What are the traditional festivals of Yi people?

0 1 Yi Festival is a concentrated expression of the lifestyle and customs of Yi people all over the country. There are agricultural festivals focusing on agricultural production; There are sacrificial festivals mainly to worship the gods and ancestors; There are commemorative festivals that focus on remembering heroes and major events; There are festivals to celebrate harvest and victory; There are social entertainment festivals with singing, dancing and opera as the main activities.

Yi nationality is the sixth largest minority in China, and its national language is Yi language, which belongs to the Yi branch of Tibeto-Burman language family of Sino-Tibetan language family. There are six dialects in North, East, South, Southeast, West and China, including five power dialects and 25 dialects.

Yi people are mainly distributed between the plateaus and coastal hills in Yunnan, Sichuan, Guizhou and Guangxi provinces, and mainly gather in Chuxiong, Honghe, Liangshan, Bijie, Liupanshui and Anshun. Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture is the largest Yi inhabited area in China.

Yi festivals are the concentrated expression of the lifestyle and customs of Yi people everywhere. There are agricultural festivals focusing on agricultural production; There are sacrificial festivals mainly to worship the gods and ancestors; There are commemorative festivals that focus on remembering heroes and major events; There are festivals to celebrate harvest and victory; There are social entertainment festivals with singing, dancing and opera as the main activities. The main festivals are:

Yi Festival 1: Flower Face Festival

The Flower Face Festival is very popular in Qiubei County. It is held on the eighth day of the second lunar month every year for three days. During the festival, young men and women in every Yi village gather together to kill pigs and chickens, prepare meals with wine and meat, worship the gods first, then invite the elderly to eat the best wine and meat first, and then everyone will sit around and toast each other and eat meat. After dinner, go to the village head and the village tail, and wipe each other's faces with ink and pot ash until they are covered in black and tired to laugh. This is why the Flower Face Festival is named. Except for young men and women, the others also wipe each other according to their age and seniority. They think that the darker they paint, the more people will paint, and the weather will be fine that year, people and animals will be safe, and crops will be bumper. During the festival, villagers are not allowed to work, nor are they allowed to plow in the spring and push the mill.

Yi Festival II: Torch Festival

Torch Festival is a grand festival of Yi people. Except for the Bai people in Muyang, Funing County, the Yi people all over the country celebrated grandly and even spread to the Han people. According to the Yi solar calendar, June 24th of the lunar calendar is the most correct day for the sun to move in orbit. At noon, when the sun shines on people, you can't see your own shadow, so this day is regarded as a festive day. June is the season when rice heads, crops bloom and all kinds of crops are close to maturity. It is also the time when all kinds of pests harm crops. Therefore, torches should be lit to destroy pests and pests in this festival to ensure a bumper harvest. On this day, men, women and children put on festive costumes and gathered in designated venues for bullfighting, horse racing and song and dance performances; At night, men and women chase and play with lighted torches to show kindness and auspiciousness, and also to burn each other's evil souls. In addition, people hold torches to kill insects and pesticides around houses and fields, and then groups of people gather around the bonfire to sing and dance.

Each branch's activities have different forms and meanings. Aza spent two and a half days from the afternoon of June 24th to 26th of the lunar calendar. In addition to offering sacrifices to his ancestors every morning and evening, he also offered sacrifices to his ancestors on 1 day. Black dragon? The next day? House god? The third day? Crops God? Some of them are still available on site? Thor? , pray for blessing. Before the festival, every family cut down young pine trees, dried them with wedge A, made torches, and lit them every night when they served their ancestors' meals. After dinner, young men and women gathered in the open field, playing torches, playing black boys and dancing strings, full of vitality. The sound of torches and happy laughter made the whole village exult. Young people are becoming more and more interested and stay up late at night. Dedication? House god? Extremely serious. Set up an altar at the back of the house, which is offered by the head of the family. The offerings include a small basket of corn and1.65m linen or white cloth, bracelets and rings. Add 1 bowl of rice and add 1 egg; Reed front line 1 bowl of water, 3 wine glasses. Tie three branches of pine, fir and chestnut with red, white, green and blue strips with a length of 16.5 cm, and insert some chicken feathers to hang on the wall. Kill the cock on the table, kill the hen on the right under the table, and burn some blood and paper as a tribute. According to legend, in ancient times, during the Torch Festival, there were 1 couples who were honored as house gods because they fought against the demons who stole the children. Future generations respect and appreciate it, and they will kill chickens and sacrifice behind the house where they are killed every Torch Festival. Yesterday, the course was simplified, and cows were killed and shared on the festival day. Cook glutinous rice that night, cook eggs according to the number of children, and put them on the ground for sacrifice. Parents hold up a dustpan and pat it to recite the words of exorcism, and then hold up a torch and spray fire with rosin particles to exorcise ghosts, mosquitoes and flies. Then each child eats 1 boiled egg, which means that he won't get sick in 1 year, and everything will be fine. In recent years, in order to protect forests and prevent fires, people no longer play with fire handles, and most other activities remain unchanged.

