Yi Minority

In Sichuan the population of the Yi nationality is 1.50 million, who are mainly scattered in Liangshan Autonomous Prefecture and other counties nearby. The Yi farmers are mainly engaged in cultivation. In addition, they manage their animal husbandry. The Yi nationality had their language for over one thousand years. It is a syllabic language, which belongs to the family of Tibetan-Burmese languages in the Chinese-Tibetan language system. After 1949, concerned scholars started to systemize the Yi language. In 1980, the Yi language started to be used officially with the approval from the State Council in Beijing.

The essence of Yi’s religions is ancestor worship. The emphasizes the all things on earth have their spirits. The concept of the supernatural beings has dominated the Yi people’s thoughts and behavior. Before 1949, the Liangshan area where the majority of the Yi people lived was a slave society. The whole society forcibly organized all the people into the five-grade hierarchy according to their blood relationship. Hereditary headmen were at the top grade while slaves at the lowest. Slaves were subject and dependent to slave-owners who could sell to even kill their slaves as they pleased. The savage system expired in 1949.

Traditionally the Yi people’s head-turban and clothes have bright and decorative patterns. Everyone enjoys having an unlined blanket-like shawl over his/her shoulders. The Yi people, male or female, all wear a kind of upper outer garment. It is a tight and short jacket with narrow sleeves and buttons slantwise at the right. The Yi women wear multifold skirts in variegated colors. Male’s pants are in different sizes at the bottom. Usually the bottom-sizes are fixed upon different areas where the Yi people reside.

With the gradual introduction of farm machinery into the Yi areas, the Yi farmers have yielded good crops in recent years. The diet in the Yi areas is based primarily on potatoes, buckwheat, oats and corn. They like eating pork meat, being cut of into cubes. Wooden bowels, cups and spoons are their daily utensils. Traditionally timber structure, soil walls, double-plane roof and wooden tiles characterize the houses in which the Yi people live each house inside generally consists of upper, middle and lower rooms. In addition, there is a living room, which faces the house entrance a fire pan, a symbol of the Yi’s custom, is placed in the middle.

The Yi people have their won important festivals. In the Liangshan Autonomous Prefecture, the Yi Nationality’s New Year lasts three days starting on October 10 every year. During the festival the local people worship their ancestors and visit their friends. At the same time traditional sports games are held like horseracing, wrestling and seesaw playing.

The Yi people’s Torch Festival is one of the main traditional minority festivals in China the Yi people have a three-day holiday when the Torch Festival starts from the twenty-fourth of the six lunar months.

There was a story about the Torch Festival. A long time age, there was an invincible wrestler by the name of Eqilaba, who was so famous that the God in Heaven sent down another good wrestler to have a match with him. Unfortunately the wrestler from Heaven was killed and the God got angry. He sent down swarms of “heaven insects” to destroy crops and damage farmers’ house. Eqilaba and his friends went up to the mountains where they cut down bamboo trees to make fire torches. They lighted the torches and had a fight against “heaven insects”. Finally they killed all the insects. The crops and houses remained safe. In order to honor repeat the Torch Ritual every year at the end of the sixth, along with wrestling, singing and dancing. As time went on, the torch ritual developed into the current Torch Festival.

The Torch Festival starts early in the morning when people begin to dress up. A man puts on a new embroidered-short jacket and a pair of new loose ear and a blue or black turban tied around his head. A woman wears an upper garment embroidered and trimmed with lace, and multifold skirt in variegated colors. During the daytime, some people participate in wrestling, bullfighting, archery contest and horseracing. Many others watch the games and drink wine through the celebration. At night, people light up torches. Thousands of torches are seen moving along paths in the fields and they finally gather together on the village outskirts. Young men and women sing and dance around the burning torches. Boys play bamboo flutes, moon-shaped guitars or big three-stringed instruments. Girls dance the moon dancing. Such a happy occasion may go on until dawn. This is also the occasion for young people to look for a life partner through their antiphonal singing.

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