Miao New Year

Miao New Year is the new year of the Miao people, called 'Nongx Niangx' in the Miao language. In the Miao areas along the Qingshui and Duliu rivers of Guizhou, people still keep the Miao calendar, which differs from the lunar one; its first month opens the Miao year. With the harvest in and the farming year effectively over, the year begins here.

Written records of the festival's origin are lacking, but the songs remember. A ancient song of southeast Guizhou, 'Song of Releasing the Ducks', sings: 'In the tenth month we keep Miao New Year, in the eleventh the high-slope year, in the twelfth the Han year.' Around Danzhai another song tells of Awo, a Miao girl married to a poor but honest man called Di, who was carried off to the sky; each eleventh month the Miao kill pigs, hold bull fights, blow the pipes and beat the drums to bring Awo home to celebrate with them.

Because the opening of the Miao year falls at staggered times from village to village, each takes its turn as the centre of the festival — wine in your village this year, pipes in his the next. In June 2008 Miao New Year, jointly nominated by Danzhai and Leishan counties in Guizhou, was inscribed on the second national list of intangible cultural heritage as item Ⅹ-83.

The year begins at the stove. In the days before, every household kills its year pig, pounds glutinous rice cakes, brews rice wine, grinds tofu and sews new clothes. Once the new year's eve has turned, chickens and fish are prepared for the year meal — and fish cannot be missing: on the offering table the fish and meat are laid out on leaves while the ritual specialist chants the old songs to send off and welcome the ancestors, a way of remembering the eastern homeland the Miao left behind.

The year meal runs from daylight into the night. After the reunion toast at home the men set out to visit other villages, a bowl in one house and then the next; every household invites outside guests to a 'village-hopping meal', the hostess singing toasts while the guest answers in song, and a single banquet often lasts until dawn. New Year's morning has its rules: no sweeping, no blowing on the fire, no cooking of raw food, no water carried out of the house — all for a lucky year.

Then come the days of pipe and drum. In the lusheng ground the girls change into full dress to dance the pipe dance and tread the drum, while young men from other villages come at night to sing in courtship, the 'youfang'; in fine weather they dance until daybreak. By the bull pond the fights begin, the whole field accompanied by lusheng and the deep mangtong pipes. A Miao New Year usually lasts five to twelve days, and the young then move on to the next village's celebration; the pipes play on into the Drum-Turning Festival of the second month, when they are put away and dancing stops, and the year's rejoicing is finally over.

Miao New Year joins calendar-keeping, sacrifice and harvest celebration in one. It marks the yield of a year's work and makes offerings to ancestors and spirits, and to the maple, bamboo, rock 'mother' and wells that the Miao regard as guardians. Run through its sequence, the festival holds the lusheng dance, silverwork, Miao embroidery and the calendar songs of the year — nowhere is the culture of a Miao village seen so completely.

In Leishan today the village-by-village observance has become a joint celebration with a procession of ten thousand: the Gaopai lusheng band, the Zhang'ao bronze-drum team and the hundred-bird-coat contingent come down the road together, and a thousand-place long-table banquet fills the street. As young people leave the villages the atmosphere thins, yet each new year the pipes below Leigong Mountain still sound on time — one reason the festival is listed nationally and stands in need of transmission.