A cedar tree grows beside the ruins of Ridu’s ancestral home.

Photo: Jidi Ridu

Evening in Bowoku is bathed in blue. A gentle rustle of walnut leaves dances on the wind. My initial encounter with a high-mountain village in Liangshan occurred the winter before last. Eryi Ribu, seated by his doorway and facing a majestic wall of black-blue peaks, gestured into the distance. He recounted how, in the late Qing dynasty, a clan from beyond those mountains had come to fight. When peace was eventually brokered, their explanation was simple: they had seen and desired the lush, green rice flourishing on this mountainside.

Crossing a single ridge reveals a myriad of differences, from the very soil to the local language. I have now resided here for two years, in this inland pocket between Sichuan and Yunnan. My sense of the place constantly evolves with its accumulating contrasts. My first lessons came from friends close by, whose practices seem rooted in the mountain soil itself.

Bowoku in blue. The mountain in the background is the one referenced at the beginning of this essay.

Photo: Rui Lanxin

Eryi Ribu

At the age of two, Ribu moved with his mother from Bowoku to his grandmother’s village, Huoluolada, due to family circumstances. For over a decade, he traveled back and forth between the two places.

Longtou Mountain is the Han Chinese name. In Yi, the ridge running northward is called Jinye Shuonuo. It is the hinge between Greater and Lesser Liangshan, and is legendary in Liangshan’s history and tradition. Here I try to learn the mountains by their Indigenous names, not the ones found on administrative maps.

Today, wind turbines crowd the ridgelines of Jinyeshuonuo, their constant hum filling the air over the cattle and sheep. In recent years, change has swept Liangshan, with things vanishing, shifting, and reappearing overnight. Back in Bowoku, the natural sounds still echo with Ribu’s earliest memories.

In the very first recording Ribu sent me, I heard the soundscape of a village I had never set foot in. The summer after high school, he began traveling around Liangshan, collecting field recordings from place to place, organizing them by instrument. He titled his first jaw-harp compilation From Jinyeshuonuo to Abuzeluo.[2] Ribu’s recording journeys trace a line between these two ranges vital to Liangshan’s geography and culture.

A snowy night at Emu Erqu’s home.

Photo: Eryi Ribu

In those years, to seek out the most skilled hands, Ribu left Meigu and went to the rest of Liangshan. A few villages lie in the inaccessible terrain that takes hours of uphill climbing. These musicians lead varied lives: some have worked in the mines, some farm their own lands at home, and others are working elsewhere as migrant laborers. Playing an instrument is only one part of their daily life.

Last winter, I followed Ribu up to the musician Emu Erqu’s place. On a snowy night high in the mountains, neighbors from the surrounding huts filed into the house and huddled around the fire. All night long, the hiss of burning logs, bursts of children’s laughter, kittens’ mew, and the mellow notes of Erqu’s moon lute blended into one stream of sound. When recording, Ribu doesn’t filter out the surrounding sounds, because the music unfolds within these ordinary moments.

My first trip to Bowoku was also my first Yi New Year in Liangshan. By late November, cold bit sharply at both dawn and dusk. Rituals began the moment the sky turned gray. By the time I pushed through the crowd, Ribu was gripping a knife still wet with pig’s blood. Slaughtering the New-Year pig is the centerpiece of the celebration. There are few young people left in the village who still know how to do this job properly, so he goes from house to house, butchering pigs for more than a dozen families across the village. Warm blood steamed in the cold air, blending with the smell of fern burned for the rite.

Snowfall in Bowoku.

Photo: Eryi Ribu

It was only then that I learned the villagers call Ribu “Rege”—the word for a fool here. “Hair down to his back, never trimmed, always roaming around with a camera,” they say. Yet Ribu keeps saying that the duties he owes the village matter more than anything else. One track on the album is titled Crumbling Mud Wall. Lately old houses collapse; some mud walls are left standing to keep livestock out of the fields. That is the image the tune evokes for Ribu—those walls, too, are the traces of a shifting land.

