After passing through the Yunnan Tiger Leaping Gorge, the Yangtze River spirals sharply and forms an inverted U-shaped river valley, and the Immeasurable River merges from its top to form a landscape where three rivers gather, named Sanjiangkou. The ancient village of Oya, which has a history of more than 400 years, is on the north bank of the Ronda River, a secondary tributary of the Wuliang River.
In the large Russian-Asian village, which is closed to traffic, horses are an important means of transportation.
The Austrian-American explorer, botanist, and geographer Joseph Locke once described it in the Kingdom of Ancient Naxi in Southwest China: "The entire Gonggaring Mountains and the Wuliang River were once ruled by the Naxi chieftains during the Ming Dynasty (1573-1619). There are many Naxi villages, collectively known as Oyasia, and the inhabitants of the villages are descendants of the Naxi soldiers who used to defend those areas. According to today's administrative divisions, the village of Russia is located in Muli Tibetan Autonomous County of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province, at the junction of Ninglang, Lijiang, Shangri-La in Yunnan Province, and the five counties of Daocheng and Muli in Sichuan, the real "five counties of Jiming Two Provinces".
Passing through Yanyuan Lugu Lake to Yiji Township in Muli County, on the way to Russia and Asia, all the way to dust and potholes, off-road vehicles can pass. Navigating between cliffs and cliffs, there are places where only one car can pass, which is very thrilling. As far as the eye can see, the mountains are full of pristine forests, and there are snow covered not far away. After more than ten hours of bumps, the feet were able to touch the soft soil. It is precisely because it is difficult to reach, the Russian-Asian village has become a 'secret place' that many explorers have heard by word of mouth, and the outside world is curious about the unique ma gang culture, architecture and "gang marriage" here. However, with the rapid changes in society, the Russians and Asians are no longer isolated from the world.
The Oyama Gang
Caravan
Due to traffic congestion, almost every household in Russia and Asia has a varying number of mules and horses. Villagers go up the mountain to ride horses, transportation depends on mules and horses, send fat and pull grain can not be separated from mules and horses, mules and horses and Russian and Asian ancestors of life and production are closely related.
Ya Ruo, a 28-year-old young village chief and current village secretary, told me: "There are more than 200 households in the whole village of Russia and Asia, a total of more than 1,600 villagers, usually there are three or four mules and horses in one family, and there are thousands of horses in the whole village." ”
In the evening, the Russian-Asian highway is busy, and teams of mules and horses are returning to the village, carrying grain, firewood, wheat grass and other things. The mule and horse stream is interspersed with villagers, who carry farm tools or carry their backs. The scene of mules and horses strung into the village lasted an hour or two.
In the past, the Ma Gang was their only channel of communication with the outside world. Yu Ruo told me that before the opening of the russian-Asian village, there were fifty or sixty horse gangs, with hundreds of employees, and they were famous far and wide. They traveled back and forth between Diqing and Lijiang in Yunnan, Daocheng and Muliwa factories in Sichuan, and the Oyanasi ethnic townships. Horse gangs usually carry small commodities from places with good traffic conditions to remote places, and then from remote places to produce products in the mountains to places with good traffic conditions.
Horse gangs transport timber
In 2011, the Russian-Asian village was officially opened to traffic, and the vehicle transportation replaced the horse gang, but the number of mules and horses in the village did not decrease, "because the villagers lived too far away from the crops, these mules and horses were used to drive dung and crops." Omura Naxi teacher Guma said. The masters worked in the fields, and the mules and horses grazed next to them, or were locked up in the circle of crops and waited until the afternoon to carry home the implements and firewood.
Today, the young people of Oyanos prefer motorcycles to mules and horses. In 2012, the 30-year-old Su Lang spent more than 6,000 yuan to buy a motorcycle and ride it. He said, "Now there are nearly a hundred motorcycles in the village, and the young people in the village like to put stereos on the motorcycles and put them all the way, which is very windy." ”
At the foot of the Large Village of Russia, the Ronda River flows through here, and the people of the Village of Oyano use the collateral tributaries of the Ronda River to build small water mills along the river, built of logs and covered with white clay.
