Yunnan Culture & Language

Yunnan’s culture is plural to a degree that has no parallel elsewhere in China.

The Dongba script

The Naxi of Lijiang preserved a writing system of around a thousand pictographs — a sun is a sun, a person a stick figure — used by dongba priests to write ritual manuscripts on handmade paper. It is the only pictographic script still in living use anywhere, it was never adapted for ordinary writing, and the number of people who can read it fluently is now very small. The manuscripts are held at Lijiang and are the subject of a serious preservation effort.

Naxi music

Orchestras in Lijiang play Taoist ritual music using instruments and repertoire that disappeared elsewhere in China centuries ago, performed by very elderly musicians — a genuine survival that has become a nightly performance.

Bai architecture

Whitewashed courtyard houses with painted eaves and screen walls around Dali, and the three-course tea ceremony — bitter, then sweet, then aftertaste — that Bai hosts serve as a lesson about life.

Dai Theravada

In the tropical south, gilded Theravada Buddhist temples and a culture closer to Thailand and Laos than to Han China.

The Lisu and the missionaries

Among the Lisu and several other groups in the west, British and American missionaries created written scripts in the early twentieth century and converted much of the population. The result is villages high in the Nu river gorge where several hundred people sing four-part Christian hymns in Lisu, taught a century ago and maintained since, in an idiom that startles visitors who did not expect to find it there.

Tie-dye and silver

Bai indigo tie-dye at Zhoucheng and Miao silverwork.

Mandarin is the common language and is taught everywhere, though in remote minority villages older people may have little.

Minority languages are genuinely in use: Bai, Naxi, Yi, Hani, Dai, Lisu, Tibetan and many more, belonging to several unrelated families. Dai is close to Thai and Lao; Tibetan is spoken across the north-west. Several have their own scripts, and the Naxi Dongba pictographs are the most remarkable.

English is limited outside hostels and tourist businesses in Dali, Lijiang and Kunming. A translation app is necessary.

Useful Mandarin: ni hao, xie xie, duo shao qian for how much, mai dan for the bill, and bu la for not spicy.

Yunnan Mandarin has its own accent and vocabulary and differs noticeably from the northern standard.