Cultural Customs and Characteristics of Wa

The cultural customs of the Wa include the New Fire Festival and the Sowing Festival; the Wa are characterized by their language and culture, and the areas they live in.

1. Cultural Customs of the Wa People

New Fire Festival: The annual festival of the Wa people is full of the color of "saying goodbye to the old and welcoming the new". In the twelfth month of the lunar calendar or in January of the following year, all the households in the villages extinguish the fires in the fire pits under the command of the elders and hold the ceremony of "sending the old fires", and then go to the sacred mountain to take the new fires in the way of "taking fire from the wood by drilling" and take them to the elders' homes to light up into big fires, and then the households will take the new fires back and use them. The new fire is then taken to the sacred mountain to fetch new kindling by "drilling wood for fire" and brought to the elders' homes to be burned into a big fire. In the view of the Wa, the New Fire Festival is the end of disaster, hunger and disease, and the beginning of good fortune, food and health.

Sowing Festival: It is held around the 15th day of the third month of the lunar calendar every year. Before sowing, the headman must first convene the village elders to kill chickens and read the trigrams, choose an auspicious day and sacrifice the soul of the grain, each family will begin to the field sowing. At night, everyone gathers around the fire to eat and drink water and wine, and then goes to the square to sing a song and pray for good weather and a good harvest.

2. Characteristics of the Wa People

Language and Culture: The Wa people have their own unique Wa language, which belongs to the Burmese branch of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages, and is quite different from the languages of other Sino-Tibetan families. The Wa have their own writing system, but mainly use Chinese characters in their modern daily life. The culture of the Wa has strong ethnic characteristics, including music, dance, costumes and religious customs.

Residence area: The Wa are mainly distributed in Nujiang, Dehong and Lincang in southwestern Yunnan Province, with the Wa mountainous area in Nujiang Prefecture and Fugong County in particular as the main settlements. Due to geographical constraints, the Wa live in mountainous or remote areas.

Costumes of the Wa

The costumes of the Wa vary from place to place. The traditional clothing of the Wa men in Ximeng is a short collarless shirt, short and fat pants, black or red cloth wrapped around the head, and young men's necks are often decorated with bamboo or rattan rings. Women wear black collarless short clothes, straight folded skirt around the head, silver hoops or gabion hoops, silver collars and strings of material beads for the chest, the waist and neck wear a number of rattan rings, but also like to wear a number of silver bracelets and large earrings.

The men's clothing of the Wa of Cangyuan is a round-necked shirt with lapel, short and fat pants, and black or red cloth wrapped around the head. Women have long hair, wear earrings and collars made of silver or aluminum, and wear round-necked, narrow-sleeved, right-over-right, open-breasted short clothes with several rows of silver bubbles on the chest, and wear straight, long skirts with a variety of patterns underneath. The Wa costumes of Yongde and Zhenkang are basically the same as those of the local Han Chinese.

Reference: Baidu Encyclopedia-Wa