By Yang Fuquan

To Die for Love

By Yang Fuquan

From the 18th century to the 1950s, a tragic tradition of“dying for love” was prevalent among the Naxi people, an ethnic minority mainly living in Yunnan Province, Southwest China, especially in Lijiang City, one of the best-known Chinese tourist destinations.

The reasons why so many Naxi people were willing to lay down their lives for their true love were complicated. The story might begin from the Qing Empire’s policy of“Sinification of the ethnic bureaucrats” in the year 1723, which sought to enforce on the Naxi people the Han’s Confucian ethical codes that advocated for the strong guidance of the ruler, father and husband, as well as women’s yielding to the father, husband and son. Countless numbers of Naxi people disregarded these moral codes and continued to follow theirtraditional beliefs and customs, even going so far as to willingly end their own lives in the name of true love. They needed free love instead of arranged marriages. As a result, throngs of young lovers died for love.

In the early spring of 1989, I went to Tacheng Township, Yulong County for the first time for my field research. There I met Azimi, a 70-year-old local songstress who recounted to me tales from her past growing up in her local village.

The father of Azimi was a “Dongba” or high priest of the Naxi religion, as well as a local government official of considerable political and religious influence. During the Republican Era he held the position of mayor of the Judian Township in Lijiang County. As the pretty “princess” and siren songstress of a local holy man, whose name was known far and wide in their local sphere, Azimi never lacked for suitors, but she had no right to choose her husband of her own volition.

Never able to come to terms with the fact that her destiny was completely out of her hands, she struggled to avoid marrying a man who had been designated by her parents from her infancy. Unwilling to go quietly, she stole away and struck out on her own. She had seriously considered dying for a love that was all but a chimera, yet due to the fact that her father was a local gentry, she finally went back home to save the dignity of her family.

“But the others really went through with it,” said Azimi, “I am sure of more than one hundred cases. Six couples hanged themselves together right on the hill behind my village.”

Hewami, another lady in her 60s, told me something more. It was an ironclad rule that the death together should be sure and simultaneous, otherwise those looking for justice would persecute the survivor. She told me about a girl making an agreement with her lover to die together. They both lived at the foot of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. She killed herself with poisonous herb, but when her lover lost his nerve and failed to do the same, the girl’s family came to avenge their deceived daughter, and the man fled to somewhere else.

According to Hewami, the rule of dying together is derived from traditional Naxi beliefs. Naxi people believe that all things in the world are matched, anything that is feminine should have its masculine counterpart, and vice versa. So the lovers should company each other even in the afterlife.

However, in the known history of Naxi people, more women died for love than men did. And the women were generally more decisive in doing so.

I heard a story from Yaoshuama, another Naxi woman, of four ladies committing suicide together. She said they were all beautiful ladies, two unmarried, and two married, all fighting in vain against the imposed system of arranged marriage. In despair they planned to kill themselves. Together they went to a marketplace in the town center and bought some sweets to share with other girls in the village, then taking leave to a nearby white stony hill, where each one garbed in her best dress, hanged herself, with her long flowing mane of jet black hair disheveled by wind. By that time, Yaoshuama said, there was a widespread opinion that since married life was hard for the women, it would be better for the women to live by themselves in heaven.

In Naxi culture, a sheepskin cape symbolizes the blue sky, while a skirt implies the embracement of the earth. Traditionally when a Naxi woman chooses to die for love, she will wear her best dress but put her most cherished sheepskin cape aside.

According to Yaoshuama, her grandmother once saw a couple of lovers who had poisoned themselves together with mercury on that white stony hill. The woman wore her wedding dress and jewelry; her hair ornamented with wild flowers, while her sheepskin cape was neatly put on a bamboo basket. Before the lovers died, they had put up a beautiful “youji” (a shed for those die for love), with white linen, green pine branches, and some decorative flowers. Then they lay down in a bed made of twigs, sheeted with fresh pine needles, to accept their final peace.

Azimi told me that a sheepskin cape was an emblem of female liberty, because it represented the sky where the sun, the moon and the stars roamed freely. Maybe when a Naxi girl took off her sheepskin cape before her suicide, I think, she was reposing her hope of the natural freedom and happiness in it.

Generally the Naxi people would look for a tranquil and picturesque place to die for love. There must be trees and flowers. Most of them ended their lives in a steep peak where lush and luxuriant plants, not men, were their company. The Spruce Meadow, at present a crowded scenic spot on Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, was by then one of the most often chosen sites of dying for love.

There, on a beautiful meadow surrounded by the mountain forests, a vestal virgin listened to the whistling wind and the sonorous chorus of colorful birds. She saw the freely running deer, goats and rabbits. Gazing upon the boundless trees and rambling clouds, she would start to feel “guoluo”without even knowing it. Guoluo is a Naxi word roughly meaning melancholy and grief. For those who loved hopelessly or lived ruined lives, the feeling of guoluo could easily overtake, and lead them to die for love.

(FromIn Seek of the Soul of Lijiang, The Ethnic Publishing House. Translation: Wang Xiaoke)