In the morning, the grain was poured into the grain bucket, and in the afternoon, the rice and rice noodles needed for life were ground, saving time and effort, and never worrying about loss.
"Wearing the stars and wearing the moon" is the characteristic of the Oyanasi people's clothing, men wear linen pants, women wear short clothes and long skirts, unmarried women comb long hair and long braids, married women comb their hair in buns, virtuous and kind, their traditional costumes have distinct national characteristics, one set is made of hemp, the other set is made of satin, worn during major festivals and when visiting relatives.
Naxi women are skillful in their hearts and minds, and their clothes are all handmade, and in Russia and Asia, Naxi women who make hemp and weave clothes in the river can be seen everywhere in their spare time. Because the mountains are high and the waters are far away, for hundreds of years, the industrious Naxi people have been weaving and cultivating land in the depths of this mountain, constantly multiplying and living, living primitively, but rich in food and clothing.
Walking through Russia and Asia, you can see that some houses are planted with white flags, and in front of the door hangs the corpses of wild beasts, or hangs stone tablets engraved with mysterious words and patterns, and the stone tablets are painted with color.
DongBa
For the Naxi people of Russia and Asia, The East Pakistani culture runs through the whole of daily life. "Coming of age ceremony", worship of heaven, worship of ancestors, worship of gods, marriage and funeral, exorcism of ghosts and disasters, baby naming, divination and auspiciousness and other aspects, are inseparable from "Dongba". "Dongba", the priest of naxi folk religion, meaning wise man, is the highest level intellectual of the Naxi ethnic group. Most of them combine song, dance, scripture, book, history, painting, and medicine. The Russians still use hieroglyphs, and they call their writing "Scroum", which means "wooden stone seal", that is, a mark or wooden stone script written on the wooden stone. Like other Naxi settlements such as Lijiang, this script is generally unique to "Dongba", hence the name Dongba.
Oyanasi has its own calendar, which is a lunar calendar. Every year around the winter solstice, the dongba in the village and more than a dozen village sages who can look at the stars successively tell a Dongba "leader" of their observations and opinions, and the "leader" then calculates and determines the calendar of the next year according to his own calendar and astrological signs. The village chief, Ya Ruo, introduced that there are thirty-two Dongba here, and each family has its own Dongba.
Dongba Jiaruo, eighty-three years old, three sons and seven daughters, is the oldest Dongba in Russia and Asia, he has passed on the Culture of Dongba to his younger son, became the eleventh Great Dongba, he is old, and rarely participates in sacrifices and other activities.
Rambudonba, forty-five years old, his grandfather was the most famous Great Dongba in Russian and Asian history.
Dong Ba kro, twenty years old, although only has a primary school education, is the youngest in Russia and Asia.
writing
Dongba is a very primitive pictorial hieroglyph, a total of more than 1300 words, it is a collection of calligraphy and painting in one, smooth lines, concise brushwork, this kind of writing is generally unique to Dongba, so it is called Dongba. Judging from the development of the written form, it is more primitive than the oracle bone. Originally, symbolic images were written and painted on wood and stone, and later with paper, these symbolic images were written on paper.
Lombudonpa said: "These words are fish, birds, flowers, grasses, cattle, sheep, suns, stars, moons, and so on. The pictures you see are words, and some pictures represent a meaning, an allusion, or a story. Some of the pictures are linked together as a meaning, an allusion, or a story, so there are many stories of the ancestors in these scriptures, including the process of the Oyanassi tribe moving from Lijiang to here, which is recorded in the scriptures. Also, what time to sow seeds, what time to harvest, what diseases to eat, what medicines to eat, can be found in the scriptures, there is too much knowledge in the scriptures. ”
Looking at these pictorial hieroglyphs, the time has passed, and the symbols seem to float up, and the strings float past the eyes, as if they were heavenly books from ancient times.
East Pakistan Meridian
Over the past hundred years, Dongba has written books and lectures, and while inheriting the teachings in Dongba, they have also collected and integrated the achievements of previous generations of cultures, and written tens of thousands of dongba classics, more than 1,000 kinds of Dongba classics, involving rich fields, including astronomical geography, religious philosophy, language and writing, literature and art, meteorological calendar, biomedicine, agriculture and animal husbandry and other social sciences and natural sciences. Dongba records history in Dongba script and passes on the stories and allusions of old ancestors.
