Proper name: Hmong, Na Mieo
Other names: Meo, Mieu Ha, Man Trang

Local groups: White Hmong, Chinese Hmong, Red Hmong, Black Hmong, Green Hmong, Na Mieo.

Population: 558,053 people

Language: The Hmong speak a language that belongs to the Hmong – Dao language family.

Production activities: Farming is done on terraced or swidden fields where corns, rice, and wheat are planted. The farmers inter-plant other crops together with the main product, including such crops as lotus, potato, vegetable, peanut, sesame, beans, etc. The plough of the Hmong is famous for its good quality as well as its efficiency. Growing flax, poppy (in the past), and fruit trees such as apple, pear, peach, plum, together with weaving flax are distinctive activities of the Hmong. The Hmong raise water buffaloes, cows, pigs, chickens, and horses. The horse is the most effective source of transportation in these mountainous areas, and they are beloved animals of each Hmong family. The Hmong handicraft industry is well-developed with works like embroidery blacksmithing, and the making of horse saddles, wooden furniture, rice paper and silver jewelry. All of the above items are produced according to need. Though the Hmong practice their crafts part-time, their products, such as ploughs, barrels, and wooden furniture are quite famous and well known. Markets of the Hmong satisfy not only the trading need but also fulfill their other social pursuits as well. 

Diet: The Hmong usually eat 2 meals per day, but during harvesting time, they increase to 3 meals per day. There are traditional dishes in a daily meal, like steam corn flour or rice, fried vegetables and soups. The Hmong use wooden spoons to eat the corn flour, and rice on holidays and festivals. The Hmong like to drink wine made from corn and wine. They smoke tobacco in long pipes. Offering guests pipe which the tobacco is stuffed by the host is an affectionate gesture of hospitality. In the past, smoking opium was fairly popular.

Clothing: Hmong clothing is rich in color and types. White Hmong women grow flax, and weave it into textiles. They dress in white skirts, and buttoned shirts ornamented with embroidery patterns on the sleeves and back. They shave some of their hair, and wrap a long scarf around their head. Chinese Hmong women wear indigo skirts with a flower patterns embroidery design. They wear quilted tops which split above the under arm. Hmong women wear their hair long, and wrapped in a bunch affixed with a twig. Black Hmong wear skirts made from indigo, ornamented with batik flower-patterns, and buttoned shirts. Green Hmong women wear long wrapped skirts. Those who are married arrange their hair in a chignon or bun on the top of their head, and fastened with a little bone or animal hoof comb. On top of that, they wear a scarf that is tied in the shape of two horns. The main decorations on their dresses are made by quilting and embroidery.

Housing: The Hmong live gathered in villages, each one composed of several dozen households. Their houses are one story, with 3 rooms, 2 wings, and 2 or 3 doors. The family altar is located in the middle room. The houses of well-to-do families may be decorated with wallpaper, have wooden columns placed on pumpkin-shaped stone, tiled roof, and wooden floors. The altar is placed in the middle room. More typical, though, are houses made with bamboo walls and straw roofs. Food-staffs are stored on high shelves. In some places, there are food storage areas right next to residential houses. Cattle barns are paved with planks, and are high and clean. In high mountainous areas, there is often a big space between two houses, and there are 2-meter-tall stone walls to separate them.

Transportation: The Hmong use horses for transportation. They use carrying baskets that have two handles.

Social organization: There are many skin lines in a village, and several prominent lines that tend to play a more decisive role in the village’s social structure. The head of the village takes care of all the disputes, either by fine or by social pressure. Inhabitants of each village voluntarily follow its rule in agricultural production, cattle raising, forest protection, and more over in helping each other. The Hmong pay a great deal of attention to family branches which share the same ancestors. Each of these has some special traits, which are evident in rituals to honor the ancestors and the spirits, and include how many incense bowls there are, where they are placed, and how to pray. There are also differences in the funeral customs of different branches of a family: where the corpse is placed in the house, how to leave the dead outside before burying, where to locate the graves, etc. People in the same kinship line, though do not necessarily always knows each other, and though they belong to different generations, could still recognize each other by these special customs, it’s a taboo for people in the same family line to marry each other, because those kinsmen are very close. The head of a family tree has much authority, is respected and trusted by everyone. The Hmong have small patriarchal families. The bride, once she is introduced in the wedding ritual and walks through her husband’s family’s doorway, is said to completely belong to the husband’s family line. Husbands and wives are very affectionate, and are always side by side; they go to the market, work in the terrace, and visit relatives, etc, together. 

