In Lugu Lake, Marriage Is a Ticklish Affair

Alacuo, an 18-year-old beauty in this tradition-bound village, wants to do something radical. She wants to get married and settle down.

“My mother thinks I should be like her and have several lovers,” Alacuo says. “But I want someone who will stay with me all the time.”

Alacuo lives in China’s legendary “women’s kingdom,” a matriarchal society of about 47,000 people that thrives on the shores of Lugu Lake in a remote corner of southern China.

The women of the Mosuo ethnic group, which is descended from Tibetan nomads, make the decisions and hold the purse strings. Property and names pass from mother to daughter. The women rarely take husbands.

Instead, they enjoy what is known as a “walking marriage,” in which a woman invites a lover to come visit her for the evening with a discreet tickle of his palm. The man must arrive after dark and leave by sunrise, and any resulting child stays with the mother.

It is a tradition that originated thousands of years ago, when matriarchs commonly ruled agrarian villages across China, sociologists say. The walking marriage may be the legacy of a time when fathers often were lost to wars, were nomads, or were Buddhist monks who took vows of celibacy and so would not acknowledge their offspring. In the men’s absence, the women harvested the crops, fed the families and made the rules.

Today, extended families still gather at night around the fire under soot-blackened eaves, drinking green tea or white liquor while the eldest woman assigns tasks for the next day. The men do occasional heavy jobs such as plowing the fields, herding horses and hauling fishnets. In between bouts of billiards or baby-sitting, they also may help out in a store or guest house owned by their mothers or sisters. But the women say they do everything else. Everything.

“The men here do nothing,” says Aiqingma, a 24-year-old with quiet charm and quick hands. She glares at a group of men smoking and chatting while she grills fish on a stone stove near the lake shore. “Really. We don’t like them.”

Area’s Isolation Lets System Endure

The survival of the matriarchal tradition is all the more remarkable in China, a country where male offspring are strongly preferred and females at times are aborted as fetuses or abandoned as infants. But the Lugu Lake area’s isolation allowed the society’s matrilineal system to flourish and endure, even under communism.

This area of northern Yunnan province, with its crystalline lake, Buddhist monasteries and red-earth mountains, was perhaps the model for the mythical Shangri-La in James Hilton’s novel “Lost Horizon.” Until a few decades ago, it took a mule train seven days to reach the village of Lugu Lake from the nearest trading center, Lijiang. Even today, it can only be reached after a nine-hour jeep ride over harrowingly narrow mountain passes that are frequently blocked by landslides or snow.

Russian explorer Peter Goullart lived in Lijiang, formerly called Likiang, until the Communists took over China in 1949. He describes in his 1950s book “Forgotten Kingdom” the sensation that the Mosuo caused during their visits to town.

“Whenever these men and women passed through the market or Main Street on their shopping expeditions, there was indignant whispering, giggling and squeals of outraged modesty on the part of the Likiang women and girls, and salacious remarks from men. . . .

“[Lugu Lake] was a land of free love. . . . Whenever a Tibetan caravan or other strangers were passing [their area], these ladies went into a huddle and secretly decided where each man should stay. . . . She and her daughters prepared a feast and danced for the guest. Afterward the older lady bade him to make a choice between ripe experience and foolish youth.”

With its unspoiled beauty, remote location and rare customs, it’s not surprising that Lugu Lake has become legendary, a place of fascination and often prurient curiosity in China.

“People are obsessed with our walking marriage,” says Yang Erchenamu, 32, who won a singing contest in 1983 and subsequently was one of the first women to make a life for herself outside the village. “Not only because it’s different, but also because it works.

“Outside Lugu Lake, marriage is like a business transaction,” she says. “The women worry, ‘Does he have a good job? Can he take care of me?’ In our village, the girls are strong and take care of themselves. Everything we do is for love.”

Namu, as Erchenamu is called, has a basis for comparison. In Beijing, she fell in love with an American. They were married in San Francisco and lived there but divorced after two years.

“I was raised very strong-willed,” she says. “I had to learn not to tell him what to do all the time.”

Following a stint as a fashion designer, she is back in Beijing after 10 years in the United States and is preparing to make her first recording for BMG Entertainment. She vows not to wed again but says with a laugh that she has a walking marriage with a Dutch diplomat.

But walking marriage or not, her life is still a world away from the life of her family in Lugu Lake. Namu has two older sisters, and the three women have different fathers. That makes for complicated bloodlines in the village but creates general goodwill.