Yi Festival III: Grass Horse Festival

Grass Horse Festival is popular in Zarko. Aza respects the service horse that accompanied his ancestors on their long journey and prays for the protection of crops. Every year in August of the lunar calendar, he will choose Horse or Rat Day to celebrate Grass Horse Festival. Neighboring villages will not choose the same day, which is convenient for them to visit each other and congratulate each other on the festival. On this day, every household makes grass horses, inserts all kinds of wild flowers and dresses up as colorful horses; Make a horse reed from pumpkin leaves and fill it with kitchen ash and grass seeds. Sacrifice the ancestors before killing the chicken that night, put the chicken and good dishes in the horse's mouth and put them in the grass in the west of the village before dinner. The next day, flowers and horses were placed on both sides of the road for everyone to visit and evaluate and learn from the winners. In the afternoon, every family in the village presented grass and horses, and all men, women and children went to the suburbs for lunch to see who ate well, had many guests, was popular, and was lucky. It is another lively scene to hold a bullfight after a meal to evaluate the champion of strong cattle. During the festival, men and women in the village and foreign guests play freely, especially at night, singing, playing flute and jumping strings. This excitement will last until late at night or early the next morning.

Yi Festival 4: February 8

The eighth day of the second lunar month is an annual festival of Weishan Yi people, which is grand and warm. Every village should hold activities, which ones are there? Damen Road? 、? Sacrifice is dense and dry? This is a common activity. On this day, all villages have to cut off some branches to block the intersection into the village, and no outsiders are allowed to enter the village. The activities of offering sacrifices to Miku religion are held within ethnic minorities, and women are not allowed to participate. During the activity, people all speak Yi language, but don't speak Chinese. This activity was first called. Ground pulse? Answer? Dense withering? Then, an activity of offering sacrifices to the dense dead trees was held, and then Abi (a Yi religious figure), boys and strong young men guarded the dense dead trees for three days and three nights. Playing songs was an essential activity in every village.

Why do Yi people hold such grand and enthusiastic activities on the eighth day of the second lunar month? According to legend, Miku, a kind-hearted and helpful old man in Yi Nationality Village, Weishan, lived in a hut one mile away from the stockade. At noon on the eighth day of February one year, all the young and strong laborers went to work in the fields, leaving only some women, children and the elderly in the stockade. Miku suddenly found two hungry tigers coming at the stockade, and both the old man and the children were in danger. At this critical juncture, Miku ignored his own danger and shouted? Children, run. ? While cutting down branches and thorns on the roadside with a machete that you carry with you, you can block the road and delay the tiger from entering the village. When you are exhausted, you will not hesitate to meet the tiger and stand under the big green tree, and lead the hungry tiger to yourself. People came from all directions, the tiger was killed, the villagers were saved, but the old man fell in a pool of blood. People buried the bones of the dead old man under the big green tree with deep feelings. Since then, the Yi people have been called Daqingshu? Dense dead trees? ,? Dense dead trees? Become the incarnation of the old man. Yi people have passed? February 8? This custom has been handed down from generation to generation. March 27th, 2007 (the ninth day of the second lunar month) was held in Weishan. The 12th Yunnan-Sichuan-Guizhou-Guangxi-Yi Ancient Books Cooperation Conference? The meeting decided that the eighth day of the second lunar month was the main day for the Yi people in China to jointly sacrifice Nanzhao Metropolis.

Yi people's festival 5: rice food festival

Miss is a tree god. Every year on the eighth day of the fourth lunar month, the whole village will kill pigs to worship the tree god. Pray for tree gods to bless and eliminate disasters, and bless the prosperity of people and animals in the village and the bumper harvest of crops.

Yi Festival Six: Shahubi Festival

? Shahubi? What is the significance of Weishan Yi language? Taste new wheat? The time is the middle of April in the lunar calendar. In this festival, every family uses new wheat flour and glutinous rice to dip in honey to worship their ancestors, and invites relatives and friends to taste new products to celebrate the bumper harvest in Koharu. On this day, a married daughter should visit her family with a rake and other gifts.

