Miao

族About this people

The Miao are one of China's largest ethnic minorities, with a population of over nine million concentrated in the mountainous border zone of Guizhou, Hunan, Yunnan, and Guangxi, with communities extending into Sichuan and Chongqing. They are related to the Hmong people of Southeast Asia (who are diaspora Miao who migrated south from China from the 18th century onward). The Miao language family (Hmongic branch of Hmong-Mien) comprises many dialects that are often mutually unintelligible, and several distinct Miao sub-groups (Gejia, Hmong Daw, Qixiong Miao) maintain distinct traditions.

The Miao are renowned for two visual art traditions. First, their embroidery: Miao women spend years producing garments covered in densely stitched pictorial and geometric designs that encode genealogical, cosmological, and historical memory. The embroidery is not merely decorative but a textile record of the community's history, passed through women's hands. Second, silver jewellery: Miao women at festivals wear enormous headdresses, collars, and chest pieces of hammered and cast silver, some weighing several kilograms, that represent accumulated family wealth and social status. Miao silversmithing is a highly specialised male craft.

The Lusheng (a bamboo reed pipe organ) is the primary instrument of Miao festival music, played in pairs or groups for communal dances. The Miao Lusheng Festival, held in the autumn in the Qiandongnan region, draws tens of thousands of participants from surrounding villages.