Nan - the 2022 Iu Mien / Yao Festival

[DavidFL]

Jurgen the GTR photographer maestro had a tip off a few weeks ago for another annual Iu Mien / Yao ethnic festival....

These annual Iu Mien meetings have been going for several years, exactly how many I'm not sure, but there have been 2 in Chiang Khong & 1 in Chiang Rai that I know of.

The 1st Mien / Yao Festival At Chiang Khong For Songkran 2018

The rumour was 2,000 hill tribe people in Chiang Khong for a hill tribe festival at Songkran in 2018. Wow that sounds something to behold, but getting precise details of the event to be was another matter. The dates however were reported to be 17-18 April 2018, basically at the end of...

www.gt-rider.com

The 2019 - 2nd Annual Yao / Iu Mien Festival - Chiang Khong

8-9 February 2019 saw the second annual ethnic Yao / Mien hill tribe festival in Chiang Khong with hundreds of Mien people coming together for a regional get together. The 2019 event was significantly bigger than the 1st one held in 2018. The 1st Mien / Yao Festival At Chiang Khong For...

www.gt-rider.com

Getting the right info for Nan in 2022 was a bit of a challenge, but eventually we seemed to have the right info.
Grand Opening Friday Night 4th March
Parade & Main Event Saturday 5th March
Beauty Contest Final, Sunday 6th March
Or at least we thought was planned.

So how did it go?
Jurgen came from Cnx in his jeep on the Friday via 11 & 101 & I rode over to Nan via 1091, my favourite route into Nan.

My GTR Route

A two stop ride
Chiang Kham - PTT PhuSang @ Chiang Kham
Chiang Kham - Ban Luang
Ban Luang - Nan.
Departure time fro Chiang Khong: 11.45AM
Arrival Time: Nan: 4.30PM.


A cool tree in the Ban Luang School

In Nan, the Grand Mansion is my place of stay.

Nan Accommodation

Thought I say a thread on this - but can't find it. Someone point me in the right direction ? Trying to plan a week ride there and want good digs to return to every night. Will do loops every day in different directions. Thanks

www.gt-rider.com

Decent value for money in the old rooms @ 400 baht.

Grand Mansion Hotel · 71 1 Thanon Mahayot, Nai Wiang, à¹à¸¡à¸·à¸à¸ Nan 55000, Thailand

âââââ · Hotel

goo.gl

Jurgen has another hotel, close to event, booked for him by the organizers.

Jurgen & I hooked up then at the grand opening by Wat Phumin, in the Nan night market

A very professional show & presentation of the Iu Mien peoples.
Ajarn Kevin from the Phu Langka Resort on R1148 would seem to be the main organizer & respected Iu Mien guy in North Thailand.
A top gentleman with good English language.

A lot of introductory speeches are given, by the participating Iu Mien clans, plus singing, music & a bit of dancing.

Apart from the singers, & speakers masks are the order of the day.

Not so great for photography most of you would say, and both Jurgen & I agreed.

More to come.....day time & less masks?

 

[DavidFL]

The next day less crowded in the day, it was easier to walk around the Iu Mien stalls and chat to people.

Doi Silver from Pua

Some Iu Mien History

The official entry hall for the event

A parade representing the 12 Iu Mien clans attending was originally planned, but covid-19 restrictions prevented that from happening.


Instead a guard of honour was set up to receive the vice-governor of Nan for the event.

Below: The vice- governor of Nan in the white. On the 2nd left is Ajarn Kevin from the Phu Langkha Resort

A bit more to come...enjoy the pics.

 

[DavidFL]

Inside the main area. The Iu Mien gals lined up for the official reception.


The Iu Mien are originally from China and are scattered throughout S E Asia.
Representatives from each country usually attend pre-covid with open borders, but not so in 2022.

Some Iu Mien history.....12 clans & that long Iu Mien Passport banner.

The Iu Mien Legend
The Iu Mien people were the first civilization in China according to the chanting song story, Iu Mien Elders, a shaman's worship book written by Iu Mien elders in ancient Chinese characters. The Iu Mien nation was located in the southern part of China today known as Guangdong, Guangxi and Hunan provinces and was ruled by the king of the Iu Mien people

An old scroll in Chinese, called the "King Ping's Charter" tells a story of P'an Hu, a multi-colored dog who married a Chinese princess.
According to the myth, the Chinese emperor King P'ing of the Ch'u Kingdom (528-516 B.C.) promised to give one of his daughters in marriage to anyone who could rid him of his enemy, King Kao.
A multi-colored dog named P'an Hu succeeded, brought back King Kao's head, and married the princess, giving birth to six sons and six daughters. These twelve children became the forefathers of the twelve Yao tribes.

