Logo
Prev
Bookmark
Rotate
Print
Next
Contents
All Pages
Related Articles
Browse Issues
Help
Search
Home
'
National Geographic : 1951 Apr
Contents
The National Geographic Magazine National Geographic Photographer Maynard Owen Williams Costumes Rather than Faces Identify the Tonkin Hill Tribes To experts, these ageless fashions serve as altimeters, for each girl normally lives at a different mountain level. Bashful White Meo (left) wears coiled hat and sailor-style collar. The legginged Man-Tien's kitelike hat appears ready to take off in the first high wind. Her Man-Coc cousin wears turban, soft red pompons, and check trousers. All three share a fondness for silver neck rings. leys; so they set up their homes on the hill sides. The Meo, Lolo, and others who have come since settled on the higher slopes of the mountains. Indochina's people have thus become a study in vertical pyramiding as well as one of horizontal expansion. We learned about feminine style too, as we climbed into the hills. Hill-tribe men often adopt the dress of the plains people. But not so the women! So colorful and distinctive is female costume that one depends more on fashion than feature to recognize a tribe. The Man-Tien beauty with oiled hair and high, elaborate head dress, well-polished jewelry, and fashion able skirt-flare is not easily confused with her Man-Coc cousin, who prefers checker board-embroidered trousers, bright red pompons on her blouse, and a multicolored tur ban. Beside them the Meo looks like a schoolgirl in a sailor collar, short skirt, and wide hat. This latter is built up of layer after layer of braid until it stands out, pancake flat, around the head. Even the Meo are divided into several groups, the Black, White, Red, and Flow ery, according to the type of dress the women wear. The wide-eyed Meo girl Despujols painted wears her hair in a tur banlike roll of twisted horsetail (page 471). Tribal recognition may also hang on an eyebrow! Among the Man women eyebrows hardly show, but under a Nung headdress, which lies like a bril liant folded napkin on the head, are eyebrows as well trained as if they had been shaped in a beauty parlor rather than in a moun tain hut. "Man" means "Barbarian" in Chinese or "Savage" in Vietnamese. A more accurate name for the tribe is Kim-mien, meaning "Mountaineers." Among these Man tribes are the Man of the "Horns" (Man-Coc), the Man of the "Chinese Money" (Man-Tien); and those of the "Large Boards," the "White Pantaloons," of the "High Villages," the "Ferocious Man," and several others! The White Thai and Black Thai White Thai sounds more formal than Black Thai, but the opposite is the case. The Black 464
Links
Archive
1951 May
1951 Mar
Navigation
Previous Page
Next Page