The Dai people have a long history, and there are records of the Dai ancestors in Han historical records in the 1st century BC.
In 109 BC, Emperor Wu of Han Dynasty set up Yizhou County, and the Dai area was under the jurisdiction of Yizhou County. In 69 AD, the Dai area belonged to Yongchang County.
To the Ming and Qing dynasties, the implementation of the minority areas to abolish hereditary Tusi, replaced by temporary officials (i.e., the flow of officials) ruled the "return to the flow" policy, the Dai region gradually returned to the direct rule of the imperial court. During the Republic of China period in the Dai ethnic areas were established in the county, set up a bureau.
The bamboo buildings where the Dai people live are a kind of dry-structure. Bamboo building nearly square, dozens of large bamboo support, suspended pavement floor; roof covered with thatched rows, bamboo wall gap is very large, both ventilated and light, the roof of the two sides of the slope is very large, was "A" shape.
The bamboo building is divided into two floors, with people living upstairs and raising livestock and stacking sundries downstairs, and it is also a place for pounding rice and weaving cloth. Dai men generally wear collarless button-sleeved shirts and long tube pants, and wrap their heads in white or blue cloth.
The dress of Dai women varies greatly from place to place, but is basically characterized by bundled hair, tube skirts and short shirts. The tube skirt is as long as the top of the foot, and the shirt is tight and short, with the hemline only reaching the waist, while the sleeves are long and narrow.
The Dai people use rice as their staple food, and the most distinctive feature is the bamboo tube rice. Its production method is to put the rice into a fresh bamboo tube and add water, put on the fire barbecue, eat up the fragrance and delicious.
Pu-erh tea is a specialty of Xishuangbanna, Yunnan Province, in the Tang Dynasty has been exported throughout China, the Qing Dynasty, exported to Southeast Asia and South Asia, has now entered Japan and Western Europe and other countries and regions of the market, and has become a famous Chinese and foreign famous tea. Dai has its own unique calendar.
The difference between the Dai calendar and the Gregorian calendar is 638 years, i.e., 639 years in the Gregorian calendar is the first year of the Dai calendar. The year of the Dai calendar is a solar year, but the month is a lunar month.
The Dai calendar is divided into three seasons: January to April is the cold season, May to August is the hot season, and September to December is the rainy season. The Dai people are very fond of poetry, especially long narrative poems.
Narrative poems such as "Shao Shu Tun and Nan Manona" and "E and Sang Luo" are valuable cultural heritages of the Chinese nation. There are many kinds of Dai dances, and their movements and contents mainly simulate the activities of common local animals, on the basis of which they are personified.
The Peacock Dance originates from the imitation of the peacock's graceful movements, as well as from the beautiful and touching legends of the Dai people. The famous dancer Knife Meilan is famous for performing the peacock dance.
The Water Splashing Festival is the most ethnic festival of the Dai people. It is the New Year of the Dai calendar, and is celebrated between June 6 and July 6, which is equivalent to the fourth month of the Gregorian calendar.
On the day of the festival, people will worship Buddha, and the girls will wash the dust of Buddha with fresh water with flowers floating in it, and then splash each other with water to play and wish each other good luck. At first, with hands and bowls of water, and later with pots and buckets, while splashing and singing, the more intense, drums, gongs, splashing, cheering into a piece.
During the Songkran Festival, traditional recreational activities such as dragon boat races, putting high, flying lanterns and a variety of songs and dances will be held.
What are the characteristics of the Dai people?
Characteristics of the Dai people's clothing Ethnic dress, men wear collarless lapel or lapel small-sleeved shirts, under the black or white pants, cold days wear felt, more white cloth or green cloth head. The custom of tattooing is very common, and when a boy is eleven or two years old, he is invited to be tattooed on his chest, back, abdomen, waist and limbs with a variety of animals, flowers, geometric patterns or Daiwen and other floral patterns for decoration. Women traditionally wear narrow-sleeved short clothes and tube skirts. The costumes of Dai women are known to be beautiful and generous, with strong ethnic characteristics, and they vary from place to place. However, the three items of clothing, namely, hair-binding, skirt and short shirt, are the same. Dai women in Xishuangbanna wear white or scarlet underwear, with a small waist, wide hemline, and tube skirts of various colors. Women in Mangshi and other places wear light-colored lapel shirts before marriage, long pants, and a small girdle; after marriage, they change to sheep's lapel shirts and black tube skirts. The hair of Dai women is different from that of Miao, Yao and other ethnic groups in that they wear their hair in a bun at the back of the head or slightly to the side of the head, which is generally not tied, and some of them only wear bulbous combs or flower headscarves. The Dai women's tube skirts, which are like buckets, are different from those of the Jingpo, Wa, and Brown ethnic groups in that they are characterized by their length up to the instep. Dai women's short shirts, especially the narrow-sleeved short shirts of Xishuangbang, more unique ethnic style, sleeve tube and long and thin, only enough to wear into an arm; shirt body, in addition to tight, long only and waist, the back of the pendulum is not as long as the waist, a little spine exposed, sometimes hidden, for the whole clothing color a lot. Mainland Dai women's clothing and the border is largely the same, but there are regional characteristics, often called by other ethnic groups as "flower waist Dai", "big-sleeved Dai" and so on.