Suori Geha

After university, Geha moved back to Liangshan to teach in middle school. The night we first met, a new crescent edged above the ridge, its cold sheen spread across the river. He taught me the Yi word for moonlight—luoxi, literally the moon’s foot. I said I loved the chill mist that drapes these hills.  Geha told me that Yi has a precise word for the fog that encircles mountains in autumn.

In every conversation, he would suddenly quote an ancient proverb, pause, then rummage for the Han Chinese to explain it. Sometimes he searched for a while in his mind and let it go. Yi, he said, can never be fully rendered in Chinese; the two languages rest on different logics. The fissures between languages are both bewildering and captivating.

Geha’s school by the riverside.

Photo: Rui Lanxin

Meigu, Geha’s home county, is considered the heartland of bimo culture[3], with local friends in Liangshan often joking that thousands of bimo reside there. Geha’s paternal lineage, Jike, is a prominent bimo family; in his father’s generation, all men served in this role. Though many men born in the 1980s continued the tradition, the practice has diminished due to factors like migrant work. By Geha’s generation, the number of bimo significantly decreased, leading him to observe, “our generation never even had the chance to forget.”

Writing is not widely used in daily life among the Yi people; only the bimo—guardians of the sutra scrolls—are familiar with the script. Few others ever have the chance to come into contact with Yi writing. Mandarin is prioritized in schools, and Yi language classes are considered unimportant. In such circumstances, even children born and raised in Yi communities can grow estranged from their mother tongue.

Zhuang Xueben, The War of Ancient Warriors

© 2014–2025 Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology

Whenever friends have questions about Yi knowledge, they always turn to Geha for guidance. In his room, I see some old Yi manuscripts he has collected from various places, as well as Yi folk music scores he is studying. A half-open copy of The Art of Not Being Governed lies open on the desk—he is just as curious about stories beyond Liangshan. Moon lutes, jaw harps, and kexiju’er (rim-blown bamboo flutes) crowd the little space. At first, driven by passion, Geha taught himself to play these traditional Yi instruments, slowly refining his sound.

Geha’s hometown in the mountains.

Photo: Suori Geha

To his friends, Geha is known more as a musician than as a teacher. During my research trips in Liangshan, I often heard his songs playing on the long-distance buses. In the drumbeats of the suni [4] during rituals, Geha found a kind of musical motif. As intermediaries between people and spirits, the voices of suni in ceremonies are not for performance, but to address real-life concerns—prayers for blessings or healing. Geha feels that in those rhythms lies something intrinsic to Yi culture. 

Geha playing the kexiju’er (rim-blown bamboo flute).

Photo: Rui Lanxin

I, too, have begun to sense the ancestral pulse Geha speaks of. At Yi weddings, I have listened to kezhi [5], a form of traditional Yi oral literature. It has the cadence of a rap battle: two voices lock into a beat and argue full tilt, while epic myths and clan legends flash back and forth between their lines.

One of Geha’s yet-unreleased songs carries the same tribal memory. It opens with the names of the Black Earth Mother and the White Sky Father, and the epic world springs to life: “Our forebears set their hearthstones on Zizipuwu, our children’s smoke rises over Nimu’erke, every road of mine points back to Zizipuwu.”[6] The tune follows a traditional Yi mode. Geha has gone back to the great epic Le’eteyi, searching it for hidden meters and rhythms, then recasting those inner forms in his music. It’s the kind of work that demands time and persistence.

Though he once studied inside the modern conservatory system, Geha insists that only the sounds that first rang out in the village can summon what lies deepest in him. He can feel them, yet words fail; he keeps writing song after song, trying each time to catch hold of them.

Axi Aga

Aga’s childhood unspooled in the wayside towns strung along the Cheng–Kun Railway. Years later, she realized that her first memories seemed to have traveled along those tracks.

While editing for a forthcoming collection of her short stories, Aga noticed that nearly every piece circled around the idea of fate. A few years ago, her essay “Aga, the Train Is Coming—Do You Hear?” was published online and quickly traveled within and beyond Liangshan. In readers’ feedback, she felt, for the first time, her story seemed to weave itself into a wider current of human experience. Memory gathered around in certain places—trains, illness, the homeland—so she kept writing, tracing the people and tales of Liangshan.

Aga’s mother and younger brother under the harsh light of Lewu.