King Pan, was the last Iu Mien King & his namesake survives in the modern Iu Mien surnames Phan, Saephanh, Saephan, Phanh, Pharm, Pan etc..

In the early 21st century the Iu Mien numbered some 2,700,000 in China, more than 350,000 in Vietnam, some 40,000 in Thailand, and approximately 20,000 in Laos. Several thousand Mien refugees from Laos have also settled in North America, Australia, and France.

The Iu Mien people, apparently passed through Vietnam during the 13th century, prior to entering Thailand through Laos.
They first arrived in Thailand approximately 200 years ago, contemporaneously with a large number of other Hmong–Mien migrants.

About 800 years ago the Iu Mien were engaged in lengthy war by forces of the Chinese emperor of the day. All but crushed by the Emperor's forces, the Iu Mien were given an ultimatum surrender or be destroyed. The Iu Mien King chose to make a treaty & cede control of his lands.

The treaty was called “Passport to travel in the hill” or “Passport to cross the mountain.”

This critical treaty, written in Chinese proclaims

“Iu Mien people have rights to maintain their identity, language, culture, and worship system and live on the hillside or in the mountain to cultivate the land for farming and crops and raise their family.
The Iu Mien would not be allowed to form their own government and have no rights to pursue their own nation.
Iu Mien, who possesses this document, has the legal rights to cross any territories / borders to settle and to build their village in the hill / mountain to make a living by farming without delaying by any regional governments.
The governments of that country are responsible for their well being and educating them to follow the rules of laws of the country that Iu Mien are living in.”

Copies of these Iu Mien Passports are often proudly displayed at festivals & Iu Mien events.

Information suggests that
The document known as Emperor Ping’s Charter is of uncertain provenance. About 200 copies of it have been located by Chinese scholars within China, and a few more by Western researchers in Vietnam and Thailand (Huang 1991; Alberts 2011; Pourret 2002: 248-61).
Scholars dispute the veracity of the treaty. Was it written by the Chinese or the Iu Mien?

The earliest copy known to be in Thailand, was brought to Nan by a Iu Mien, Tang Tsan Khwoen.

Tang and his followers went from Guangdong and Guangxi to Vietnam, Yunnan, and Laos, and later to the kingdom of Nan that subsequently was made a province of Thailand.
In the late 1870s or early 1880s, the group approached the king of Nan with a petition to settle in the mountain areas of his domain.

One story of this exchange was recorded in 1972:
When Tsan Khwoen first came to Thailand the authorities adamantly refused to grant him and his fellow villagers permission to stay and they were not even allowed to cut down any part of the forest.
He therefore got out his copy of the Charter for Crossing Mountains and invited a Cantonese to translate it for the king of Nan and for the officials at the Nan court.
Now, in the Charter it says that in ancient times the Emperor Pien Kou [Chinese: Pangu], who opened the heavens and established the earth, gave the charter to the Mien and therein ordered that, wherever the Mien went, no one was to deny them access to, or the right to live in, any part of the mountains.
Nor was anyone allowed to collect tolls from them at fords or ferries, or to charge them for riding on any kind of conveyance vehicle.
As for the collection of taxes in any area, such could be levied on all other peoples but not on the Mien, and this restriction was to apply equally to corvée labor, to surcharges on goods and to all other kinds of taxes.
After the Charter had been read to the King of Nan, he decided that he could not forbid the Mien to settle in his territory.
In this way Tsan Khwoen and his followers received permission to settle at Phu Wae, and Tsan Khwoen was further appointed Phaya Khiri [Mountain Chief].
At the time Tsan Khwoen was made Phaya Khiri, Thai rule extended all the way up as far as Muang Singh.
As soon as Tsan Khwoen had shaved his head, he was put in charge of all the hill peoples – Mien, Hmong, Lisu, Lahu, Akha, Khmu,
Mun – in the Nan Kingdom and was empowered to collect taxes from every one of them.
His jurisdiction extended all the way up to the Chinese border and included the areas controlled by Nan in both Laos and Thailand.
This was a really bustling place then, as big as a province, and people had a lot of fun there (Le et al. 2016: 524-525).
According to Mien recollections in northern Thailand in 1993, Tang Tsan Khwoen achieved invulnerability through his individual connection to a royal spirit, which brought him considerable military prowess.
He later was allowed to settle in Nan with his followers in exchange for silver, rhinoceros horns, and a promise to serve as a reserve military force for this kingdom (Jonsson 2005: 78-85).
He was given a semi-royal title, phaya, and later his son was granted a thao title.
That son subsequently became sub-district headman (Thai: kamnan), a position inherited later by that man’s son and grandson.
They maintained the relationship with the king’s spirit and kept the copy of Emperor Ping’s Charter, which was a family heirloom though it now is becoming more of an ethnic marker (Jonsson 2014: 100).
Sometime around 1900 the Mien leader was licensed to grow opium and sell it to the Royal Opium Monopoly.
Only big farmers in five Mien villages had this license, that was annually assessed and reconsidered, and the cultivation was actively monitored (Jonsson 2005: 74-86).
Western missionary accounts from the time indicate that the Mien leader was possibly the richest man in northern Thailand.
For five generations between the 1880s and 2010, Tsan Khwoen and his direct male descendants had official connections and recognition as Phaya, Thao, Kamnan, and Nayok O.Bo.To, first under the kingdom of Nan and then under Chiangrai and Phayao provinces.
But there is no general awareness of such relations, recognition, and integration of highland people in Thai history.
The copy of the Emperor Ping’s Charter that Tang Tsan Khwoen brought with him when he arrived in Nan in about 1880 is now kept in the Mien village of Pangkha in Phayao province.