Dyeing teeth, teeth dyed black with black smoke, is considered a beauty by the Dai women, as men and women tattoo. Outside Xishuangbanna, elderly women with black teeth can be seen everywhere, but they have disappeared among young people.
Dietary characteristics of the Dai people
The Dai people live on the banks of the river, where the climate is hot, rainfall is abundant, and there are no four seasons throughout the year, with only obvious dry and wet seasons. The land is fertile and irrigation is convenient, which is suitable for growing rice and many kinds of cash crops.
The Dai people are mainly agricultural, with glutinous rice as the main food, mountain treasures and even some small animals and fish, shrimp, pork and beef are their main cooking ingredients. Because often in the field meals, so accustomed to hand pinch rice balls to eat. With the sour meat, roast chicken, mumble, moss pine, dry eel, bamboo tube rice, etc. can be done at home or in the wild fire grilled.
Cooking methods are y influenced by Buddhist temple cuisine and Han Chinese cuisine, specializing in boiling, baking, roasting, pickling, mixing, pounding, burning, stewing and so on.
In addition to common raw materials such as fish, beef, pork, chicken, snails, and vegetables, the most popular raw materials are moss, ants, sour bamboo shoots, bird's nests, dog meat and bee pupae, eggs of cow dung, bamboo maggots, crickets,
bamboo worms, field turtles, flower spiders, brown maggots, etc. The Dai people are fond of wine, and they like to drink wine, and they like to cook. The Dai people are addicted to wine and betel nut.
The national festivals of the Dai people include the Water Festival, the Mid-Autumn Festival, the Spring Festival, and the Bathing Festival on the seventh day of the first month. The Spring Festival takes five or six days, and the last day is called "Winnen" in Dai language, and the whole village will have a reunion dinner in the afternoon.
The specialties of the Dai ethnic group include beef salsa, assorted food, fish chopped ginseng, sour meat, crab mumbai, roasted chicken with fragrant barnyard grass, hedgehog sour meat, chicken stewed with sour bamboo shoots, chicken jerky, moss pine, three flavors of ants and eggs, fragrant bamboo rice, deep-fried sesame crisps, elephant ear poop, etc. The last day of the Spring Festival is called "Winnen".
What are the specialties of Dai?
Characteristics of the Dai:
1. Faith
Religion, the frontier Dai generally believe in the Southern Theravada Buddhism, belonging to the Hinayana Buddhism, while retaining the remnants of the primitive worship of ghosts and gods. The mainland Dai worship the "Dragon God" and the "Dragon Tree", and there are religious professionals called "Bo Meng" and "Shi Niang", who perform divination and healing on behalf of people. There are religious professionals, "Bo Meng" and "Shi Niang", who perform divination and cure on behalf of people. In Jinggu and other areas, there is also belief in Theravada Buddhism.
2. Clothing:
Women traditionally wear short, narrow-sleeved dresses and skirts. Dai men wear collarless lapel or lapel and small-sleeved short shirts, with long pants underneath, wearing felt on cold days, and wrapping their heads in white or green cloth. The custom of tattooing men is very common, both to show bravery, but also to ward off evil spirits and decorate the body.
3. Diet
The staple food of the Dai people is mainly rice. The Dehong area eats round-grained rice, and Xishuangbanna and other places love to eat glutinous rice, which is usually pounded and eaten now. Dai famous incense bamboo rice, also known as bamboo tube rice, out of the laborers often eat in the field, with banana leaves to hold a ball of glutinous rice, accompanied by salt, chili, sour meat, roasted chicken, mumble, moss pine can be eaten. Meat has pigs, cows, chickens, ducks, do not eat or eat less mutton, good roast chicken, roast chicken, like to eat fish, shrimp, crabs, snails, moss and other aquatic products. Frequently eaten vegetables are cabbage, radish, bamboo shoots and beans.