Beliefs: There are many sacred places in the house that are reserved specifically for worshiping, such as a place for ancestors, for house spirits, door spirit, and kitchen spirit. Those men who are traditional healers or ritual specialists have altars to worship the founders of their profession, there are many rituals duding which the strangers are forbidden to walk into the Hmong’s houses and villages. After worshiping a spirit to pray for someone, a good-luck charm is worn.
Education: The Hmong writing though edited like the national alphabet since the 60s is no longer widely used today

Festivals: While the Vietnamese are busy to finish those last days of the year, the Hmong have already started those first days of the next year. Counting by the Vietnamese Lunar Calendar, the Hmong’s New Year is in December to coincide with their traditional agricultural calendar, and it is about one month earlier than the Vietnamese Tet. During the New Year’s Festival, villages play shuttlecock, swing, flute, and sing and dance at public areas around the villages. The second biggest holiday is the 5th of May (lunar calendar). Outside these two, depending on location, some places celebrate the 3rd of March, 13th of June, or 7th of July holidays (of the lunar calendar)

Artistic activities: Young people like to play pan-flutes while dancing. Flutes and drums are also used in funerals, when visiting someone, or during worshipping. Flutes made from leaves and whistles are vehicles for young people to express their feelings.

 

http://www.riversidevangvieng.com/ethnic_hmong.php

The Hmong began migrating from the central and southern parts of China into Laos in the19th century. Today, they inhabit the northern and central parts of Laos, including Xieng Khouang, Luang Prabang, Oudomxay, Luang Namtha, Xayaboury, Vientiane and Bolikhamxay provinces. Many Hmong villages can be found around Vang Vieng. The Hmong have their own spoken and written language, and constitute the third largest ethnic group in Laos, with about 8% of the population.

In the past, the Hmong used to be called the Miao or Lao Soung. Lao Soung means “Lao of the mountaintops.” The expression refers to where the Hmong traditionally liked to live. However, these names are no longer considered appropriate, and the Hmong prefer to be called by their ethnic group name.

The Hmong are a proud ethnic group, maintaining their distinctive culture and traditions. They cannot marry within their clan, or even a person of their own family name. This means that men and women often have to find a spouse from outside of their village. Traditionally after marriage, a woman will then follow her husband and severe ties with her parents.

The Hmong celebrate their New Year, called Nor Pe Chao, in December or January, following the lunar calendar. The celebrations last about 10 days and include many activities, such as top-spinning games, arrow shooting contests, singing and dancing, and courtship games. Young men and women will wear colourful traditional clothing on these occasions, in the hope of attracting a life partner.

 

 

Getting Oxen To Fight http://www.vietnamheritage.com.vn/pages/en/91211401278-Getting-oxen-to-fight.html

Vietnam Heritage, June-July 2011 — The Hmong people in Mường Lống, Kỳ Sơn District, Central Vietnam, are among those in Vietnam who go in for bullfighting as a pastime. Whereas most bullfighting in Vietnam is done with buffaloes, the Hmong of Mường Lống train oxen. Va Ba Di, of the Cultural Department of Kỳ Sơn District, said, ‘Fighting bulls are raised in most Hmong villages in Kỳ Sơn, and most are found in Mường Lống Ward. When it is time for big festivals, which often occur several times a year, hundreds of bulls from all corners of the villages are gathered.’ Every village has a bullfighting arena. I went to Mường Lống during a bullfighting festival. Dozens of bulls were waiting. Thousands of villagers, dressed in colorful outfits, supported the fighting teams with drums and panpipes. A team of referees also acted as a security team to protect the audience.   Xenh Ba Gianh’s bull defeated Lau Giong Mua’s in less than 10 minutes. The tournament lasted three days. Every day, farmers in Kon village, Vinh Quang Commune, Kontum, in the Central Highlands, cross Dak Bla river, hundreds of metres wide, with sampans and bullock carts to get cassava Photos:Thanh Trang There was no reward for the champion, but a Chinese tourist bought the winning bull for $3,200. Va Ba Ly, a fighting-bull-trader for 20 years’  said, ‘To become a fighter, the bull has to be strong and healthy. His horns have to be twice as long as a normal bull’s. His shoulders have to be large and muscular and his body has to be slim.’ Mua Sau Cho, a trader, said that although there were a couple of thousand bulls in Kỳ Sơn, it was not easy to find fighters. He had to go to Laos for them, sometimes finding nothing, after a month. A bull cost VND10 million ($500) to VND25 million ($1,250). Va Cha Xa, a bullfighting professional, said prospective fighters could not run free in the mountains like other bulls but had to be put in wooden cages with floors that protected them from the air coming from the ground. This promoted big, strong legs. Eventually the uncomfortable habitation annoyed the bulls and they turned belligerent. In addition to the best grass from the forest, they had to be fed other special foods like rice soup, corn and potatoes. Every few months they had training fights.

