An Analysis of the Current State of Cultural Heritage Transmission in Cangyuan Wa Autonomous County, Yunnan, from Modern and Postmodern Perspectives
It is hard to imagine that as late as the 1950s, the Wa people still practiced human sacrifice. Looking back at the ethnic group’s past, it seems like a blood-red history. Now, upon actually arriving at that remote village, I feel a sense of disorientation.
Smoke rises gently from the village, greenery tints the earth, and the sunlight warms the thatched roofs, making them feel cozy and fluffy. The scent of damp mud wafts up from the dirt paths between the houses, mingling with the “green” scent brought out by the sun, creating an ambiguous aroma that lingers in the air.
This is a small village—it is exactly what you would picture as the ideal rural home in your memories. I find it hard to imagine that this place was once drenched in blood; after all, the scent of blood simply does not belong here.
I. The Current Situation of the Wa People: Between Sacred Roots and Scenic Tourism
This is Cangyuan Wa Autonomous County in Yunnan Province, and the place described earlier is one of its “viral villages”—Wengding Village.
More than 3,500 years ago, the ancestors of Cangyuan painted scenes of hunting, rituals, and song and dance on cliff faces, creating the Cangyuan Cliff Paintings—the oldest rock art in southern China. The Wa people have no written language of their own; they trace their ethnic roots to the orally transmitted epic Sigangli, which gave rise to animistic beliefs such as the worship of wooden drums, sacred forests, the “Calling the Soul of the Valley,” the “Welcoming of New Water,” and the “Stealing of Cattle.”
Until the Reform and Opening-Up era, Wa villages like Wengding still preserved stilted thatched huts, wooden drum houses, ox-head totems, and complete ritual practices. In 2017, Wengding Village opened its sacred gates to welcome wave after wave of tourists.
But how can a mere few hundred words possibly summarize the history of a great ethnic group? Just as I cannot, even with all my literary skill, describe to you the profound sense of culture I felt when I was actually there.
Today’s Wengding is not a “typical” primitive village, but rather resembles a typical tourist destination:
- As the sun rose, the mist lingered reluctantly; the young couple was married in Meigeng, witnessed by countless tourists;
- As the sun slowly dispersed the thick fog, the shouts of the wooden drum pullers rose to the heavens once more;
- At the height of the midday heat, the entire village became bathed in clear light, and a group of men and women dressed in “foreign-style attire” set off along the gravel path leading to the wooden drum house…
By chance, we were also fortunate enough to participate in a “wooden drum pulling” ceremony. If you narrow your focus just a little, some things seem just as they were in the past: the drum looks similar, the shouts are the same—perhaps—and even the people pulling the drum bear a resemblance to those of the past.
Yet if you look around, things are fundamentally different from before: women participate in the drum-pulling—something that was once strictly forbidden; bustling crowds of visitors stare unabashedly at this most sacred ritual; performances are held multiple times a day. Wouldn’t the deities find this a disturbance?
When the same ritual becomes different, is this truly what we call “preservation”?
II. The Conflict: Tradition, Function, and Performative Shells
What we see is an unavoidable conflict between tradition and reality.
From the earliest days when Cangyuan was still in a primitive society, all the way to after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, when they entered a modern society, geographical constraints led to relatively lagging economic development. Consequently, commercial transformation was introduced, turning their original residential village into a living symbol of Wa culture.
Before visiting this village, the common perception was that this transformation would undoubtedly bring nothing but benefits: from a modern perspective, knowledge and technology changed their lives, replacing a precarious existence with convenience and stability.
Yet have these changes truly preserved the soul of the culture? We see multiple ritual performances scheduled merely to accommodate tourists arriving at different hours, or grandmothers repeatedly winding and unwinding yarn as they weave on display. The Lamu Drum ceremony, as a traditional religious rite, derives its essence from specific steps and taboos: women are not allowed to participate, and the drum must not enter the village on inauspicious days. These time-honored traditions now seem completely set aside. To outsiders, although tradition is showcased, the very soul of the ritual appears lost.
The Sociological Meaning of Ritual
Scholars such as Bronislaw Malinowski and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown argued that rituals are not useless “superstitions,” but rather serve to solve concrete real-world problems. But have these real-world problems truly been solved? We can identify three profound meanings behind the original ritual:
- Strengthening Collective Identity: In the old tradition, men would go up the mountain together to fell the sacred tree, while women waited at the foot of the mountain. The men collectively hauled the wooden drum back to the village. This shared labor and celebration gave people a tangible sense of belonging and cemented emotional bonds.
- Symbolic Mediation: As Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz noted, the objects (wooden drums, rattan ropes), actions (felling trees, hauling drums), and taboos (women not touching the trees, refraining from taking life) in rituals are condensed “symbolic signs.” Through the hauling of the wooden drum, the community provides a shared vessel for its deepest unspoken hopes.
