, near the Sino-Myanmar border Menghai County, Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, has an alpine mountain covering an area of more than 1,000 kilometers square kilometers, called Brown Mountain , famous for its abundant production of Pu'er tea , and is a habitat for generations of Brown ethnic group , Wa ethnic group , De'ang ethnic group , etc.
There are dozens of villages of all sizes here. Each village may have different ethnic groups, but has similar customs and cultures.
, but the only village called "Manbang Three Team" (the transliteration of ethnic minority languages is different, also known as "Manbang Three Team") is very special: in this village, a man can marry five wives, and a woman will become a mother at the age of twelve or thirteen. Moreover, there is a strange custom in the village: people must be buried with their faces facing down after death.
reveals strange villages everywhere
In 2012, 17 soldiers from the Xishuangbanna Public Security Border Detachment, each carrying about 30 kilograms of supplies, came to the Mannan Village Committee of Brolangshan Township.
Border Defense Captain Chen Junzu said: This batch of supplies was given to the third team of Manbon. I hope someone can lead them to find the village of Manbonbon Sanlian, and the soldiers will deliver the supplies to the villagers by themselves.
So, under the leadership of Yan Xianger, the branch secretary of Mannan Village, the border soldiers walked for more than three hours of mountain road and finally arrived at the village of Lahu tribe Manbon team 3.
But the border soldiers did not expect that the Lahu tribe of the third team of Manbon, but they revealed "weirdness" everywhere.
Before coming here, Yan Xianger, the branch secretary of Mannan Village, told the officers and soldiers that today is the annual New Year's Day of the Lahu people. At this time, people in the Sanlian Village of Manbon would gather on the top of the mountain and celebrate the festival by whipping gyro .
When the border soldiers climbed to the top of the mountain, they found a group of women wearing ethnic minority costumes sitting together, looking at the men who were beating the top in the middle with concentration.
But when the people in the village saw outsiders coming, they immediately stopped vigilantly. The women ran behind the men, while the men leaned tightly together.
They looked in the crowd with hostility, and when they saw Yan Xiang'er's figure, they felt relieved. But he still keeps a safe distance from these strangers.
Yan Xiang'er was afraid of misunderstandings, so she quickly explained to the officers and soldiers: You come here today, I actually said hello in advance, otherwise, according to the past practice, the people in the village would have already hidden from afar.
The officers and soldiers naturally understood that they immediately put the basket on their backs on the ground, took out various daily necessities such as biscuits, clothes, and distributed them to the people in the village.
At this time, the wariness of the members of the third team of Manbon were eliminated, and they enthusiastically invited people to their homes.
Mantang's third village are all Lahu people. The place where they live is said to be a village, but they don't look like a village at all. The mixed straw is laid on the roof, and a simple thatched hut is built, which is the shelter for a family of several people.
After entering, the soldiers realized that the people here didn't even have quilts when they were sleeping.
However, even such a shabby thatched hut has only 17 teams in Manbon's third team, and there are only 67 people in total.
The village is not equipped with water or electricity, and the residents live a primitive farming and breeding life. The only connection between them and the outside world was that when they found that their family was short of salt, they ran to the Mannan Village village committee more than ten miles away to collect it. What the officers and soldiers even more unimaginable is that in such a harsh living environment, there was a man who married five wives in the third team of Manbon!
The five-family wife of the elder in the village and his daughter who got married at the age of 13
Manbon Team 3 is led by an oldest elder, and this elder can have five wives. In addition, the woman in the village must get married when she is thirteen years old.
Although the Manbon Third Team has a small population, they have been insisting on not intermarrying with the outside world for a long time. When the body develops almost the same, boys and girls will live together under the help of their parents.
and no one in the village has an ID card, and the young couple living together certainly don’t have marriage certificate .
Only when the village cadres of Mannan Village come to see each other once a dozen miles away and hear the cry of children, they know that there is a new population in the village.
But the child is born, it does not mean that he can be raised.
Manbon Third Team Village is too small, and basically they are close relatives and newborns will be accompanied by many diseases.
The medical conditions here are very limited. The only medicine that villagers can afford is the so-called folk remedy passed down from the local ancestors, which makes the child's premature death rate remain high.
Moreover, because the people of Manbon Team 3 feel that the earth is dark, in order to allow the souls of the dead to be reborn smoothly, after the natural death, the people here will simply dig a hole, bury some grass, and bury the dead person's face downwards.
This time, the arrival of the border guard warrior made Yan Xianger, who was the village party secretary of , see hope. However, , however, the choice of Manbon's third team surprised everyone again.
What you give is very good, but I don’t like
As early as 1996, Menghai County The government began to implement poverty alleviation work. Among them, the three teams behind Manbon have become the top priority in poverty alleviation.
At that time, people from the county government came one after another, hoping that the third team of Manbon could follow their suggestions and move to a place with convenient transportation at the foot of the mountain.
For this reason, the government promises to provide housing for free. But helpless, all the members of the village disagreed.
In 2002, the Menghai County Government allocated financial funds to build 16 wooden buildings that suited their living habits for the third team of Manbon, and donated clothes and bedding. In addition, the government has specially equipped each family with a plowing cow.
However, the final result was that within a few months, only two of the 16 cows were sold by the villagers.
And they still felt that it was not enough to sell the cows. The villagers demolished the wooden building specially built by the county government for them, sold all the things they could sell inside. After getting money, they returned to their valleys one after another and continued to live a hard life.
And before 2012, there were actually PLA officers and soldiers here long ago. But according to Yan Xiang'er's description, the soldiers came happily with daily necessities that time, and planned to help the people in the village solve the minimum living allowance problem, but in the end they returned disappointed.
Because people in the village are afraid of seeing strangers. That time, before the border guards stepped into the village, they ran around.
No ID card or household registration book, so the village cannot apply for a minimum living allowance for them. Later, there was no choice. Yan Xiang'er asked the town police station to move the camera to the village committee, and then went to trick the people in the village to say that their son was getting married and they all came to have a wedding banquet. Then she took a photo of everyone, which was a solution to the matter.
Although their minimum living security problem was solved and the government also built a new house for the third team of Manbon, they were still unwilling to go down the mountain to live.
The main reason is that every household has a piece of land in the deep mountains and old forests, and they are reluctant to leave it behind. If you go down the mountain, it will be too tiring for the village residents to travel back and forth to the arable land every day. In comparison, it is more convenient to live in an old place.
What would the elder who has a wife in "five rooms" think?
The villagers were unwilling to go down the mountain, so the Menghai County Government decided to build a road, building a mountain road that was not flat but still regular to the village village, and then spent money to provide water and electricity to the village people. Later, the government allocated 50 acres of land for each household under the mountain, which was enough for them to cultivate.
In a few years, the lives of the three villages in Manbon have also changed dramatically compared with the past. Children can also go to school, and they don’t need to accept the fate of getting married and having children when they grow up to twelve or thirteen years old.
In 2019, the third team of Manbon became a large grain producer from a super poor household who could not help crying when they saw him, achieving a 733 kilograms of rice per mu, and successfully removed the hat of " Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, the most impoverished area" above his head.
When the elder who has a wife with a "five-house" is now, and when he thinks about the stubbornness he was unwilling to "get out" at that time, what would he feel?
