Who can introduce the "Sherpa"?

Sherpa people live in the south side of the Himalayas, only a small number of people in our country live in Zhangmu Port, Tingjie Chentang, Tingri velvet Jurisdiction of the border mountainous areas, the natural conditions are more favorable. Char, meaning the East, Sherpa that is the people from the East.

Tibet before the peaceful liberation of Sherpa people mainly engaged in back transportation and exchange, and later the development of agricultural and animal husbandry production, and then vigorously develop a variety of side production and trade exchanges. Crops are corn, potatoes, chicken claw grain, buckwheat and beans. Animal and plant resources are relatively rich, the mountains have a variety of trees such as spruce, camphor; forests have monkeys, roe deer, bears and other animals; under the forest production of cordyceps, shellfish and other medicinal herbs, edible fungi are abundant.

Sharpa men wear wool woven white short-sleeved jacket, black wool along the edges, called "Pudu". Waist inserted a called "fruit Ben" crescent-shaped machete; women wear brightly colored long-sleeved shirt, lower body around a flower skirt, outside the cover of a handmade white woolen shoulders, called "Pardo", comb a long braid with red spikes, but also like to wear gold and jade earrings. They can sing and dance well, the music tune is melodious and elegant, the dance action is very similar to some folk dances in Nepal and Pakistan. Whenever a festival or a happy event, all the family to get together, while drinking, while singing and dancing, often all night long.

Religious beliefs and customs

Sharpa people believe in Tibetan Buddhism, Lixin and Chentang each have a temple, the name of the Gonpa Saba and Lagang, the vast majority of people believe in the Sakya and Kagyu school, but also believe in Gelugpa and Nyingmapai. Sakya and Kagyu followers can get married at home, do not live in the temple, cultivate the temple land, they just take turns to go to the temple to burn incense, make offerings and recite sutras. They use Buddhist rules as their code of conduct, and lamas enjoy a special status among the Sherpas.

They also worship ghosts and believe in astrology, and all major moves are first divined and then decided.

Funeral: If a loved one dies, a lama is asked to recite the sutra first, and then cremation and burial are held. Adults die in a special wooden box, sent to the cremation of the place of the rack firewood burial, two or three days after the burial of a small amount of ashes scattered into the river, the rest of the stone base cover; children die, the body tied into a fetus-shaped, stored in the cliffs of the stone caves or tree holes, a long time into the body wax.

The Sherpa's living customs are influenced by the natural environment and traditional culture, partly the same as the Tibetans, but more colorful and distinctive.

Food: the staple food are corn, rice, tsampa, followed by dry flat rice, potatoes, noodles, oil cake and so on. Sherpa love to drink ghee tea, sweet tea, "Balu" (corn wine), barley wine, yogurt and soju. They like cooked food, do not eat raw meat, with fried vegetables to accompany food. Vegetables favorite consumption of potatoes, nettles (a perennial herb, stems and leaves with fine hairs, skin contact can cause stinging, and even swelling, intolerable), eggs, beef and lamb and a small animal similar to toad. They do not eat fish, dogs or veal, and are not in the habit of feeding pigs, but eat pork. They do not kill cattle, and most of the beef eaten is meat from death by fall or disease, a custom which may be connected with that of the neighboring Nepalese. Corn is a common staple food, one can do "Gongze", is half-dry corn paste; one can do "Balu", is corn wine. In the past, the whole family used to eat with their hands in rice pots and vegetable pots. Now many people in the territory have gradually used chopsticks and bowls. Stir-fry is very concerned about the spices, with cumin, chili peppers, onions, garlic and curry powder, etc., especially chili peppers, cumin as an indispensable condiment, most of these spices with a wooden punch or stone mortar crushed, dipped in vegetables or rice balls to eat.

Habitat: usually live in a wooden house, grazing time to live in the barn. House building form special, generally are herringbone-shaped roof, covered with fish scale board (i.e., with an axe split into thin boards of wood). Surrounded by stones into a thick wall, on the wall beams to build buildings. Most of the construction of two-storey building, the average height of about 6 meters, the upstairs is generally separated into three rooms, divided into the kitchen, dormitory and storage room, downstairs, piling up odds and ends or circle cattle and sheep. Simple indoor furnishings, kitchen in the middle, with ghee barrels, aluminum pots and various cooking utensils such as bowls and cups, there is also a family with a slate pad into a kang, bracket cooking, eating on the ground. They pay attention to hygiene, indoor clean and bright. Generally families have toilets.

Etiquette: Sherpa people show respect in two ways, one is to honor the hatha, one is to touch the other's head on the hands or knees. In the old days, there is the habit of bending over and spitting the tongue and bowing the head, this phenomenon has not been completely eliminated. Sherpa heavy gifts - where there are celebrations will send each other gifts to congratulate, but also the number of gifts must be more than the number of gifts, generally doubled, otherwise it is considered a loss of gifts, gifts received by the family to register, in order to double the gift back. They attach great importance to titles - elders are generally not called by their first names, which is considered impolite. Generally, they call their first son or daughter by their first name, followed by Abba or Ama, and for older male elders, they call them "Mingmi", i.e., "Master"; for older female elders, they call them "Yimi", i.e., "Master". "

The festival is the first of its kind in the world to be held in the United States, and it is the first of its kind in the world to be held in the United States, and it is the first of its kind in the world to be held in the United States, and it is the first of its kind in the world to be held in the United States.

