Characteristics of the Dong people

The Dong people believe in many gods and worship their ancestors, especially the female ancestor "Sama", and many places have built "Sama Shrine". Some places also believe in some of the gods of the Han Chinese. Buddhism, Protestantism and Catholicism have also been introduced, but fewer people believe in them.

The language of the Dong people is Dong, which belongs to the Dong Shui branch of the Zhuang-Dong language family of the Sino-Tibetan language family. There are two major dialects of the Dong language: one is southern and the other is northern. It is divided by a line of Miao and Han mixed in Jinping County, Guizhou. The Dong language is a tonal language, and there are some differences in the tones in the various dialects, with 9 tones in some places and 6 tones in others.

The Dong are good at music. The most famous Dong folk music is the "Drum Tower Song", which is a kind of a cappella multi-voice chorus. 1986 Guizhou Dong Song Choir went to France to perform the Dong Song, causing a sensation and reversing the international argument that there is no polyphonic music in China. The ox-legged zither is a traditional stringed instrument of the Dong people.

The clothing of the Dong people is mostly made of homemade "Dong cloth" in shades of green, blue, white and purple. Men in the remote mountainous areas wear short clothes with right overlapping and no collar, wrapped in a large turban, and some of them keep their hair on top of their heads.

Women's attire varies slightly from place to place, the upper body has a large lapel without a collar and no buttons on the blouse, there are also clothes up to the knee, the lower wear pleated skirt or tube pants, more girdle, tie the legs, lapel, clothes, such as rolls and so on, embroidered with flower patterns. Women more combed hair bun head, love to wear silver and other jewelry.

The diet of the Dong people is not taboo, and there are many varieties of food, including some insects and silkworm pupae.

The Dong family cuisine is particularly pickled food, including a variety of pickles, pickled meat, pickled fish. There is also a unique rice wine, which is not vicious in taste, but is said to be easy to fall down if you drink too much of it. Rice wine is mostly made from locally produced glutinous rice or corn, and the degree of alcohol is not particularly high, but it is often mixed with honey and rock sugar, which makes it sweet and easy to drink too much and get drunk. It is easy to fall asleep quickly and stay awake for a long time after getting drunk.

Extended information:

The ancestors of the Dong ethnic group can be traced back to the Gan Yue among the Hundred Yue in the Qin and Han Dynasties, among others. In the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties, they were known as the "Bong", and in the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, they were known as the "Dong", and later, many Han Chinese came to their place of residence and mixed with the local people.

The name of the Dong people comes from "Xidong", which is the traditional administrative unit of the local people, and today there are still a lot of local places named "Dong". After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the inhabitants of these places were collectively called the Dong.

There are 2,879,974 Dong people in China*** (2010 census), making it the 12th largest ethnic group in China. The Dong people live in the region where the four provinces of Guizhou, Hunan, Guizhou, Hubei and Hubei meet on the southeastern edge of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau.

Guizhou is the largest province with 1,628,568 Dong people, accounting for 55.01% of the Dong population, 12.21% of Guizhou's ethnic minority population, and 4.62% of the province's population, and the Dong are the fourth largest ethnic group in Guizhou, after the Han Chinese, the Miao and the Buyi.

Baidu Encyclopedia - Dong Ethnicity