4. Architecture
Column architecture is the characteristic of Dai residence. The bamboo buildings of the Dai around Xishuangbanna and Ruili in Dehong have a unique style. Building nearly square, up and down two floors, the upper floor to live, about 7 feet from the ground, the lower floor without walls, used to raise livestock and stacked goods, the top of the double sloping, more covered with woven "grass row". Pick up the stairs, there are corridors, drying platform, you can dry things, cool.
The Dai people in most areas of Dehong live in cottages, dissected bamboo for the wall or adobe for the wall, covered with thatch, more for the courtyard. Chuxiong Yi mountains in the Dai bamboo building, the roof is relatively wide and gentle, the main function is to ventilate the sun cool, rain secondary; housing overhead, people live upstairs, can avoid the ground hot summer heat and moisture, to prevent insects and vermin infringement; beams and columns inside and outside of the interspersed connection, all in one, very strong, can prevent the earthquake of the worry; downstairs, there are only a few columns, in the event of flooding, in general, can keep the bamboo building unharmed. In the Yishan Dai area, families have built bamboo buildings, and more for the Dai people's main residence.
5. Dai theater
The Dai have a traditional Dai theater. In the past, Xishuangbanna had a dance-based form of singing opera words, which was the prototype of Dai opera. Its plot is relatively simple, mainly showing the hunter with a knife and the disguised dragons, phoenixes, tortoises and cranes to fight. The development and perfection of Dai Opera is mainly in the area of Dehong. Therefore, Dai Opera is also called "Western Yunnan Dai Opera". Around the beginning of the 19th century, it arose in Dehong Yingjiang's Zhanxi and Ganya.
6. Festivals
The festivals of the Dai people are mostly related to religious activities. The main festivals are Somen Festival, Open Door Festival, Water Festival and so on.
Expanded Information:
The Dai people, also known as the Tai people, the Shan people, and so on, the national language for the Dai, is a branch of the Han-Tibetan family of the Zhuang-Dong language Zhuang-Dai language.
The Dai people regard peacocks and elephants as mascots, and their folk stories are colorful and colorful. The Dai people like to live by the water, love cleanliness, often bathe, and women love to shampoo their hair, so they are known as "the people of the water", and they used to believe in the Theravada Buddhism and primitive religions in the past.
The Dai people in China are known as Dancing, Dana, Daiya, Dai tian, Daituan and so on according to their distribution areas. Xishuangbanna and other places called themselves "Dancing", Dehong and other places called themselves "Dai Na", the upper reaches of the Red River, Xinping, Yuanjiang and other places Dai people called themselves "Dai Ya", Ruili, Longchuan, Gengma borderline Ruili, Longchuan, Gengma border line of the Dai called themselves "Dai bandage", Lancang Mangjing, Mangna for the Dai bandage branch. The Han Chinese call Dai dancing for water Dai, Dai Na for dry Dai, Daiya for flower waist Dai.
The Dai are the main ethnic group in Thailand and Laos, accounting for 40% of Thailand's total population. The Dai are also the second largest ethnic group in Myanmar, and an ethnic minority in China, India, Vietnam and Cambodia. According to the 2010 Sixth Census, there are more than 1.26 million Dai in China***
References:
p> Dai culture as well as characteristics
Second, the Dai language and writing The Dai language belongs to the Zhuang-Dong branch of the Zhuang-Dong language family of the Sino-Tibetan language family.
It is divided into Xishuangbanna dialect, Dehong dialect and Jinping dialect. The phonetic script of Dai is derived from the Sanskrit alphabet, which varies from place to place.
In 1954, a script reform was carried out, divided into Dai Na script (Dehong), Dai Dance script (Xishuangbanna), Dai Liwen (Ruili, Gengma, Lancang and other places) and Jinping Dai script. Now passes Xishuangbanna and Dehong two kinds of Dai language.
Third, the Dai astronomical calendar The Dai have their own traditional calendar. In Dai language, it is called "Zura Saha", which means "small calendar".
Its origin can be traced back to the Zhou and Qin, the current Dai calendar began before the Ming Dynasty. It is a yin and yang calendar.
The year of the Dai calendar is the solar year, that is, one week of revolution around the sun; the month of the Dai calendar is the lunar month, that is, the moon's cycle of a circle. A year is divided into 12 months, a single month is 30 days, bimonthly is 29 days.
With June as the beginning of the year, its first month is equivalent to the tenth month of the summer calendar. An ordinary year is 350 or 355 days and a leap year is 384 days.
The Dai calendar began in 638 AD. Fourth, the Dai medicine and health Dai medicine as a knowledge, is an important part of the Dai science and culture.
