Like myself, most of the Chinese people you know or have met will probably be from the majority Han ethnic group since more than 90% of the Chinese people in China are from this majority group. The other less than 10% belong to over 50 ethnic minority groups.

I’ve had the pleasure of visiting Yunnan Province, in Southwest China, where 22 of the ethnic minorities live together along with the Han group, making 23 groups in total. I met people from 3 of these ethnic groups prevalent in the area of Lijiang, Yunnan: the Zhuang (壮族), Naxi (纳西族）and Bai (白族)nationalities. The Zhuang group is the 2nd largest after the Han group, with 18 million people. There are a little over 300,000 Naxi.

Each group embodies different beliefs than the Hans, and it was fascinating to learn about some of the unique aspects of each of these ethnic minorities. For example, the Naxi group’s places the woman’s role higher than the man’s, they own the property, do the main work and are respected at home and in society. I could carry on but for now I will leave you with a fascinating detail about the Naxi.

The ancient culture of the Naxi people is called Dongba, and has its own religion, customs and language. The original written language of the Dongba was made up of individual pictographs around 1,000 years ago, much like the original design of the Chinese character. Today there are still 1,400 characters and Dongba is claimed to be the only living pictograph language still in existence in the world.

Here is the phrase in Dongba written for “美梦成真” loosely translated into “May all your beautiful dreams come true”. It definitely makes sense in terms of the moon, man and bed. For the rest of it I shall have to leave it up to my Dongba imagination.