Bouyei

族About this people

The Bouyei — also romanised as Buyi or Puyi — are a Tai-speaking people of the southern Guizhou plateau, concentrated in the Qiannan Buyi and Miao Autonomous Prefecture (capital Duyun) and the Qianxinan Buyi and Miao Autonomous Prefecture (capital Xingyi). Their language is closely related to Zhuang and belongs to the same Tai branch of the Tai-Kadai family.

The Bouyei have a long tradition of settled agriculture in the warm river valleys that cut down from the Guizhou plateau toward Guangxi and Guangdong. Their stone villages — built from the local grey limestone in characteristic vertical-slab roofing — are among the most architecturally distinctive of any ethnic minority in China. The Maling River Gorge canyon in Xingyi, with its waterfalls and cable car crossing, runs through traditional Bouyei territory.

Batik fabric (laran) is the most celebrated Bouyei craft: beeswax is applied to cloth in geometric and floral patterns using a small wax pen, the cloth is dyed in indigo, and the wax removed to reveal white-on-blue designs. This tradition is shared with neighbouring Miao groups but each community has distinctive pattern vocabularies. Hand papermaking from bark fibres — a technology related to ancient Chinese papermaking — is practised in some Bouyei villages. Antiphonal singing (duige) competitions in the spring and autumn are major social events.