Courtesy of Axi Aga

Aga is adept at capturing emotions that are subtle yet profound—perhaps because the weight of life fell on her too soon. When she was four, her mother grew gravely ill, and her father kept accompanying her to city hospitals. Aga remembers running to the platform to watch the train pull away. She was so little, all she grasped was that the train had taken them away, and she had no idea when it would bring them back. Her memories are hazy, but she recalls that it was always raining beyond the platform. This image of falling rain continued to resurface throughout her life.

The Chengdu–Kunming Railway as it passes through Xide.

Photo: Rui Lanxin

Apart from her mother’s sickness, childhood in Lewu village was full of light. Living next to the tracks, her family and neighbors grew familiar with the railway workers who passed through. People often came to sing together at the song-and-dance hall her parents owned, and so their house is dotted with many videotapes brought in by train. Family friends also brought gifts from the train—one of them was a film camera. Aga’s mother used it to capture small moments and the peaceful everyday life with family. Illness tormented her, but nothing could dim her vitality. Over those years, her mother took hundreds of photographs. In those fading images Aga can still feel the glow of childhood.

Long illness made ritual a part of daily life. Once, when her father was seriously sick, the family asked a medium to perform a ritual in order to retrieve his soul. That night, the medium stepped into the spirit realm to search for his “lost soul.” On the road the medium met Aga’s forebears one by one, greeted them, passed on, and reached the father in distress. The last one the medium faced was Aga’s mother. Through such crossings between the living and the dead, Aga’s sense of things slowly shifted: death is no terminus; another world waits on the far side of life.

Aga’s former family home in Xide, now demolished.

Photo: Rui Lanxin

In recent years, Aga writes to look back and to probe ahead. Her subjects are the ordinary people of Liangshan, and the subtle turns in their fates push her to know them through writing. In college, she followed and documented a Yi junior soccer team that had been sent out of Liangshan for training. All the children came from impoverished backgrounds. Their displacement compelled Aga to create a collective portrait of the team, aiming to reveal the profound impact of intergenerational realities on the Yi people of Liangshan.

The stories Aga writes also inspire her. She met a young woman who, at fourteen, left Liangshan for work. What initially captivated Aga was the girl’s unusual independence and courage, particularly for a Yi girl, as she ended an unfulfilling marriage. Over time, Aga discovered that the girl’s shrewdness and tenacity stemmed from the strong bond she shared with the women in her family, who supported her through numerous difficulties.

Aga, like many figures in her stories, faced adversity early in life. Nevertheless, she believes the brightness of her early years can guide her through difficult times.

Jidi Ridu

Ridu’s earliest memory begins with a dreamlike scene. One evening when he was seven, he walked into the deep woods beyond the village. The last swath of Liangshan’s primeval forest was still standing. Moonlight poured through the mist, and in the forest, day and night seemed to dissolve into one. Butterflies and birds drifted past, threading the mist in slow spirals.

This forest—called Jidi Huoci—was the Ridu family’s ancestral land, set inside Adu territory[7]. In Ridu’s childhood, an old man kept guard over the trees. Each household contributed grain and some money to support him, and he lived alone in a shack he had built among the trunks. These methods were collectively decided upon by the people themselves; those who live in the mountains understand best the impact of the forest.

At the site of Ridu’s ancestral home, now in ruins. He has taken many photographs of his family here; in the foreground is his younger sister.

Photo: Jidi Ridu

After spending a long time in Liangshan, I learned to recognize the Adu people on the streets by their appearance—those wearing clothes with large silver round buttons and tall hats. When people mentioned Adu people, they often used words like “brave,” “steady,” and “combative” to describe them. Once, when passing through Butuo with Ridu, he pointed to a spot halfway up the mountain and said that was where his ancestral house once stood. A century ago, the place had a drawbridge and four stone towers to guard it. The Cultural Revolution flattened the house; only shards of the wall survive. Beneath the lone old cedar that still stands, Ridu took a photo for his relatives. In his narrative, the legends of his nuohe[8] ancestors have faded into the distance. What remains with him, he says with certainty, are the peaceful memories of his childhood spent with the villagers.

