Ethnic revival

Book offers valuable insights into the musical culture of China's Thai Lue people

By: JOHN CLEWLEY
Published in the Bangkok Post, 17 April 2009

I visited Sipsongpanna in Southwestern China in 1986, a month after it had been opened to outsiders to visit. I still had to get permission from the authorities to go to the region, which I wangled through some contacts at Yunnan University, and I had to state the intention of my visit, which was to write a story on the Thai Lue of Sipsongpanna (Xishuangbanna in Chinese), many of whom are related to Northern Thais.

Song & Silence is a fascinating ethnographic study of the region.

Now, of course, you can fly to Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan, or even directly to Jinghong in Sipsongpanna; you can go overland through Laos into Southwest China, too. I had to get a visa to enter through Macao, take two flights across China and wait for days for a flight to Simao and then a long overnight bus ride to Jinghong.

It was worth the effort, though. The region is spectacularly beautiful and at that time there were very few tourists. I discovered a culture beginning to show signs of a revival after the excesses of the Cultural Revolution: temples being renovated after being used as granaries, novices once again learning sacred texts (some taught by visiting Thai monks) and a growing pride in local ways. My only disappointment was not to find much in the way of local music, such as Thai Lue chang-khap, the equivalent of Laotian mor lam or Thai lam tad.

Although I haven't made a return trip yet, I'm still curious about what has happened over the past 20 years and what, if any, music has come out of the region. American anthropologist Dr Sara L.M. Davis answers these questions and poses a lot more in her fascinating ethnographic study of the region, Song & Silence: Ethnic Revival on China's Southwest Borders (Silkworm Books, Bangkok, 2005). I found a copy at the recent Bangkok Book Fair.

The book begins with the author's search for temple murals near the China-Burma border. She discovers that most had been scraped off temple walls and replaced with Maoist slogans. She uses this as a preface to describe what had happened during the Cultural Revolution.

Davis conducted field research for a doctorate on chang-khap ("skilled chanters"), whom she described as trained "oral poets" who perform narrative poetry. In the process, she learned that there are two separate and distinct cultures - one, official, and shaped by the Chinese state's policy on minorities and the other, unofficial and often underground, part of "a growing ethnic revival movement emerging piecemeal below the radar of the state."

She notes that Thai Lue people were not only trying to revive the language and oral poetry, since 1997 a Thai Lue pop subculture has developed. Her interviewees suggest that when traditional singing like chang-khap was banned during the Cultural Revolution, people started to listen to music brought in cassettes across the border from Thailand and Burma's Shan state and this led to a small local pop music scene. In the '80s, Shan rocker Sai Mao was popular along the Mekong as were pleng phua cheewit rockers like Caravan and later Carabou. Davis is on trickier ground when she talks of the background to pop music. Like some Western academics she confuses pleng phua cheewit with luk thung, which she says comes from Northeastern Thailand, which is a common misconception.

In 1989, the authorities allowed the Thai Lue to practice their religion openly and begin to sing their oral poetry again. Davis goes into great depth about performance by local legends like E Guang and the Thai Lue chang-chap poet laureate Khanan Zhuai.

She describes how singers must learn sacred Buddhist texts before they can sing and when they do sing, be able to verbally joust with another singer, thinking on their feet as the song develops. I found this section of her book fascinating because the process is exactly the same as that described by Thailand's National Artist Mor Lam Ken Dalao when I spoke with him a few years ago. But there's little mention of the links between Laotian music (either from Laos or Thailand) and the Thai Lue and yet, Northern Laotian music is called khap lam - are khap and chap the same word? I'd be very surprised if mor lam, and particularly mor lam sing, was not popular with some Thai Lue youths.

But these quibbles aside, this is an important and valuable book that offers insights into a part of the region that is discussed mainly as a tourist destination and not for its music. I do hope Dr Davis releases a CD of her recordings. I am a keen to hear how chang-chap sounds in comparison to other forms of oral poetry in the region. If any reader spots a CD of Thai Lue music, let me know.

This column can be contacted at: clewley.john@gmail.com