The Tujia people of China: stilt houses, brocade and the hand-waving dance

Name and language

The Tujia call themselves Bizika, which means ‘native dwellers’.

The Tujia language belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family but is usually treated as an isolate within it, with no close relatives. Only a small minority still speak it: at most about 70,000 native speakers, mostly in northern Xiangxi in Hunan. Most Tujia speak Chinese. The language has no written script of its own, which is one reason the Tujia see their brocade as a way of keeping their culture.[3][8]

Stilt houses

Tujia villages are known for their stilt houses (吊脚楼, diàojiǎolóu): wooden buildings on raised pillars with grey-tiled roofs, held together by nail-free mortise-and-tenon joints. Families built them on steep slopes so that the flat land could be kept for crops.

A typical home has a main house and a stilted side building that hangs free on three sides. The space underneath shelters livestock and firewood; the upper room was traditionally for the family’s unmarried daughters, kept dry and safe from pests. In Shuangfeng village (双凤村), Yongshun county, Hunan, which an ethnologist called ‘China’s first village of the Tujia’, 56 wooden buildings survive, the oldest from the late Ming or early Qing. Villagers still coat them with tung oil every September.[6]

The hand-waving dance and Xilankapu brocade

The hand-waving dance (摆手舞, bǎishǒuwǔ) is a group dance about 500 years old that mixes singing, dance and music. Dancers wave one hand or both, circle and bend, using about 70 traditional gestures; in Shuangfeng, 13 core movements such as ‘clearing fields’, ‘planting seeds’ and ‘weaving hemp’ follow the farming year. It is usually danced from the third to the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, especially in Longshan, Baojing and Yongshun counties of Xiangxi, and is on China’s national intangible cultural heritage list.

Xilankapu (西兰卡普), Tujia brocade, means ‘flower-patterned cover’ in Tujia. It has more than 200 classic designs of flowers, birds and lucky symbols, woven by hand in more than ten steps; traditional pieces are patterned on one side only and used as bedding. It was named national intangible cultural heritage in 2006. Longshan county in Hunan is a centre of the craft, and a large brocade is on show at the Xiangxi Intangible Cultural Heritage Museum.

At the Spring Festival, Tujia families make ciba (糍粑), cakes of pounded glutinous rice that are grilled by the fire and eaten while singing folk songs.[3][6][7][8]