Yi Festival 7: Huang Tu Festival

The Huang Tu Festival is held in the middle and late September of the lunar calendar, and the Yi people in Weishan will choose to hold a ceremony to send Huang Tu on a night that does not belong to their family's zodiac. On this day, people will draw a line from the inner room of the main room to the side room and then to the enclosed room, taking the intersection line of the courtyard center as the midpoint, then draw a circle and set four corners to form five directions of east, west, north and south, and insert a pine branch and a chestnut branch respectively, and insert three branches in the center, order incense, tea, rice, wine, salt and other foods, and hold the rooster in one hand and knock on the plow in the other. Eastern, western Jin, soldiers in the south, water in the north and black-bone chickens and rabbits in the middle, my family dedicated them to the local emperor one day? . Then kill a chicken, insert tail hair in five directions, and wrap tail hair in five directions. When the chicken is cooked, the whole family kowtows. Send the local tyrant to ensure safety, land and foundation? Good luck. Finally, send all the branches and incense to the roadside behind the house and have a family dinner.

Yi Festival 8: Let's drink opera festival.

? Let's play, shall we? Weishan Yi language is to taste new rice on the first day of October every year. On this day, people turn the harvested new grain into Gu Mi, and call their married daughters, visiting sons, relatives and friends back to kill chickens and taste new rice. When tasting new rice, you should worship your ancestors first, and then respect the elderly. At dinner, an old man gave a speech? Let's drink opera, play European opera, Chinihan Maiwan, and go to Imado in the South China Sea? . Taste new rice, taste and taste, this year's harvest, and hope to have better harvest next year. In some Yi villages, new rice is mashed into bait blocks with various patterns, painted and distributed to relatives and friends and the elderly in the village for tasting.

Yi Festival 9: White Paper Valley? Joe's Day?

In the high mountains of Yongren County, there is an alpine Yi village called Baizhigu. Every year, the first day of the fourth lunar month is the Dragon Day, and the local Yi people will hold a grand event. Joe's Day? .

Baizhi Valley belongs to the villagers' committee of Hu Mao Township, Yongren County, and is located in the hinterland of Yishan on the Jinsha River.

Perhaps because of the different migration routes or time, the Yi people in Baizhi ancient times are divided into different branches, and their holiday customs also have their own characteristics. ? Joe's Day? It is one of the unique festivals of Yi people in Zhiju, Yao Ju, Baizhigu, Piancha, Ali and Liangshan in Chuxiong Prefecture.

? Joe's Day? It is the most important and lively festival of the local Yi people. On the morning of the festival, with the first cock crow, the elder Li Bo in the stockade sounded the first crisp bronze drum to tell people? Joe's Day? It has arrived, and the festival is about to begin. At this time, villagers dressed in festive costumes gradually gathered from each stockade to the venue where the festival activities were held, and then got busy according to the contents of the festival activities. Women's main task is to prepare sacrifices for sacrifices and holiday food, while young and middle-aged people are prepared to pick buckwheat seeds, while unmarried young people take this opportunity to enjoy singing and dancing and love affairs. The activity lasted all night and the scene was very lively.

At the beginning of the activity, the first thing is to pick up? Josh? . Under the leadership of the drummer of the bronze drum, everyone went to the buckwheat field in turn and circled the field, and began to call buckwheat seeds. At this time, it is the harvest season of buckwheat. The name of buckwheat seeds means that buckwheat seeds should stop attaching to the fields. Please take buckwheat back to the granary of every household, live happily with people in mountainous areas, and return to Shan Ye in the sowing season next year.

After the ceremony of picking up buckwheat seeds, everyone broke a green branch nearby and took it home, which showed that the buckwheat seeds attached to the branch had come back with them. When the green branches are taken home, they should be inserted at the bottom of the building and sent back to the ground when sowing in the next spring.

Next is the dance performance. On the dam in the middle of the stockade, I saw more than a dozen Yi men wearing strange costumes wearing masks, robes and holding sticks, dancing, singing and performing various dance movements in a big circle centered on a square table on the dam. It is said that in ancient times, a big fire destroyed all the houses and food of the Yi people. At that time, there was no grain left, and people were struggling with hunger and pain. Later, I don't know who found a few surviving buckwheat seeds under an upside-down bowl. People sow buckwheat seeds on the hillside, carry water to the foot of the distant mountain under the scorching sun, take turns guarding them day and night, and carefully manage them. In this way, until April and May of the following year, buckwheat finally blossomed and seeded, and the ancestors of the Yi people survived and multiplied their descendants with these buckwheat seeds. This is the origin of Yi buckwheat festival. In order to make future generations remember this painful farming history forever, the Yi people perform these dance performances every year at the Qiao Nian Festival to show that they will not forget yesterday's hardships.

