Ban Sailek - Laos

The Yao are an old and widely distributed ethnic group with dozens of subgroups. It is believed that the ancestors of the Yao lived in China 4000 years ago. The main subgroup and the one living in Muang Sing are the Mien. The migration of the Yao from their place of origin, China, has been caused by infertile land, but also by the expansion of the opium trade and the reprisals of the Chinese government against hill tribe peoples. After the people’s revolution and the foundation of the Lao PDR in 1975 many Mien left the country for Thailand.

The Mien do not produce their own silk or cotton, but they are masters in the art of dyeing, embroidering and sewing their distinctive costumes. The men are skilled black- and silversmiths. They cultivate dry as well as wet rice, supplementing their diet with different kinds of secondary crops. The Yao in general are famous for cultivating opium poppies, but have been forced to give it up by the Lao government’s opium eradication program.         

Mien villages are usually very small, from 15 to 60 houses. Similar to the Hmong they build their houses on the ground and these houses normally consist of three to four rooms.
Yao society is strongly patriarchal in its organization. The husband is the absolute commander of the family. Traditionally they were polygamous (men tended to have six to seven women) and favoured large households. Nowadays the trend goes towards monogamy. To add labour power to their household they sometimes adopt children from other ethnic groups, paying their parents, so that in some Yao communities adopted children make up a fifth of the total population.  

The mainstream religion of the Mien is still uncertain and a matter of controversy. Some anthropologists consider it a complex system of animism, ancestor worship and an ancient form of Taoism. Mien Taoism includes guardian spirits for the family, which protect them against all kinds of evil spirits, disease, misfortune, etc. Women participate in religious activities to full extent.

Funeral service is a complex and expensive event in Mien communities. Funerals normally last for three days.
Silver is placed in the mouth of the deceased. After the body is washed and the hair is cut, the dead person is placed on a bier in front of the ancestral altar. Relatives and friends, wearing white stripes of cloth around their heads, meet for prayers. The body is then buried in a coffin unless the person died in an accident or due to any other unnatural cause, then the body is burnt.