"My love, you look like in the mirror. I could see you but not touch you.

"My love, you are like a sweet fruit on the top of the tree. I want to pick it but somebody has climbed up before me.

"My love, I miss you so much that the lovesickness makes me lay wide awake all night.

"My love, I miss you so much that the lovesickness makes me too weak to hold a piece of paper..."

In the last glow before dusk, Li Lina, aged 17, and Wei Wen, 22, dressed in their traditional dark costumes dyed in dark indigo blue, sang antiphonally outside their stilted-houses in Nongwen Village lying in the mountain valley.

The loud but melodious songs lingered to touch every person tired of the hustle and bustle of the world, longing for a haven of peace.

The haven of peace in the mountains is Napo, a small county in South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

Indigo blue

People of five ethnic groups - Zhuang, Miao, Yao, Yi and Yaolao - live together with the Hans in the county. Li and Wei belong to a special tribe of the Zhuang called Heiyi Zhuangs who dress in dark indigo blue.

The name comes from a folklore that every person of the tribe knows: Nonglaofa, the leader of the tribe, was seriously wounded in a fight against another tribe's invasion.

When he withdrew and took cover in a dense wood, a god in his dream taught him to pound the leaves of the wild indigo and apply it to the wound.

He did what the god told him and soon recovered.

After that, Nonglaofa led his tribe to defeat the invaders. Then he ordered all the families to grow the indigo and for people to wear the clothes dyed in dark indigo blue.

Since then, the tribe's residents have adored the dark indigo blue and considered the special customs as their symbolic difference from other tribes.

Both the men's and women's traditional dress feature wide-bottom trouser legs and sleeve cuffs to make it convenient for their labor.

For women, there's a special wide skirt which can be folded to form several bags around the waist.

"I can put many things into my skirt as I go to the fair," Li said as she showed how to fold the skirts.

Although the Heiyi Zhuangs nowadays wear simpler modern pants, shirts and jackets, the villagers still keep at least one set of traditional attire for festivities.

And many local women still keep spinning yarn and weaving cloth at home, and dye it into dark indigo blue.

In the second floor of the stilted-house of Li's home, there is an old wooden weave-machine.

Li said: "It takes about a week for my mother to make a traditional costume, and I like to wear it to the gexu (open air folk songs festival regularly held in neighbouring villages) or the fair in the county."

Nongwen Village, where Li and Wei live, is composed of about 50 families of Heiyi Zhuangs. Their old stilted-houses stand among green palm and plantain trees.

"My home village lies in the stone mountains; one tenth is soil while the rest is stone..." a song's lyrics explains.

The Heiyi Zhuangs have lived and worked in the mountains for thousands of years.

In the bottom of the valley, they built up the cisterns to store rainwater to irrigate a few patches of rice fields. On the mountains, they grew corn in the crevices of the stones.

Hospitality

Although society is being developed at an amazing speed, the good-natured Heiyi Zhuangs still keep simple traditional customs in daily life.

In the stilted-houses, on the first floor, they raise livestock, such as pigs, while on the top floor, they store the grains, corn and firewood.

Each family has built a methane-generating pit near their home, and they use marsh gas for the power supply.

The cured meat and the glutinous rice are their daily food, washed down with home-brewed tasty rice wine.

They have a custom to entertain guests with this home-made wine. Seeing people entering the village, no matter if they are strangers, they will welcome them to their houses and present them with a bowl of rice wine, urging them to drink in a polite way or through singing.

"If the guests cannot drink, we will tell them just to take a sip to taste the flavor," Wei said.

Given names

Heiyi Zhuangs also have a unique custom in giving names to their children.

Only 12 Chinese characters can be used for the names. It is said the 12 characters were the names of the 12 gods who safeguarded the tribe. So people named their children after the 12 gods for good luck.

Yet, nowadays, parents follow the rules only when giving their girls the names, or use them as pet names. As children grow up and go to school, they will have a new name common in modern society.

Singing tradition”

The old tribe remained in obscurity for a long time until the 2001 Nanning International Folk Songs Festival, when they became known to the outside world.

During the festival, all the audiences, singers and critics were fascinated by the cappella performed by the Heiyi Zhuangs.

To the 51,800 people of the tribe, singing has been their traditional way of life for centuries.

Songs are improvised when they meet friends, entertain guests, work, talk, greet new-born children and even when they bury the dead.

The folk songs also act as matchmakers between young people. Many young people traditionally use such spontaneous songs to court potential spouses.

There's a special gexu called “Romantic Street” held annually at the end of March.

In the evening of that day, the well-dressed young people gather together from neighboring villages to meet their lovers and potential spouses.

When a young man falls in love with a woman, he will give her his "hongmeidai," a red silk ribbon which a man wears from his birth as a protective talisman.

And if the woman accepts his love, she will give him a pouch she has embroidered herself as exchange to pledge her love.

When Li and Wei were singing, Qin Caifen - Li's mother - came back home with a bundle of greenfeed on her back for pigs she cut from the mountain.

Born in another village, Qin met her husband at the gexu held in Nongwen Village and then married in Nongwen.

Although she is 40 years old and her forehead is lined with wrinkles after years of hard labor, she has maintained a loud and clear voice.

"I learned singing from my mother but I cannot sing as well as she can, as I only learned some of the tunes she sings," said Li modestly.

Li's parents are among thousands of Heiyi Zhuang couples in Napo, since the tribe maintains the rule of marriage-within-tribe.

However, it does not mean these are consanguineous marriages. "Our wise ancestors prohibited marriages between directly-related family members and the collateral relatives by blood in three generations," said Nong Minjian, head of Napo County.

Open to the outside

In the new century, Nongwen Village, like the other 128 villages in Napo, has gradually opened to the outside world.

Increasingly more young people are leaving the mountains and no longer lead the lives of their parents and grandparents.

Nong Lilan, a 19-year-old nurse working in the county hospital, said: "I envy my mother and those who are good at improvising songs, yet I yearn more for the colorful life in the modern society. Moreover, I wish my village could develop fast."

Wei Wen, another young person has enrolled into the local song and dance ensemble, and he aims to become a professional singer.

"I hope more and more people could know Heiyi Zhuangs and Napo through my songs," he said.

(China Daily January 4, 2002)