Do the girls of the Dulong clan still have tattoos The tattooed women of the Dulong clan, why do you

The Dulong people use Chinese to call their traditional women's face tattoos "painted faces". In the past, where the girl arrived.

Ten. At the age of two or three, they began to tattoo their faces. It means to indicate adulthood. The literary tradition has now been discontinued.

So far, there are fewer than 100 women who have stopped tattooing. "Survey of the Northern Boundary of Yunnan" said that in the upper reaches of the Dulong River, "women's heads, faces, nose bridges, cheeks, upper and lower lips are tattooed with patterns, and the grass juice and pot smoke are rubbed into the skin and flesh to turn black, and they cannot be washed." In the lower reaches of the Dulong River, "women have tattoos, only one prick around the tip of the nose, and two or three stabs on the lower lip."

The Current Situation in the Undemarcated Territory of the Northern Section of Yunnan-Burma says: "Women's ......The face is covered with small holes and painted with black to make the pattern beautiful. Otherwise, people will laugh at it." Before the founding of the People's Republic of China, the women of the Dulong nationality still generally retained the custom of tattooing, and different sources and records have different accounts for the origin of this tattooing custom.

It can be summarized into four explanations: First, the Dulong people believe that women's facial tattoos are a symbol of beauty, in addition to the Dulong people's understanding of beauty, they also believe that the blood circulation stops after death, and the patterns on the face are more obvious than usual, so they think that the tattooed people look better after death; The second is to distinguish the signs of the clan, and the patterns and patterns of the tattoos are also obviously different with different regions and hobbies: the upper reaches of the Dulong River are full of facial tattoos, and the forehead, cheeks, nose, and upper and lower lips should be tattooed with patterns; In the downstream area, some only prick 2 and 3 ways at the tip of the nose and under the lip; Others are tattooed only with black flower-like patterns under their lips; The third is the primitive totem worship, the Dulong people believe that after death, their souls will become a colorful butterfly, so the whole face is tattooed into a butterfly like open wings.

Fourth, in history, the Dulong people have been ruled and bullied by foreign feudal Tusi (mainly referring to Tibetan Tusi) for a long time, and formed a custom in order to escape the robbery of women by foreigners. The method of tattooing is basically the same, when tattooing, first use charcoal or pot ash to draw a thorn pattern on the face, the tattoo person holds the old thorn with hard thorns in one hand, and constantly knocks with a wooden stick in the other hand, stabbing the basin from top to bottom along the line, and then rubbing it repeatedly with pot ash or dark grass juice, the thorn pattern allows the grass juice to seep into the subcutaneous, the face is red and swollen and scabbed, about a week, the wound is scabbed, and the pattern is blue, leaving a pattern that can not be scrubbed off forever. In 1908, Xia Hu, a local official of the Qing Dynasty, inspected the Dulong River area, and for the first time explicitly banned tattooing, in the mid-40s of this century, Kong Ziqing (former Gongshan County Magistrate) also banned writing when he served as the head of the old township in the Dulongjiang area, and after the founding of the People's Republic of China, Dulong women gradually gave up the custom of tattooing.

Since then, the history of Dulong women's tattoos has come to an end.

Nowadays, there are no girls who get tattooed faces, and all the women you can see are at least in their thirties.

Yes, there are still people who have tattoos

As for the reason for the tattoo, there are many theories about the orange tattooed women, some say it is for good looks, some say it is to recognize the soul after death, some say it is to not be robbed as a slave, and some say it is to distinguish between men and women. Some of them are so that they can take away the things they had in life after death. Tattooing is a painful thing, and the pattern is usually pierced with a thorn and colored with a dye made of southwest birch.

The face is rich in blood vessels and nerves, and it will be red, swollen, and painful for 3 to 5 days, and the tattooed pattern will not go away for life.

The Dulong people are very friendly and often embarrassed that they don't have anything to give to their guests. An old man with a tattoo said to me that her wish was to wait for all the tattooed people to pass away and exhibit their ** in the largest and best exhibition hall in the world.

The pattern is basically the same, regardless of clan and family. In the Dulong River Valley, men do not have tattoos, while girls need tattoos when they reach the age of twelve or thirteen. When tattooing, the girl first washes her face and then lies upright on the ground, a woman uses a bamboo stick dipped in pot smoke to draw a pattern on the girl's face, with a small wooden stick to continuously hit a hard thorn on a thorn, from top to bottom according to the pattern to pierce the face, and then use pot smoke or a dark grass juice to repeatedly rub the thorn lines, so that it seeps into the skin.

After a week or so, the redness and swelling disappear, and the blue-blue pattern remains on the face forever.

However, there is a big difference between the upper and lower reaches of the Dulong River, not only the facial pattern is diverse, but also the parts of the facial pattern are also more different: most of the lower Sixiang and Sanxiang areas in the lower reaches of the mouth are tattooed only on the chin part, like a man's beard, and the stripes are in the shape of an upper and lower line; Some of them even have tattoos on the left and right parts of the philtrum under the nose.

The women from Erxiang and Yixiang in the upper reaches of the Dulong River have facial patterns covering their entire faces from their foreheads, but the patterns are different. Some elderly women not only have facial lines, but also shaved their hair, leaving only a small handful on their foreheads, much like the hairstyle of young boys in rural Han China. If it weren't for the characteristics of the tattoo to tell me:

This is a woman, I would really call her "old man"! It is said that from the different face patterns, the locals can tell at a glance that the place where the woman lives belongs to a certain tribe or ethnic group.

Among the ethnic minorities in China, in addition to the Li women I have seen tattoos at the foot of Wuzhi Mountain on Hainan Island, this is the second one, and I have not heard of any other ethnic tattoos. I asked a number of old people in the Songzao village to know the origin of the tattoo, but the reasons for telling me were different, and they all seemed to be reasonable.

The first said: A woman's tattoo is a symbol of beauty, and a girl who does not tattoo her face will not be able to marry in the future; The second said: Tattoos can ward off evil (I don't understand why men are innocent?).

The third says: as a sign to distinguish the various clans or family tribes; The fourth said: Prevent the Tibetan Tusi of the northern Chavalong Tibetan Tusi from snatching the Dulong girl.

There are different opinions, so I can't judge what is the real reason for the tattoo of the Dulong women. However, there are no girls getting tattooed anymore, and all the women you can see are at least in their thirties.

Dulong women like to write noodles, and the size of the text varies according to different regions, the north likes the big text, and the south likes the small text. The northern part refers to the Shangjiang area of the Dulong River, and most of the women's faces are tattooed on the forehead, cheeks, and chin; The southern part refers to the Xiajiang area of the Dulong River, where only the cheekbones and below are written, and some only have two or three chins, just like the small whiskers left by men. The Jiangwei area and the Jiangxinpo area only have two or three ways of the chin, and some areas have gradually changed this custom.

The method of Dulong writing is to tattoo a number of rows of small black dots on the face, without flower shapes, and without animal and plant patterns. Literature is an attempt by primitive people to beautify themselves under the condition of very low productivity and extreme material poverty. The literary age of Dulong women is mostly after the age of twelve or thirteen, which already contains the meaning of adulthood.

The pattern is only a regional difference, not a sign of the clan and the tribe, therefore, a look at the pattern is to know where the writer is, but I don't know what clan it is. Dulong women all claim that they laugh for beauty, especially in their later years, because of the wrinkles on their faces, they look young and ageless.

Literal reasons:

According to historical records and folk legends, the origin of the custom of tattooing faces of Dulong women has its specific historical reasons. In the past two to three hundred years, the forces of Tibetan Tusi and Susu slave owners have continued to penetrate deep into the Dulong area and brutally exploit and oppress the Dulong people. In particular, the Tibetan Chavalong Tusi has to collect a variety of tributes from the Dulong people every year, and even the mouth, ears, nose, and hair have to be taxed.

If they could not afford to pay, they would forcibly take women into slavery in Tibetan areas. In particular, young, beautiful Dulong women are often in danger of being taken captive. In this special social and historical environment, in order to avoid being taken captive and escape the ravages and trampling of Tusi, the women of the Dulong tribe had to adopt a passive self-help method

smearing his cheeks with a pot of cigarettes, and even preferring to endure the pain and engrave his face with "black blue lines" that can never be washed away, becoming not like a human or a ghost, making the living afraid and afraid to approach. Over time, the custom of tattooing was formed, and it continued until the beginning of liberation. Therefore, in history, tattooing is a form of passive struggle for Dulong women to resist national oppression and seek personal safety.

That's their totem worship!

With the death of the last tattooed person, the tattooed culture has been lost, revealing the last tattooed girl of the Dulong clan!