- Reverence for Origin and Nature: Hauling the sacred tree from the forest back to the village reenacts the Wa people’s historic journey from the primeval wilderness to permanent settlement, continuously reaffirming their sacred reverence for the earth.
Today, however, all these customs in Wengding Village have been transformed into performances: wedding ceremonies repeated daily, and multiple staged reenactments of hauling the wooden drum.
Do the performers participating in these rituals harbor the same genuine awe during these daily displays as their ancestors did? Do these rituals still regulate daily ethical behavior? As long as our definition of a ritual is limited to inner sanctity, the answer is certainly no. A ritual stripped of its sacred context risks becoming merely a soulless shell—identical in outward form, yet fundamentally altered in essence.
III. The Reconciliation: Dissemination, Agency, and the Rights of the “Owners”
From an outsider’s perspective, our purpose in visiting may be to observe the state of cultural inheritance. As visitors who stay for only three or four days, it is tempting and easy to stand on high moral ground, condemning the community for failing to preserve tradition in a pristine state.
We could point out that:
- The performative nature of the rituals constitutes a secularization of sacred heritage;
- The use of Mandarin and boarding arrangements in schools accelerates the loss of the indigenous language;
- Commercialization inevitably introduces physical and symbolic damage to ancient sites.
If all we yearn for is that simple, tranquil little mountain village of the past—where mysterious rituals unfolded during festivals—it is undeniable that such a scene has vanished. That loss is genuinely regrettable.
Survival before Aesthetics
Yet without these changes, what would the alternative reality look like? Deserted villages, elderly people and children facing poverty and hunger, inadequate medical care, and a rich culture trapped in mountain isolation.
As the German-Austrian School of History of Culture (Kulturkreislehre) noted, culture acquires enduring historical meaning when its practices and forms are disseminated and known to broader humanity. If ritual culture remains strictly confined to inaccessible valleys, it risks dying out alongside demographic decline. To ensure that a culture endures, we must preserve its core characteristics while communicating it in forms that broader society can understand and engage with. Appropriate adaptations are an indispensable part of this transmission. Utilizing museums, cultural tourism, and training young inheritors ensures that civilization survives for future generations—a contribution far more constructive than passive lamentation.
The Question of Cultural Ownership
From a modernist perspective, we often presume that cultural preservation must conform to an external, purist template: the immaculate preservation of all antique forms. As outsiders who have never lived local realities, we too easily speak on behalf of indigenous peoples.
We forget a fundamental truth: culture is created by human beings.
The culture of the Wa people was created by the Wa people themselves, and it must ultimately be interpreted and directed by the local community. Culture cannot be reduced to frozen museum specimens or language fragments; it is something that breathes through living persons. The local Wa people grew up listening to the epics of Sigangli; they pass the sacred banyan trees daily; they observe the village elders conducting ceremonies.
When interviewed, local Wa residents consistently noted that these tourism-oriented practices are acceptable to them and have brought tangible improvements to their livelihood, education, and healthcare.
What right do external observers have to oppose the pragmatic choices of the culture’s actual owners?
The flow of history is irresistible. Changes in national infrastructure and socioeconomic integration have brought alternative ways of living to the mountains. It is entirely human and understandable for the Wa people to share their heritage with the outside world and use tourism to support their households and educate their children. The ongoing adaptation of culture is not the death of civilization, but its very mechanism of resilience—the clearest testament to human adaptation.
This does not mean advocating arbitrary destruction of tradition. Within our own values, we can actively support initiatives that safeguard core heritage—such as funding youth apprenticeships in oral epics or supporting bilingual education. But external support must respect local autonomy. Condemnation without responsibility is meaningless. True appreciation of cultural preservation requires first understanding the full complexity and material realities of Wa life.
IV. Conclusion: Beyond Grand Narratives to Postmodern Respect
In the contemporary world, critical movements grounded in contemporary perspectives—from feminist theory to indigenous rights movements—are dismantling unexamined assumptions about authority and voice.
Just as men cannot presume to speak on behalf of women’s lived experiences, dominant cultural observers cannot presume to speak for ethnic minorities.
Since the nineteenth century, the rise of scientific rationalism and essentialist thinking brought undeniable progress, but under its grand civilizational narratives, local hardships and human trade-offs were often obscured. While modernism emphasizes uniform development, postmodern perspectives—with their emphasis on anti-essentialism, anti-elitism, and skepticism toward unilateral representation—remind us to respect difference and local agency.
True cultural preservation does not require freezing living communities into living dioramas for the contemplative pleasure of outsiders. It demands recognizing the multidimensional realities of human lives, respecting indigenous communities’ fundamental rights to survival and self-determination, and standing alongside them as they navigate the difficult, living bridge between their ancestors’ sacred drums and their children’s future.