A Chinese Minority Village Wedding In Pictures
I’ve returned to China to visit my friend’s wedding in her rural village. I met her weeks ago in my last trip to Xishuangbanna and promised to return when I heard a pig was being fattened for the feast. Although most of China is Han Chinese (what you’re probably used to seeing), there are 56 minority groups living in the country. My friend is Jinuo and her fiancé is Yi. We got to enjoy the drinking customs and dances of both. I’ll let the photos show the rest of the two days we attended. It was quite the feast and party.
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- That’s not a wok, THIS is a wok. Feeding a village of 50 homes requires some serious wood fired gear.
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- I kid. No, the bride holds a kid. 10 goats were brought by the groom as a wedding gift. Fair disclosure: I have some pictures of four of them being readied for dinner later.
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- The village is a mix of Jinuo and other married in minorities. They still live a simple life of farming.
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- Often while traveling I must remind myself I’m not in Kansas anymore. Until I see many ears of corn, then I think I might be in Nebraska. Unfortunately it’s the mealy corn of Asia and not the soft sweet corn of America.
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- One of the less sustainable but moneymaking crops around here is rubber tree farming. They raze whole hills to plant these things. Another cash crop is banana trees, the two trees sound almost the same in Chinese and baffle me constantly.
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- Rural China still has not caught on to the green Earth ideals and tend to leave their trash everywhere, even among their beautiful forest and rivers.
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- This village raises some gigantic fat chickens. Delicious.
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- The bride shimmies up a tamarind tree to get us a snack. This is after she poked a papaya tree for us already.
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- The Yunnan province is a spicy place. These are just for the wedding. I couldn’t get a clear shot of the market’s worth of vegetables in this store room.
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- Wedding feasts require whole rivers worth of fish.
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- That is a dude blowtorching a goat’s hair off. I wish you could see the huge bright blue flame.
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- There were many cute puppies and dogs running underfoot. The bride and groom are both great with animals and these little guys were incredibly well behaved to show for it.
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- Every time we sat still for longer than 2 minutes, someone would try to feed us. I am not kidding, this place is my dream. This is a delicious cold bean noodle soup.
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- I love the wood fired huge woks that they use in the house.
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- The Yunnan province is famous for their pickles. The wedding family makes their own delicious ones in these huge clay jars.
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- When your wok is that big, you cook with a serious wok shovel. They brought out normal sized shovels that we thought they might cook with.
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- Machetes and butcher knives are interchangeable out here.
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- Refrigerators are overrated when you can just leave quarters of goat hanging near your guest’s heads.
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- The pre-wedding day feast. The weirdest thing was probably the congealed goat’s blood in the upper left corner.
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- Someone sent a case of red wine to the wedding. I can’t say I expected to drink half a bottle of red wine in rural China.
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- The evening’s festivities include all the women doing circle and line dances. Do the shuffle doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. It looks like a bunch of old Asian ladies doing tai chi to an electronic aerobic’s video.
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- It is common to see people smoking out of huge water pipes in this region. I had to explain in America, water pipes are never used for tobacco. They smoke cigarettes out of the ends of them here, I think to smoke them faster?
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- The wedding car is a proud American Cadillac adorned with amusingly white person wedding cake like toppers. A guy rode standing in a truck bed in front of them filming the hour long ride with a handheld camera. China’s safety will never cease to amaze me.
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- The Thai contingent, my new foreign friends, showed up dressed beautifully in Thai clothing to compliment the bride’s choice of a lovely Thai lavender dress.
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- Here comes the bridge and groom!
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- I cannot begin to explain how much they love the NBA here. They love talking to me about it, even before Jeremy Linsanity. Sadly, unlike the delicious Beer Lao, China mostly has watery crap.
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- After almost two hours of set up in the banquet restaurant, the festivities really only went on for about an hour or so. The people left in swarms as fast as they came.
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- The real party was back in the village. Fireworks announced the bride’s arrival. Fireworks, not just for your Chinese New Years Spring Festival enjoyment.
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- There was a delicious second dinner at the village. I really enjoyed their preparations of goat and the various pickles.
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- The groom drank so much as everyone kept wanting to drink with him that you can see his mother coming in to stop people from giving him more.
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- This lovely lady got smashed and at this moment was explaining something about condoms with this plastic bag and a pair of chopsticks. I’m not sure if it would’ve been any funnier had I known what was going on.
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- They covered the patio area in plants and a huge tent to be more festive. The pre wedding day went until 2 am. The actual wedding day festivities went til the sun rose.
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Do you know that Ah Hong spend the next night after the wedding harvesting those ears of corn on the fields ? I wonder if that’s a typical village honeymoon !