An ancient Iu Mien Passport that Ajarn Kevin has at his Phu Langkha Resort.

Is this the original one from 1870/80s carried by Tang Tsan Khwoen?

The Iu Mien fleeing Laos & the war....coming.

 

[Conemeister]

Good to see everyone respecting their health with mask wearing......perhaps the next event will be unrestricted

 

[DavidFL]

Iu Mien, the war in Laos & escape to Thailand.

In 1958, agents of the CIA asked around who were the leaders of the Iu Mien people, and were told of Chao Mai and Chao La..
At the time, Chao Mai had the position of taseng, a sub-district headman.
The CIA’s need for ethnic leaders increased the two brothers’ prominence.

Some Iu Mien men went for soldier training, and some served as spies across the border in China [McCoy 1991: 335–343].

Attacks by Pathet Lao forces on Iu Mien settlements made a real difference, in that people either had to cooperate with them or fight on the other side.

Recollections of this time suggest the violence of forging the two sides of this national and international war, and the wartime normalcy of killing those on the other side:

In about 1963, communist soldiers came to the village.
I was with my grandfather visiting at the other end of the village, about 10 minutes walk from our house. The soldiers shot and killed a cow (to eat).
My older brother had got a gun from Chao Mai in Nam Dui just a few weeks before that.
After they killed the cow, the leader of the communist army was in the (household’s) vegetable garden.
Bullets would not enter him, he had faat (magical protection).
But the Iu Mien caught the leader and then his soldiers fled.
They (local Iu Mien) knew bullets could not kill him (the Pathet Lao unit-leader), so they did him in with rocks and then a shovel.

Later we (the villagers) went to Nam Keung (Nam Keung is diagonally opposite Takhong & Had Bai. Nam Keung Kao & Nam Keung Mai.)
In response to Pathet Lao capture of the provincial capitals of Nam Tha and Muang Sing, adjacent to China, the two Iu Mien leaders brought their followers from these provinces to the area around Houai Xay, by the Mekong River and at the border with Thailand, about a week’s walk from their previous home villages.
The resettlement in Nam Keung and Nam Dui took shape between 1962 and 1964.
There was some tension between the two brothers.
Chao Mai, the older, was the military leader, and he set up camp in Nam Dui.
Chao La, always more of a businessman, led his followers to Nam Keung.

Some people have mentioned this fraternal rivalry, but none extensively.
Chao Mai passed away from a sudden stroke in 1967, leaving Chao La as the de-facto leader.

The brothers, Chao Mai and Chao La (these are princely titles, their names were Tzeo I-Fu and I-Kyen) were the sons of a man with the title Phya Long (“great chief,” his name was Tzeo Wuen Tsoi Lin), who was one of several titled chiefs in this border area of Laos and China.

Upland leaders received titles, collected tribute or tax, and served as reserve military forces.
Prior to World War II, there was competition among these chiefs, ranging from Thailand through Laos to Muang La in Yunnan, China, over household size.
The goal was a household of one hundred people.
While no one is said to have achieved this goal, it indicates how chiefs were engaged in social formations that were radically different from those of commoners — ordinary farming households had on average between four and twelve people.