Ridu spent several years of his childhood at his grandfather’s home in the mountains. Life there was shaped by mutual support among the elders, who lived closely together. His grandmother’s corn liquor was especially good—she would often call her old friends over to drink and chat. In spring, his aunt foraged for ferns and gastrodia elata in the hills, then bartered them at the market for sweets to bring back to the children. In autumn, Ridu followed his grandfather to the high pastures to herd cattle, sheep, and horses. In winter, villagers hunted together in the snow-covered forests.

A few years ago, Ridu returned to the village. The people had all moved down the mountain, and the houses lay in ruins. After his mother passed away, he wrote a poem titled Yize Zuoshi to commemorate her, asking: “No more games between the herdboy and the village dog—has our mountain fallen silent?”

After college, Ridu came across posts by people from other ethnic groups sharing about their cultural heritage and circumstances on online forums. This inspired him to begin writing consciously about the social realities of Liangshan in his poetry. In Ridu’s view, a certain marginality was inescapable—in the stereotypical narratives that had persisted for years, the Yi people of Liangshan had been stigmatized, and those who migrated elsewhere bore this burden to varying degrees. He realized he wanted to do something about his hometown.

Ridu led children in street art activities during his time working at an NGO.

Photo: Jidi Ridu

A relay race during the New Year’s event organized by Ridu and his NGO colleagues in town.

Photo: Jidi Ridu

After graduation, he briefly worked for an NGO focused on improving the lives of women and children in Liangshan. When he encountered various limitations within the organization, Ridu and several friends started their own: the Mountain Initiative. He believed there was still space for action—even if it required different means. Last winter, he launched a survey on traditional Yi astrology, once again drawing on childhood memories: after dinner, when the skies were clear, villagers would gather in the courtyard to stargaze, and the elders would point upward, naming the constellations. The Yi have their own astrology; every facet of traditional life is intertwined with it, and signs of fortune or disaster shimmer in the shifting night sky.

Over the past two years, despite the slow progress due to practical constraints, Ridu remains convinced that much can still be done to promote Yi culture.

Luohong Niuniu and Sheyang Sibo

My first conversation with Sibo began with his illustrious surname. The “She” in Sheyang Sibo’s name traces back to the clan of Lady She Xiang, and through his father, he is descended from the legendary tusi[9]who once ruled the Wumeng Mountains in Guizhou[10]. His ancestors are the very figures chronicled by Wen Chunlai in Identity, State and Memory: The Southwest Experience (2018)—people who made their mark during the tumultuous period of the Republic of China. In the 1960s, the family, carried along by the tides of history, was driven into exile and scattered across the land.

I have never managed to braid the loose ends of these tales into a single strand, nor can I fathom what such weighty family legacies might truly mean to Sibo. Yet it was by watching how Sibo interacted with his mother that I began to understand his bond with Liangshan. His mother is called Niuniu, a Yi name that literally means “mother’s daughter.” At twenty-four, Niuniu as a nuohe, left her high-mountain village of Hongmo in Liangshan and married into the tusi descendants in Guizhou. She spent the next few decades there, but every year—despite a two-day train journey—she returned to Liangshan for a month or two. A few years back, Sibo was always heading to Liangshan, so Niuniu just went along, rented a place, and stayed. 

Sibo with his mother Niuniu.

Courtesy of Sheyang Sibo

The first time I met Niuniu was at a party in Sibo’s home. She had prepared a whole table of food, many of them were classic Yi dishes—pickled-greens-and-potato soup, lightly seasoned Tuotuo Pork… When Sibo was small, her cooking had always stood apart: she never took to stir-fries, having spent decades in Guizhou eating the food of her own Yi community. If the boy caught a cold, she would simply brew a pot of that pickled-greens soup and the illness would soon be gone.

After we ate, everyone gathered with instruments and started to sing. Niuniu chose a song with simple tunes and repeating lines. Sibo told me it was an old Yi song of longing for one’s mother. Niuniu’s voice was low, stripped of ornament. I couldn’t understand the lyrics, yet the sadness slipped straight into me. Sibo recalls that through all those years away from home, his mother would hum tunes like these.