After all kinds of activities, people get together to sing, jump on bamboo poles and play Hulusheng. The elders sat around the square table in the center of the venue, drinking, narrating and singing.

? Joe's Day? In fact, it is an agricultural sacrifice festival, which actually expresses a kind of natural worship of the Yi people, which is the exposure of a common mentality of the agricultural people looking forward to a bumper harvest.

Bai Zhigu? Joe's Day? The custom has been passed down to this day.

Yi Festival 10: Secret Festival

This is a primitive worship ceremony and one of the major festivals of the Yi people in Yunnan and Guizhou provinces. But there is no fixed and unified festival. Which festivals are it made of? Bimo? Hold festivals on auspicious days. On the same day, the men in each village took the whole slaughtered white sheep and went to a special sacrifice field in the deep forest to hold sacrifices, praying for a bumper harvest of crops and the prosperity of six livestock.

About what? Secret details? There is another legend about its origin. According to legend, there was a shepherd expert in ancient times. Dense branches? . Over the years, he helped others graze cattle and sheep, and people were very grateful to him. On New Year's Eve, a host gave him a chicken, a liter of rice and a catty of meat, and told him to go home for the New Year. But he is homeless, and it is inconvenient to spend the night in another house (because it is New Year's Eve, which is unusual), so he can only curl up under the eaves of others. Unfortunately, he was killed by cold and cold that night. People feel very sad and sorry about this. In memory of him, the Yi people set up a memorial called "? Secret details? . However, because he died on New Year's Eve, it was not convenient to set up a festival on this day, so he changed it? Bimo? Choose another day to celebrate the festival temporarily every winter.

Yi Festival Eleven: Bow Jumping Festival

Traditional festivals of Yi people in Napo county. Also known as the jumping public festival. Yi language is called Kaqi, Kongzi and Cao Qi. It is held every year in the middle of April in the lunar calendar. The exact time varies from village to village. According to legend, in ancient times, the ancestors of the Yi people left the village to resist the enemy. They won in early April to mid-April and returned to their hometown. People hold banquets, sing and dance to celebrate according to custom. This activity began in the Northern Song Dynasty. There are big jumps and small jumps. In 9 years, there were 1 big jumps, each lasting 6-9 days. 1 Small jumps are held for three and a half days every year. People sang and danced around the golden bamboo silk, and the neighboring villagers came to watch and congratulate. There is a temporary market transaction outside the venue.

Bow jumping activity

Public dance is also called. Bow jumping festival? It is the biggest festival of the Yi people in Napo, Guangxi and Funing, Yunnan. It is said to commemorate the ancient warriors who returned home in triumph. It has been circulating for thousands of years. The specific time of festivals in each village is similar, all in the early April of the lunar calendar. The contents include offering sacrifices to ancestors, gods and ancestors, preaching national history, singing and dancing, performing entertainment and so on. A village held a public dance festival, and several nearby villages came to participate, which was very lively. During the festival, all the men, women and children in the village put on holiday costumes. Mora (meaning priest, teacher and wise man in Yi language) preached the achievements of their ancestors and led everyone to worship them. Then, everyone drank and sang, played bronze drums and played lusheng, followed the traditional dance pace, from slow to fast, from low tide to high tide, and celebrated heartily. Young people perform symbols of hunting enemies? Jump over the gate? 、? Crossing the broken bridge? Dance, etc. , showing the heroic and martial spirit of our ancestors and the commemoration of the victory against national oppression. Surrounded by holiday food, everyone can eat and dance, interspersed with Bimo's chanting, praying and blessing ceremonies from time to time, and horse racing and various performances will be held during the period. After dark, young men and women flocked to every property, taking turns dancing, praying and even partying all night.

At that time, people will wear certain clothes, and girls will wear white jackets, blue cloth pants, leggings, collar earrings and belts. The young man was wearing four brand-new jackets with his collar exposed, and nine young people gathered in the square with long poles (symbolizing the long Mao used by their ancestors) and blue robes. ? Master? Lead people to sacrifice their ancestors with pig heads, and board the bamboo platform to officially announce the start of the golden bamboo dance. ? Ma Gongba? The leading dancers, wearing white hats, robes and new shoes and socks, led the crowd to dance on lusheng and gongs and drums. The dance lasted two days. At noon on the third day, all men, women and children climbed to the top of the mountain together. Master? Under the auspices of another ancestor, they left one after another.