Festivals and entertainment: entertainment activities in addition to singing and dancing, there are "擦嘎", "Kobi", poker. Chaga is a kind of gambling, gambling for 10 half of the dry walnuts, by one person, everyone bets, to throw the walnuts front and back to calculate the winners and losers; Kobe like throwing pots, put a small tube in front of the player with small coins to the tube to throw to the tube, in order to get into the tube for the win.

Sherpa festival has a few is fixed, the territory of Sherpa to New Year's Day is the most grand, followed by the Tibetan calendar year. In 20 days before new year's day, families soak rice, boiled and made into cakes, known as the "Koh hot" and "western cup", but also to prepare beef and mutton, ghee, paji (i.e., dry flat rice), tsampa and potatoes and so on. New Year's Day early in the morning, each person to go to the ditch near the stream to play a bucket of clean spring water, back home to wash their faces and change clothes, said in the new year to clean. Before wearing the new clothes, they should run their hands over themselves to show that they will live a long life, and then get dressed. The family gathers in a room and offers a khat to the idol hanging in the center of the room. A long wooden board is placed under the idol, on which seven kinds of food, including rice, tsampa, cakes, fritters, water, oranges and dried flat rice, are offered, and tsampa flour and ghee flowers are sprinkled around the food. In front of the door, a 1-1.5-meter-long white sutra streamer is erected, surrounded by fine threads of various colors, with bright and colorful edges (according to Yuan Chaojun, "Overview of the Sherpas," in Tibetan Studies, 1989, No. 1).

Sherpa Marriages and Trial Buildings

The caste system of Sherpa society in the territory and the Nepalese caste system were one and the same in the past. It is said that the Sherpas of Lixin, who have been living in the area for more than 260 years, their ancestors were moved from Nepal's Sharkhumbu region, and some say they were moved from Ganzi in Sichuan. They meet if they don't know each other, they have to ask a surname (i.e. caste) what, if it is the same caste, can't joke, also can't intermarry. In the past, Sherpas did not intermarry with Tibetans and other ethnic groups. But they and heterogeneous caste Sherpas in Nepal, are not subject to nationality and geographical restrictions, intermarriage. There are several forms of their marriage. First, the man invites others to go with him to the woman's house to propose marriage, send wine and offer hada, and the woman's house can be married if the young and the old agree to be invited to dinner. Secondly, when the man proposes marriage, the woman's parents agree, but the woman herself does not agree, then take the form of robbing the marriage. Third, both men and women agree, and the woman's parents do not agree, the woman will be snatched to the mountains to hide, and then find the woman's parents to plead for mercy, until the consent of the woman will be led home. Before the marriage, the man also has to pay the bride price to the woman's family custom.

Sharpa people also have two brothers with the wife of the form of marriage. The wife has her own house with a queen-size bed, and each of the two brother-husbands has his own house, and it is either decided by the two husbands or by the wife who sleeps with the wife. If there are four brothers, it is customary for the eldest to share the same wife with the second, and the third with the fourth. Weddings are held with two grooms and three brides, which is again different from the Tibetans and the Menba.

In the Sherpa caste of Sherpas, there is also a form of trial marriage. There is a traditional "Everest Trail" from Tingri to Solu and Khumbu in Nepal. Solu and Khumbu is the American contemporary anthropologist Ajiz's base, she had to Tibet to escape in the object of the people there, from the thousands of survey data from the compilation of the Tibetan side of the family book. It is in this Solu and Khumbu region that there are still many Sherpa trial marriages in small wooden buildings. When a Sherpa girl reaches the age of 14, her parents let her go out and befriend freely, and at the same time allocate a hut to her, and rich families also build a separate small wooden building for their daughters, so that she can live there alone at night. She chose a boyfriend, can guide him secretly to the small wooden building to the night, parents even if they know also do not interfere, and also to explain to the little girl gender contact and knowledge of gender life. Live for a period of time, both of them if they are satisfied, it will be the man entrusted by the medium to the woman's parents to send a few bowls of rice wine, even if the formal engagement. After the engagement, the fiancé can openly live in the girl's small wooden building. If either party is dissatisfied, the engagement will be broken off and the man will have to leave the small wooden building immediately. However, most men and women are able to move on to the next stage, the birth of a child. Only after the birth of a child are the man and woman declared subordinate to each other, whereupon the man formally proposes to the woman and her parents, and the relationship is formalized through a certain ceremony. If there is still an emotional crisis between the two couples, the husband can leave the woman or take the child away by negotiating a child support payment to his wife. If they can continue to live in harmony, then they can establish a lifelong partnership, and the woman can move to her husband's home with the child, and then hold a solemn wedding. According to Purba, a youthful guide of the Sherpa Sherpa caste of Sherpas, "Generally speaking, a woman can cohabit at the age of fourteen and a man at sixteen, but it is only after one, two, and a second and a second determination of affection that a family can be formed, and this takes from three to ten years." According to an old Sherpa ama, Sanjuma, in Solu and Khumbu localities, who was making celebratory food preparations for her daughter's fiancé's door-to-door marriage proposal, explained, "The reason for this is very simple: there is no better way for a young man and a young woman to get to know each other and get through to each other than to sleep together in the same bed. Even if a bed to sleep, a moment is also difficult to understand and communicate, so the trial period should be long, long until the birth of a child, long enough to withstand the trust and test brought about by assuming the responsibility of the **** with."