For Sibo, Liangshan is a place that continually reenters his life through his mother, yet it always hovers beyond reach. As a child, he couldn’t grasp the sense of isolation and dislocation his mother must have felt upon arriving in Guizhou. Last year, he left for Germany to study art—deliberately immersing himself in a language he hadn’t yet learned, as if to approximate, in his own body, the disorientation his mother once lived through.

Installation view of the exhibition “Sheyang Sibo: Let Poetry Return to the Gut,” April 2023, Jihuo Lab, Chengdu.

Courtesy of Sheyang Sibo

Back in Liangshan, he confronts its society, its history, and the riddle of his own identity. Sibo documents these encounters, and where words fall short, he turns to the body. In the spring of 2023, he staged a performance: together with friends, he transported soil from Mount Jingyeshuonuo to a gallery in the city and sowed it with seeds. A month later, grass emerged, spelling out poems he had written about Liangshan. When the exhibition ended, he carried the soil back to the mountain and hurled it off a cliff. The entire gesture took place on the steep face of Jingyeshuonuo, an iconic landscape in Liangshan.

Unlike many friends who grew up in Liangshan, Sibo has never formed a clear sense of the place. I never asked him why, but watching him fling the soil over the cliff repeatedly, I sensed that this physical reckoning was something he couldn’t avoid. Perhaps it reaches back to his earliest memories—the emotional residue left by his mother, the quiet ache of prolonged separation.

Sibo scattering soil over the cliff of Mount Jingyeshuonuo.

Courtesy of Sheyang Sibo

Since settling in Liangshan, friends often ask what the place is like, but no simple answer surfaces. The region carries the imprints of intricate clan migrations and protracted conflicts. No central authority has ever managed to homogenize its inherent disparities. Even today, Liangshan’s complexity is evident across its social strata, diverse landscapes, and gender dynamics.

Still, a persistent thread runs through the stories my friends tell. The origins of their lives are held and remembered by the land itself, etched into the very fabric of the mountains. As I write these stories down, fragments of academic discourse sometimes come to mind, but I no longer feel the need to annotate their words with theory. These stories already carry the emotions and secrets of the land.

Notes

[1] Adapted from an ancient Yi proverb, which means that those who fight on the lowland plains are seen and remembered by the watching mountains.
[2] From Jinyeshuonuo to Abuzeluo was recorded and edited by Eryi Ribu, released by WV Sorcerer Productions. Abuzeluo is the name of the best-known mountain range in the Adu region.
[3] A bimo is a nuosu ritual specialist. In Yi, ꀘ (bi) means “to sacrifice” or “to chant,” while ꂾ (mo) means “elder” or “sage.” Bimo are mainly hereditary, or their knowledge is passed down from master to apprentice. They are well-versed in the Yi script and religious rituals, and hold a respected status in Yi society.
[4] A suni is a nuosu spirit medium whose role is non-hereditary. Female practitioners are called moni. Unlike bimo, suni do not use scriptures, chant sutras, or preside over major sacrificial ceremonies. In ritual settings, suni primarily enter trance states through drumming and chant-like speech to communicate with spirits. Their practices are aimed at exorcism, soul-calling, healing, purification, and other spiritual interventions.
[5] Kezhi, also known as keshihaju, is a long-standing oral literary form in the nuosu tradition. It is primarily featured in nuosu wedding ceremonies, funeral rites, and ancestral homecoming rituals across the Greater and Lesser Liangshan regions and the northern dialect areas of Yunnan Province.
[6] The original lyrics of the song are in Yi and have been translated into Han Chinese.
[7] Adu was once one of the four major Yi tusi of Liangshan, and its domain corresponds roughly to present-day Puge and Butuo counties.
[8] Nuohe is the nuosu autonym for the Black Yi. Because the term “Black Yi” was historically narrowed by outsiders into a rigid social class label, this text adopts nuohe instead.
[9] Tusi were hereditary tribal leaders recognized as imperial officials by the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties of China.
[10] Sibo’s family were chieftains of the Chele subgroup of the Yi. The She clan held the Ming-dynasty post of Yongning Pacification Commissioner before eventually resettling in Guizhou.

Translated by Yang Mengjiao and AI tools

*The translation is abridged from the original Chinese text.