My conversations with Iu Mien in the US
A number of Iu Mien fled Laos in 1973, in response to the capture of the Nam Nyou base by Pathet Lao soldiers (with considerable Vietnamese backing). This occurred at New Year when most of the Iu Mien soldiers were away, celebrating with their families.
Many of the people affiliated with Nam Keung and the Iu Mien militia unit left for Thailand at the time.
Of those, many returned to Laos after a month, with Chao La, when it was clear that Nam Keung would not also be attacked.
In 1973, a coalition government was formed in Laos, after international peace talks.
When it lost power in 1975, many Iu Mien soldiers feared being sent to labor or re-education camps, and people started fleeing across the Mekong River.
When the first groups left, many were brought over by boats arranged by a man on the Thai side who had established relations with Iu Mien in Nam Keung as an arms trader to insurgents in Burma.
The thousands of Lao Iu Mien people who crossed the Mekong River to Thailand in 1975 were not as easily absorbed as the perhaps hundreds who left in 1973.
Refugee camps were gradually set up in Chiangrai (Chiangkhong, Chiangkham) and Nan Provinces (Mae Jalim, Nam Yao), and elsewhere.
Military leaders had considerable say in where their followers were placed.
When one temporary camp was dissolved, Iu Mien from Nam Keung were sent with their leader Vern Chien to Suan Ban Tong (Chiangkhong in Chiangrai) while Iu Mien who had had no previous relations with Chao La were sent with Long Tong, another leader from Chao La’s militia, to Nam Yao (in Nan).
While others were later placed in the Ban Vinai camp, which was heavily Hmong and a Vang Pao stronghold, the structures of refugee relief tended to reinforce an ethnic imaginary that played to the interests of militia leaders.

Some hundreds of the Lao Iu Mien people who settled inside Thailand during the 1970s were rounded up in the early 1980s, by the UNHCR after the Thai government made a complaint about “strays” from Laos who needed to be in refugee camp.
This roundup brought to camp some Lao Iu Mien who had settled in Thailand in the 1960s, as well as Iu Mien who had lived in Burma most of their lives and had been on the Thai side for a few years, and some who had spent their whole lives in Thailand.

This denial of residence in Thailand served to revamp the Lao Iu Mien sense of themselves as individuals and a people in relation to Chao La and Laos, at the same time as it entrenched certain Thai nationalist understandings of Thailand’s highland ethnic minorities as aliens.
One man who had lived in Nam Keung told me that the Iu Mien refugees who settled in farming villages on the Thai side had “disappeared like drops of water into a river.”
This is from a perspective that is tied to the official story of exile as of 1975, and assumes that Iu Mien people had lived in Laos and were now in the US (and elsewhere), rather than making a new home in Thailand.

The internal resettlement in and around Nam Keung created an ethnic space that was unlike the common multi-ethnicity of the social landscape in these areas (in Laos and adjacent regions of China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Burma).
Nam Keung had various non-Mien peoples such as Lahu, Akha, Hmong, Tai Neua and Tai Lue, but the wartime configuration made it an Iu Mien space.
Nam Keung provided the conditions for fashioning an ethnic consciousness in relation to a military leader, that was later reinforced as people fled the country and were placed in refugee camps on the Thai side as of 1975.
Iu Mien in Laos who were beyond the resettlement near Houai Xay lived in villages that were interspersed with those of various ethnic others.
Theirs was not an ethnicized space, and I have never heard Lao Iu Mien who were not affiliated with Chao La claim their experiences as being those of the whole ethnic group.
When I have consulted with the Iu Mien from Nam Keung about what I learned from those who never identified with Chao La’s command, their most common reply is a dismissal; “they are ignorant, all Iu Mien were under Chao La.”
The wartime Iu Mien terms for those on the communist side were jan-lom and jan-sala.
The term jan marks them as non-Mien, suggesting how at least the people in Nam Keung identified Iu Mien ethnicity with their side in the conflict.
Jan-lom translates as “bush-aliens,” while sala is from the Lao language; “to forsake, renounce, abdicate,” implying the communists’ plan to overthrow the Lao monarchy monarchy.
Some of my contacts stated that jan-lom were the Pathet Lao soldiers and spies whereas jan-sala were the North Vietnamese communists who backed the Pathet Lao and were also involved in the fighting.
But there is no consistency in the references of these terms, now over thirty years later, beyond the implication that these were not Iu Mien people.

Many of my sources say that the terms were nonsense words that were invented for the sake of secrecy in case there were spies around, which indicates a lingering anxiety about people transgressing social boundaries without others’ knowledge.

Such fears were central to the notions of witchcraft in the Nam Keung resettlement.

Source: Militias and Ethnic Boundaries in Laos and Exile by Jonsson
Source: Highland Chiefs and Regional Networks in Mainland Southeast Asia: Mien Perspectives