by Phan Sang

 

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1364757/Hmong

Ethnic group living chiefly in China and Southeast Asia and speaking Hmong, one of theHmong-Mien languages (also known as Miao-Yao languages). Since the late 18th century, the Hmong alone among the Miao groups have slowly migrated out of the southern provinces of China, where about 2.7 million still remain. See also China: People. Some 1.2 million have moved into the rugged uplands of northern Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and the eastern parts of Myanmar (Burma). More than 170,000 live in the United States and nearly 20,000 more in France (15,000), Australia (2,000), French Guiana (1,500), Canada (600), and Argentina (600). (See Researcher’s Note: Hmong population figures and self-name.)

The original home of the Hmong is thought to have been in the Huang He (Yellow River) basin of central China. They were slowly driven southward and marginalized by the expanding population of the Han Chinese. Traditionally, the Hmong practiced the shifting cultivation of unirrigated upland crops; buckwheat, barley, and millet were grown at the highest altitudes, and rice and corn (maize) at lower elevations. Virgin forest was cleared and burnt off for the planting of new fields; when soil fertility declined (usually after several decades), the entire village would relocate. New villages could be a considerable distance away from a group’s previous locale. In the late 19th century the opium poppy was introduced into the highlands by outside traders, and the Hmong began to cultivate it in an integrated cycle together with corn and dry rice. They sold opium to itinerant traders, usually Chinese, in return for silver. The silver was used in bridewealth payments, and the trading system often involved a loan against a future opium harvest.

By the late 20th century, shifting cultivation had become impracticable except in a few remote areas. In response to government programs in Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam, the Hmong have now largely abandoned shifting cultivation and opium production. They have instead turned to the permanent-field cultivation of crops such as corn or the gardening of flowers, fruits, and vegetables, which they sell in lowland markets.

Hmong society is organized through a number of patrilineal clans with Chinese surnames such as Li, Wang, and Yang. Smaller descent groups within these clans comprise people united through a known common ancestor and shared ancestral rituals. Surname exogamy, or outmarriage, is still strictly observed: a Li man may not marry a Li woman. An ideology of brotherhood unites the men of a particular clan, so that a man of the Li clan may expect to find hospitality from other Li “brothers,” wherever they may be living. The role of women in traditional clan culture is more ambiguous; their spirits were cared for in the afterlife, but their social status was low.

Clans bridge the broad cultural divisions that are thought to reflect the migration of different groups of Hmong from central China. The two main cultural divisions of the Hmong in Southeast Asia are the White Hmong and the Green Hmong, which may refer to the colour of women’s clothing. The White Hmong and the Green Hmong traditionally lived in separate villages, rarely intermarried, spoke different dialects, had different forms of women’s dress, and lived in houses of different architectural patterns. By the late 20th century there was greater proximity between the cultural groups—more intermarriage occurred and mixed settlements had become commonplace—yet the sense of difference between the divisions still remained strong.

Hmong cultural life and religious beliefs are extremely rich, like the embroidery and love songs for which the Hmong are noted. At marriage the bride joins her husband’s household. The sequence of events at a wedding is carried through by a series of songs marking each moment of the bride’s transition, sung by two go-betweens appointed respectively by the bride’s and the bridegroom’s side. A certain amount of bridewealth, traditionally in silver, must be paid by the family of the groom to the family of the bride. This payment acts as a sanction on her behavior; if it can be shown that she has misbehaved (for example, by cheating on her husband or by running away for no good reason), the husband’s family can demand its return. Female suicides, often by swallowing opium, were quite common. A man may have more than one wife; co-wives live together in the same house and treat their children equally.