“When we were kids, we were taught to treat everyone well,” Namu says. “You never know who might be your brother or sister.”

When Namu came of age, her mother told her which young men not to walk with in order to avoid a relationship with a blood relative. But even in her lifetime, things have changed.

Cultural Revolution Halted Traditions

The year Namu was born, 1966, also marked the beginning of Mao Tse-tung’s decade-long Cultural Revolution, a time when the Communist Party tried to eliminate old customs and create a new China. Local government leaders tried to eradicate the “decadent” traditions of the Mosuo, forcing them to marry and abandon their language and religion.

As soon as the Cultural Revolution ended, the Mosuo reclaimed their traditional ways with a rash of divorces. But in an effort to simplify bloodlines, they made one change: Now, once a couple have a child, they hold a ceremony announcing their relationship and usually stop seeing other people. But almost without exception, even after fathering children, the men continue to live in their mothers’ households and help raise their sisters’ children.

But as the Lugu Lake area becomes more accessible and tourists bring in their fashions and customs, strong currents are moving through the Mosuo villages, threatening to upset the old ways.

Chinese karaoke videos, viewed thanks to the arrival of electricity two years ago, feature coddled, delicate heroines. Tourists tell the Mosuo girls they work too hard. The boys should labor all day, they scold, while the girls play cards--or go to school.

Even Namu’s tales of Beijing, the United States and her brief marriage feed young Mosuo girls’ romantic ideas about the outside world.

“I tell them not to be in such a hurry to leave their culture behind,” Namu says. “It’s only after you lose it that you realize what you’ve lost.”

If there were to be a men’s lib movement here, it might be led by Alazhaxi. A dashing figure in a goat-hair cape and aviator sunglasses, Alazhaxi used to be an avid practitioner of Lugu Lake’s most renowned custom. With his sharp cheekbones, easy smile and intense brown eyes full of possibility, he became a favorite of the village. In a night of drunken boasting, he told an outsider that he had “walked” with 26 of the village women, something of a record.

“Usually it is a secret buried deep in the bone. We don’t even tell our brothers and sisters,” he whispers. “The girl’s family can hear the footsteps in the dark, but they never see the boy’s face until there is a baby.”

But Alazhaxi broke tradition--and dozens of hearts, he claims--when he decided to marry and live with the woman who bore his child. “I am one man in a thousand,” he declares with a broad smile. “I dare to do new things.”

Others hint that he had to marry so that his wife could keep an eye on him. The real reason, he says, is that he left his mother’s house when she died and opened a small guest house with his wife and her mother. He concedes that it would be hard to pay visits to other lovers while they all live under the same roof, but he says he gave up his midnight trysts six years ago anyway when his son was born.

Preserving the Village’s Way of Life

Today, Alazhaxi is concentrating on preserving the village traditions. For the tourists who brave the long journey over the mountains in search of pristine wilderness or in hopes of fulfilling misguided fantasies (despite what Goullart wrote about their hospitality, the Mosuo rarely tickle an outsider’s palm nowadays), Alazhaxi ensures there is something to see.

He organizes a nightly lakeside dance around a bonfire to teach visitors the traditional songs and steps. The young women wear black headdresses festooned with pearls; the older ones wear simple turbans and stamp the dirt with animal-hide boots.

The villagers are almost as curious about the visitors as the tourists are about them. The party ends in a song exchange: Mosuo folk melodies ring in the night, along with Cultural Revolution work songs and the latest karaoke hits.

Along with their pop songs and fashions that tempt local girls away from their traditional pleated skirt and velvet blouse costumes, the tourists bring money. There follows the now-common conundrum: Will the traditions survive because of the tourists or despite them?

In Lugu Lake, there are unexpected ripples. Suddenly, the men in the village can have an independent income from taking tourists fishing or running small stores. The more ambitious, like Alazhaxi, have opened guest houses. But there’s no gender revolution just yet.

“This is a woman’s kingdom,” Alazhaxi says. “Women have the power. When I row the boat, I hand the money over to my wife’s mother. She gives me enough to buy cigarettes and a drink, and I do what she says.”

But the changes brought from outside over the years are catching up to the village. Before primary education became mandatory in the 1970s, only boys went to school; girls were needed to run the farms and the households. As a result, educated men now hold most of the local government posts and work with provincial officials--usually other men who historically have had trouble dealing with the Mosuo matriarchs.

However, even the officials say the women hold the real power.

Tsizuoerchang, a headman from one village, says he makes the decisions outside the village but not inside. “If I want to do something,” he says, “I must get permission from my mother.”