Over the past thousands of years, the Dai people, in the struggle against diseases, have constantly summarized their experiences, accumulated a wealth of folk remedies, and collected thousands of herbs. Among them, "Stall Haya" (medicine book), is an important medical literature of the Dai people.
According to the literature: when the Dai moved to Jingyong, many villages died of epidemics, but there was a village in Jingyong Damtou, not only did not die of disease, but also strong and healthy. They opened up many fields and their production developed very quickly.
One day, an old man named Bo's teeth went up the mountain to pick wild fruits, passed by this village, and saw that everyone in the village was very healthy and felt very strange, so he asked the people in the village: "What do you eat, why is everyone strong and healthy?" The people in the village told him, "I don't eat anything else, but when I first came here, everyone went up to the mountains every day to pick wild fruits and vegetables to eat, so maybe there is some reason for this." Bo's teeth went back to tell this situation to other villages, and advised everyone might as well try, go up the mountain to pick wild vegetables to eat.
We all want to cure the disease, they have according to the wave of teeth said to do. After a period of time, really effective, the epidemic is obviously reduced.
Bo's teeth attention from everyone every pick back to the wild fruit, wild vegetables in the picking out samples to save. Later, as long as the village is sick, he looked for these fruits, vegetables to the patient to eat, some ate the disease on the well, there are some less obvious effect, and change the other kind of eat on the effective.
In this way, he slowly summarized, accumulated experience, whenever someone sick (at that time mainly malaria), according to the different types of disease were given treatment. Gradually, the disease was reduced, people were healthy, and the Dai people called Bo's teeth "Moya", which means the person who can cure the disease.
From then on, there is a Dai doctor. After the text, it is recorded as today's more complete Dai medical books.
Traditional Dai Medicine Manuscripts: Dai classical medical works. It records the theory and treatment method of traditional Dai medicine on medicine, prescription and preparation.
What has been preserved so far are the "Bay Leaf Book" written on the shell leaves and the "Cotton Paper Book" transcribed on the paper supported by the bark of the tree. This is the treasures of Chinese medical heritage, according to these manuscripts have been organized and prepared by the publication of the Dai and Chinese control of the "Dehong Dai medicine prescription collection" and "Xishuangbanna Dai medicine journal".
V. Religious Beliefs of the Dai People The Dai people are a nation that believes in Southern Buddhism, which is known as "Buta Shasana" in Dai language. It has a profound influence on the politics, economy, culture and art of the Dai society.
It was introduced into the Dai area around the 6th-8th centuries AD. Before that, the Dai ancestors believed in the worship of many gods, that is, the primitive religion.
Due to the widespread spread of Buddhism, Buddhist temples were very common in the Dai region. It seems to be a natural thing to send one's son to a temple to become a monk, especially in Xishuangbanna region, when a boy reaches the age of 8-10 years old, almost all of them have to go to the temple to go to the life of a monk.
They learn to read and write there, and usually return home in 1-5 years. The Dai language of the great collection of scriptures known as 84,000, most of which are engraved and written on the shell leaves, known as the shell leaf scriptures.
Some of them are Dai monks and laymen according to the Buddhist teachings to play and supplement the writings. Sixth, the Dai literature National literature: the Dai people have a rich collection of folk literature and art works, including narrative poems, fables, myths, legends, fairy tales and so on.
Many famous narrative poems, such as "Shao Shu Tun and the first wood Nona", "E and Sang Luo", "Alluan's story" and so on, are famous in China and abroad. Epic: "Batamaga Huan Shangluo", also known as "South Division Batamaga Pasadai".
The Dai epic of creation. The content includes the opening of heaven and earth, the formation of mankind, the rise of the Dai ancestors, migration, and the process of settlement.
Among them, there are many Dai mythological stories and legends of historical figures, which is a study of Dai ancient myths and social ancient literature. History: "Dancing History" formerly known as "Nangsiben Mengdan") ("Chronicles of Xishuangbanna").
The book takes the chronicle to record the Dai from 1180 (542 years of the Dai calendar) Dai chief Ba Zhen into the Lord of Xishuangbanna to establish the Jing Jindian country, stopping in 1950 the liberation of Xishuangbanna's main historical facts. The book has a translation by Li Fuyi, published by Yunnan University in 1947, titled "Dancing History", which was translated from 1180 to 1864.
In 1958, Zhang Gongjin supplemented the translation of the 1844-1950 part of the book, titled "Continuing Dancing History: Chronicle of Xishuangbanna in the Past Hundred Years". There are other translations of the book with different details and simplicity.
