Sui

族About this people

The Sui — also called Shui — are concentrated in Sandu Shui Autonomous County in the Qiannan Buyi and Miao Autonomous Prefecture of southeastern Guizhou, with smaller communities in neighbouring Guangxi and Yunnan. Their language belongs to the Kam-Sui branch of the Tai-Kadai family, related to Dong.

The Sui possess a remarkable cultural treasure: the Shuishu, an indigenous writing system of approximately 400 characters, which is used exclusively by ritual specialists (yin) for divination, ceremony, and recording calendrical knowledge. The Shuishu characters are read from right to left and bottom to top, and some scholars believe they preserve archaic Chinese character forms in inverted or altered style. The Shuishu calendar — a complex lunisolar system — governs the Sui ritual year, including the timing of the Duan festival, the Sui New Year, which falls in autumn (between the 8th and 11th lunar months, depending on the village) rather than in spring like the calendars of most neighbouring groups.

Duan is celebrated with horse racing — flat races on local mountain tracks — communal dancing, antiphonal singing, and feasting. Horse racing is a point of pride in Sui culture and the horses are carefully bred and trained for the festival. Sui embroidery uses a fine-stitch technique (maquetilha) to produce complex pictorial and geometric designs in silk on dark cloth. The fish, the water buffalo, and the horse are important symbols in Sui iconography.