Marriage
When it comes to marriage, the locals are not taboo, thinking that this is a local marriage custom, and there are fewer small monogamous families in the local area, and most of them are more populous marriage families. When I was confused about the relationship between the family members of the marriage, Lambo smiled: "The marriage family is very united, the brothers treat their wives and children equally, and usually everyone divides their work and cooperates, and there will be no contradictions." ”
Originally preserving ancient customs and sticking to its own rhythm of life, with the development of the times, marriage, this custom that has lasted for hundreds of years is gradually disappearing.
At the age of fifty-four, at the age of seventeen, she married the five brothers of Azwab in the village, and later her sister Gomi also married to form a family. Bey Map gave birth to four children, daughters Guma, Zat, and two sons, Gomi Little Be map is nine years old, and has a daughter and a son. Azwab has five brothers, the eldest Shala, the second Yiza, the old three years if he has died, the fourth Waja later worked in the county, he found a wife to break away from the marriage family, Azwab ranked fifth. In a married family, after the child is born, it is not known who the biological father is, and there are several fathers in several brothers, according to the name of the first father, the second father, and the third father.
Rambu dongba's wife, Kemi, gave birth to two sons and a daughter, and her sister Wa Cai was three years older, and the two sisters married the brothers of Langbu Dongba to form a marriage family.
The mansion
Oya Village is located in a canyon deep in the mountains, the farmland is on the high hill opposite the village, and every family builds a house on the side of the field, called "ZhuangFang". Originally built for lunch breaks and the storage of labor tools, the estates gradually evolved into temporary shelters and granaries during busy farming periods. The houses are built on top of each other, most of the buildings are flat-roofed stone blockhouses, the roof usually has a wooden ladder leading to another roof, and the conjoined buildings, shaped like a honeycomb, together constitute a hierarchical architectural community.
The estate is also home to six animals
As the population of Dacun continued to increase and the population density increased, the people of Dacun moved six animals to the village house. Now the house has become an important production base and granary for every family's agricultural and animal husbandry industry.
According to locals, the purpose of building the house was to rest at noon and store some tools for labor, but later gradually changed its function and became a temporary house and granary during the busy time of farming.
Working at sunrise and resting at sunset, the Oyanasi people have been producing and living in the village for generations, interpreting the farming culture of the Naxi people.
The houses are made of abundant local stone, wood and viscous clay, with stone walls, log frames, and clay roofs. The clay is very viscous and quite strong after being compacted and dried, so the locals use clay to build walls and roofs, and the main house frame is made of logs. The logs were cut down by themselves, the white soil was dug back from the foot of the mountain, the slate and stone blocks could be seen everywhere in the mountain, and when the house was built, relatives and friends came to help, and it was built in a few months.
Russian-Asian house
The 248 families in the village of Oyano are assembled into a huge complex, each house has no doors and no walls on the front, and the ladder is to enter the second-floor foyer, and then enter the main house, granary, and storage room. The ground floor is a livestock pen, the third floor is a women's house, and the roof is a dam, and each floor is separated by molding beams and wooden planks. The roof passes through a single wooden staircase to reach the roof of another house. Between households, a complete system is formed, and when you enter the door of a family, you can enter the entire ancient village.
The continuous alpine valleys have created the magic and tranquility of the Russian-Asian village for more than 400 years, and today, the Russian-Asian people look forward to living a modern life. A number of new houses have been built in the ancient village, and the blue tin roof is mixed with the houses, which is extremely incongruous. At the same time, the traditional customs that have lasted for hundreds of years and the strong sense of local ethnicity are also slowly weakening. However, seeing the direct discharge of domestic sewage and animal feces caused by the long-term mixing of people and animals, the flow of sewage in the laneway, and the situation that flies fly all over the sky as soon as they enter the summer, we have no right to ask them to stick to their original way of life. I only hope that when the Russians and Asians are free to choose their own way of life, they will not forget the way they came.