"Dancing History" provides many valuable information for the future generations to understand the social history of the Dai people, and is an important historical document of the Dai people. Seven, the Dai drama Xishuangbanna territory has Thai-Burmese song and dance drama, Tenglong along the border with the Chinese Dai drama.
Song and dance plays are performed in the larger religious ***, such as the car Xuanhu Street every year during the winter of fine Buddha Assembly, three nights in a row there are song and dance performances, the plot has a historical story, religious myths, love legends, and the line of disguise is strange, with the paper tied into the dragons, peacocks, tortoises, cranes, deer, mussels and so on, colorful paintings. Masquerade as a beautiful actress, the paper peacock in front of and behind the two sections wrapped around the body, with two hands to catch the wings and fly.
Actors disguised as youth, the paper deer wrapped around the body to do the deer dance. Turtle with a person ambushed in the turtle abdomen, hands and feet that turtle's four feet, turtle neck inside an organ; can make *** swiftly extend several feet, swiftly shrink back to the abdomen, attracting laughter from the audience.
Dai theater: Dai theater has a history of about two hundred years. Earlier plays include "Twelve Horses", "Gongsun Plowing", and.
Characteristics of the Dai People
Religion: The frontier Dai people generally believe in the Southern Theravada Buddhism, which belongs to Hinayana Buddhism, while retaining the remnants of the original worship of ghosts and gods.
The Dai people in the mainland worship the "Dragon God" and "Dragon Tree", and there are religious professionals "Bo Meng" and "Shi Niang", who perform divination on behalf of people. There are religious professionals called "Bo Meng" and "Shi Niang", who perform divination and cure diseases on behalf of people. Clothing: Women Women traditionally wear narrow-sleeved short clothes and tube skirts.
Dai women in Xishuangbanna, white or scarlet underwear, thin waist, wide hem, under the tube skirt of various colors. Dehong Mangshi and other places women, before marriage with light-colored lapel shirts, pants, bundled small waist, after marriage changed to lapel shirts, black tube skirt.
Male Dai men with collarless lapel or lapel small-sleeved shirts, under the long tube pants, cold days Phi felt, more white or green cloth head. The custom of tattooing men is very common, which not only indicates bravery, but also protects the body from evil spirits and decorates the body.
Diet: Dai staple food is mainly rice. Dehong area to eat round-grained rice, Xishuangbanna and other places love to eat glutinous rice, usually now pounded now eat.
Meat pig, cow, chicken, duck, do not eat or eat less mutton, good roast chicken, roast chicken, like to eat fish, shrimp, crab, snail, moss and other aquatic products. Frequently eaten vegetables are cabbage, radish, bamboo shoots and beans.
Raw, fresh, sour, spicy and wild are the characteristics of Dai cuisine. The Dai people believe that eating sour heart cool eyes bright, help digestion, but also can eliminate heat; eat sweet, can increase heat, relieve fatigue, prevent hepatitis; eat spicy, can open the appetite, increase appetite, enhance the body's resistance to prevent colds and flu; eat raw, fresh and tasty vegetables, tasty and comfortable.
Dai flavor to acid for the crown of delicious, all the dishes and snacks with meals are acid-based, such as sour bamboo shoots, sour pea flour, sour meat and wild sour fruit. Characteristic flavor food are: flowers, insects, all kinds of wild vegetables.
Architecture Dry-fence architecture is a characteristic of the Dai residence. The bamboo buildings of the Dai around Xishuangbanna and Ruili in Dehong have a special style.
The building is nearly square, the upper and lower two floors, the upper floor of the people, about 7 feet from the ground, the lower floor is not walled, used to raise livestock and stacking of goods, the top of the double-sloping, more covered with woven "grass row". The top of the building is double-sloped and covered with woven grass rows. Ascending the stairs, there are corridors and drying platforms for drying and cooling.
Language and writing The Dai have their own national language, which is called Dai, Thai, Lao and so on due to their distribution, and belongs to the Dong-Tai language family (Zhuang-Dong language family) of the Sino-Tibetan language family, the Tai language branch. The script used by the Dai people is Daiwen, a phonetic script whose characters are Dai characters .
The Dai script has a variety of dialectal scripts, of which four are used by the Dai in China, namely Dai Dance (Xishuangbanna Dai), Jinping Dai, Dai Na (Dehong Dai), and Dai Lian, while Thai and Laotian scripts are used outside of China. After the improvement in the 1950s, the two Dai scripts of Xishuangbanna and Dehong were used in China.
Funeral The Dai are buried in the earth, but there are obvious class differences, and the burial places of the nobles and the poor are strictly separated. After the death of monks and Buddhist monks, they are cremated first, and then the ashes are buried in the back of the temple in tiles.
Expanded information: