What are the Liangcang Houses and Wooden Drum Houses of the Wa people?

The Wa people, one of the ethnic minorities in China and Myanmar, the national language is Wa, which belongs to the Wa German branch of the Mon-Khmer language family of the Austroasiatic language family. The Wa people have a strong sense of food protection. Therefore, the granary house is an organic part of the Wa village, and it is also a more distinctive Wa architecture.

Granary houses are generally built at a certain distance from the village. The head of the village, the foot of the village or the edge of the village is the best place to set up the granary room. Some village granaries are more scattered, and some village granaries are clustered together to form a beautiful small building complex.

The granary room occupies a small area, and the granary is a square sealed wooden cabinet placed in the room. In order to prevent moisture, mildew and insect infestation, the Wa people use a special paste mixed with leaves and cow dung to seal the cracks of the granary. The most characteristic of Wa Mountain is the granary room with granary guardrails and carved cow heads on the warehouse door.

It embodies the primitive totem worship and aesthetic psychology of the Wa people.

The construction of wooden drum houses in the village is one of the cultural characteristics of the Wa village. The Wa language of the wooden drum room is called "pinching croa". Judging from the wooden drum painting of Cangyuan cliff and the wooden drum culture retained in Cangyuan, Cangyuan is the birthplace of wooden drum culture.

The wooden drum is called grōg in Wa language, which is an original and unique percussion instrument of the Wa people, and is a typical representative of the Wa culture and can be said to be the symbol of the Wa people. Historically, whenever there was a fire, a flood, a foreign invasion, or a large-scale social event, the Wa would beat a wooden drum to gather their people. Before liberation, most of the Wa villages have wooden drums, and have a special wooden drum room, a pair of wooden drums are generally placed in the wooden drum room, the wooden drum is usually not allowed to beat randomly, but is used in traditional festivals, festive celebrations, entertainment, and is also used as an alarm and a signal tool for folk religious sacrifices when fighting ethnic disputes, and is regarded as a "heavenly artifact" and worshiped by the Wa people.

Most of the Wa villages are built on hillsides or small hilltops, and the houses are built along the mountain, regardless of direction, from high to low. The scale of a village is more than 100 households, and the smaller ones are more than a dozen, generally around 100 households. In terms of timber, there are two main types: bamboo and wood structures and civil engineering structures.

In terms of architectural style, there are mainly two kinds of buildings: "dry column" buildings and "four-walled floor-to-ceiling houses". The Wa people of Cangyuan, Ximeng, Menglian, Lancang and Shuangjiang are mainly bamboo and wood structures, which are "dry column" buildings, which are generally divided into two floors, the upper floor is inhabited, and the lower floor is unobstructed, which is used as a stable or stacking farm tools and sundries. The Wa people have the habit of helping each other when building houses, which can generally be built on the same day.

The big heads and wealthy people could build "big houses", which were marked by special woodcarvings on the houses, and on the walls hung ox skulls with horns, which symbolized wealth, in the same form and furnishings as ordinary houses. There are three fire ponds indoors, the main fire pond for cooking. The Wa people of Zhenkang and Yongde mostly use adobe, bricks, and tiles to build four-walled floor-to-ceiling houses, which are also divided into two floors, with people living on the upper floor and farm tools and sundries on the lower floor.

The wooden drum culture is a major feature of the Wa culture, and the wooden drum culture can be said to run through the entire history of the Wa people. Some people say that if you want to understand the Wa people, you must first understand the wooden drum, because it is a symbol of Wa culture, in reality, there are fewer and fewer wooden drums, but as a manifestation of art and culture, the wooden drum finally walked out of the sacrificial room and stepped onto the stage, which played a great role in showing the Wa culture. The wooden drum is of great value for the study of ancient Wa people and even ancient human history, society, religion, art, and so on.

Nowadays, some villages in Cangyuan still have wooden drum houses, the wooden drum rooms resemble traditional houses, generally do not set up walls, in the past, the wooden drum room is the place where the Wa people dance the wooden drum room dance after the cattle sacrifice, entertain the drum soul and the gods, and pray for a good harvest, and now it is the place where the Wa people celebrate the harvest and sing and dance for self-entertainment. The Drum Room is both mysterious and cheerful. <>

Distribution of the Wa people.

The Wa are one of the ethnic minorities in China. It has a population of more than 350,000 people. It is mainly distributed in the mountainous and semi-mountainous areas of Cangyuan, Ximeng, Lancang, Menglian, Shuangjiang, Gengma, Yongde, Zhenkang and other counties in the southwest of Yunnan Province.

That is, between the Lancang River and the Salween River, in the southern section of the Nushan Mountains, the "Awa Mountains". It is intermingled with Han, Dai, Brown, De'ang, Lisu, Lahu and other ethnic groups.

Etiquette: The Wa people are bold and hospitable, and greet guests with wine first, believing that no wine is not a courtesy. The Wa people have a variety of customs of hospitality and toasting. The first is that the toaster first takes a sip of his own drink to dispel the guests' various wars, and then hands them to the guests in turn.

The wine given to the guest must be drunk by the guest, and he must drink it dry as much as possible to show that he is honest in his heart, otherwise it will be considered disrespectful to the host; Another form is that the host and guest are squatting on the ground, and the host hands the wine to the guest with his right hand, and the guest pours it on the ground with his right hand or flicks the wine on the ground with his right hand, which means respecting the ancestors. Then the host and the guests drank it dry. The Wa people have the habit of not toasting those who don't know their hearts and are not kind.

Whenever the son goes out and the guest leaves, the host has to make a "family gift". That is, toast to relatives or guests, when the host fills the wine with a gourd (wine container), first take a sip, and then send it to the mouth of the guest or distant relatives, and the guests need to drink until the gourd bottoms out, in order to show that family affection and friendship will never be forgotten.

The Wa people are in the southwestern frontier of our motherland, bordering Myanmar, and they are in Cangyuan, Ximeng, Lancang, Shuangjiang, Gengma, Menglian, and other places. They have a population of about 360,000 people, and they are a people who can sing and dance, and they have a lot of superstitious customs.

1. Wear.

Historically, the Wa people wore short black clothes and wide trousers. Women wore tunics and short skirts with striped flowers, and ornaments such as collars, necklaces, bracelets, waist bands and anklebands, most of which were made of silver or bamboo and rattan, or painted with natural pigments, or depending on the color of nature, and were almost universally loved by men, women and children.

With the development of society, the clothing of the Wa nationality has also begun to change, there are long skirts, tube skirts and some more contemporary clothing and decoration, but the areas inhabited by the Wa people still maintain the traditional national characteristics, and most of the raw materials of the clothes are self-planted cotton and linen, according to their traditional way, processed and made, and the patterns woven are like peacocks, white pheasants and other feathers, and some are like the patterns of fur such as civets and dace.

2. Residence. Most of the Wa villages are built on mountainsides or small hilltops. Some villages in the Ximeng area have a history of hundreds of years and have gathered into hundreds of large villages. The Wa people liked to live in bamboo houses, and some of them changed to adobe bungalows, which was a new form of housing that changed later.

The bamboo building can be divided into two floors, the upper floor is occupied by people, and the lower floor is closed to livestock.

The furnishings of the house are simple and bright, and it is essential to have a fire pit for human use and a fire pit for sacrificial purposes or for the heating of sacrificial and animal feed.

3. Diet. The Wa people mostly use bamboo tubes to cook rice, and when eating, the housewives divide the food according to the number of people, and divide it evenly at one time. I like to chew betel nut and drink alcohol, and there is a saying that "no wine is not polite, and talking does not count". The water wine is made by fermenting small red rice, which is mostly contained in a large bamboo tube and inserted into a thin bamboo tube to suck.

The Wa people also have the custom of drinking strong tea, and the preference for chili peppers is a common hobby of men, women and children.

4. Marriage. The Wa family is a small monogamous family, and most of the property is inherited by the youngest son, and the daughter has no inheritance rights. When naming the Wa people, they use the reverse father-son joint name system, and trace their ancestors back to themselves. The name of the earliest generation of all the Wa families is "Sigang", which means gourd or stone cave, and is the worship of matriarchy.

Men and women can associate freely before marriage, called "string girls", young men and women gather in groups, sing love songs, and give betel nuts and tobacco to express their affection. However, the marriage is concluded by the parents, and the man has to pay a bride price of a few cows, which is called "nurse money" and "girl money". Sometimes if one of the parents does not agree, the parents will run away from the marriage, and the parents will not pursue the case.

In the past, the Wa people used to be popular for aunt and uncle cousin marriages, but now there have been great changes.

5. Funeral. The Wa practice thin burials, and villages have common cemeteries. In some areas, the custom of burying the deceased under or near a bamboo building is preserved.

The current population is 351974 people. They mainly live in Ximeng, Cangyuan, Menglian, Gengma and other counties in the southwest of Yunnan Province. The Wa people call themselves "Ah Wa" and are a branch of the "Baipu" in the Zhou and Qin dynasties.

In the Qing Dynasty, it was called "Ga Thorn", "Hawa", "Kawa" and so on. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, they were collectively referred to as the Wa people, which means "people who live in the mountains". The Wa people have their own language, which belongs to the Wa branch of the Mon-Khmer language family of the Austroasiatic language family.

In the past, woodcuts and physical records were used for a long time. In the 50s of the 20th century, the Wa script was created. The Wa people can sing and dance.

Common dances include "circle dance", "chong dou" and so on. The "circle dance" is not divided into men and women, young and old, and the dancers hold hands, singing and dancing, and the atmosphere is very warm.

Your sister, are you still used to copying? The eyes of those who look at it are dazzled, so let's talk about something specific!

The regions are different, the folk customs are also different, and the customs and habits announced by the official can only be used as a reference. Just like the customs of the Han people in the north and the south are also very different. I am a Wa people, innocent Wa people, and the official Wa customs are almost the same as my daily life.

In the eyes of the Barao branch, the Wa branch used to be vicious tribes, pulling wooden drums, cutting off human heads, marking oxen, and worshipping oxen heads, which were more primitive and barbaric. The Barao branch had already begun to enter the feudal society, and began to engage in business and farming, without the custom of pulling wooden drums, or cutting off human heads, and did not sacrifice oxen heads. It can be said that "Wa" was a derogatory term at the beginning, meaning barbarian.

In the official Chinese name, we will say that we are Wa, but in the language of this ethnic group, we will not call ourselves "Wa", we all call ourselves: Brao (i.e., Braoke, Blaok, but the transliteration is different, but the meaning is the same).