the sky and fixed the seasons by the direction of the handle of the Big Dipper, which points straight up at the height of summer, and the festival falls around that moment — hence its other name, the Star-Return Festival. Historical sources record that the Yi were observing the Torch Festival more than two thousand years ago; it is among their oldest traditional festivals.

The first day is the worship of fire: each household lights torches to illuminate house and fields, offers wine to the hearth and recites prayers for the harvest. The second day passes the fire on and holds torch contests; the whole village walks the field ridges with fire, and young men and women meet in antiphonal song. On the third day the fire is sent off: the torches are gathered and burned, the fire god is escorted back to the mountains, and the rite concludes.

Daytime is no less busy: wrestling, bullfighting, horse racing and the spinning modan swing follow one another, girls dress in their finest for the costume contest, and the market fills with snacks and hand-worked silver. At night the bonfires blaze, the big sanxian and gourd pipe strike up, and everyone joins hands in the circle of the left-foot dance, often until daybreak.

In May 2006 the Torch Festival (Yi Torch Festival), nominated by the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan and the Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan, was approved by the State Council for the first national list of intangible cultural heritage (Ⅹ-10, serial no. 458).

The festival is not the Yi's alone. The Bai, Naxi, Hani, Lisu, Lahu, Jino and Achang all have long traditions of keeping it. In May 1981 the Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture people's congress passed a bill making the Torch Festival a statutory prefectural holiday, later written into the prefecture's regulations on the exercise of autonomy — today it is both a stage for cultural transmission and a window through which the ethnic areas of the southwest face the wider world.