The New Year, which starts on the 30th day of the 12th lunar month, is a time for honoring the family’s ancestral and household spirits, and for the family to remain together, but also for visiting other villages and playing communal games. In Southeast Asia rows of unmarried boys and girls play catch with a cloth ball, while in China there is the beating back and forth of a feather shuttlecock. These games may lead to further meetings between a young couple and eventually to marriage.

In cases of serious sickness or misfortune, a shaman is invited to the house, where he enters a possessive trance in order to visit the otherworld and locate the missing soul of the patient. Every person has a number of souls who may wander away from the body or be trapped by evil spirits, causing illness, and it is the shaman’s job to diagnose this and to retrieve the soul (see shamanism; soul loss).

Funeral rites may last several days, and there is a series of mortuary rituals that takes place some years after a death. A drum is beaten, the reed pipes are played, and a special ritual expert is invited to sing the song “Opening the Way,” which will guide the reincarnating soul of the deceased back to the original village of ancestors, from where it will be reborn. The corpse is buried, usually in a place selected—like the sites of villages are—according to the Chinese system of geomancy (feng shui).

Sometimes a shaman acts as a political leader, as there is no specifically Hmong political institution above the level of the village or local descent group. From the late 19th through the 20th century the Hmong have periodically risen up in armed revolt against colonial and postcolonial authorities, a response to the exploitation and hardship imposed by more dominant peoples. Often these rebellions have been associated with the belief that amessianic leader of the Hmong is about to be born, the imminence of which is announced by a prophet who validates his claim by “discovering” a form of writing for the Hmong language. There is no traditional form of writing for Hmong, but legends explain how they lost their writing at the dawn of time and describe the circumstances under which it will one day be restored. Although a variety of scripts are now in use for the language, messianic movements persist.

In the 20th century the Hmong of Southeast Asia were divided by the conflicts between communist parties and states. In Thailand, where many Hmong joined the Communist Party during the 1960s, they earned a reputation as enemies of the state for that reason. Decades later, many Hmong in Thailand still continue to lack citizenship rights or proper titles to the land they cultivate.

In Laos many Hmong sided with the opposition to the communists; after the Revolution of 1975, more than 100,000 fled from Laos into refugee camps in Thailand, from where they were resettled to countries including the United States, Canada, France and French Guiana, Australia, and New Zealand. Many families were split apart in these resettlements. Some diasporic Hmong have begun tracing family roots and tracking down relatives while revisiting their homelands in Thailand, in Laos, to a lesser extent in Vietnam, and even in southern China, which their families may have left two centuries ago. New contacts have been formed across the Hmong global community through the use of audio- and videocassettes and increasingly through the Internet. Indeed, these technological advances have been crucial in forming a new sense of transnational community among the geographically distant groups of Hmong.

Nicholas Tapp

 

Researcher’s Note:

Population figures for the Hmong in China and in Myanmar (Burma) are difficult to determine. The latter country has not had a reliable census since 1931, and even then the Hmong were not included. Since 1949 the Chinese government has grouped the Hmong with the Hmu, Qo Xiong, and A-Hmao, considering them all members of one ethnic group it names Miao and so treats them in the census. According to the French scholar Jacques Lemoine in his article “What Is the Actual Number of the (H)mong in the World?” (Hmong Studies Journal, 2005, 6:1–8), before 1949 “Miao was a kind of vague category, something like ‘aborigine’ which was used to classify all strange and backward looking non-Han people in southern China.”

In fact, the name Hmong has been known to the general public in the West only since the mid-1970s. Lemoine explains that “in Indochina, ‘Meo,’ the Vietnamese and Tai pronunciation of [Miao] that the (H)mong immigrants had brought with them, was even more derogatory being homophonous with the word for cat in both languages. There is then little wonder that when (H)mong leaders and intellectuals started playing a part in Laotian and Vietnamese politics during the Vietnam War, they wanted and managed to have their ethnic name, (H)mong, acknowledged for such.”

In contemporary China, however, Miao is the official term for the Hmong and related groups. It has no derogatory overtones, and the Hmong in China happily accept the term because it brings material benefits for minorities in the form of positive discrimination policies regarding housing, education, and population policy. Miao is also the term still used by many linguists for Hmong and related languages.