The Miao Sisters Festival is held every year in Guizhou's Taijiang County, where 97 percent of the 168, 000 people there are from the ethnic (民族) Miao group. It is an ancient tradition, which brings men and women together through food, gifts and music.
In the days before the festival, young women gather leaves and wild flowers, which they use to dye (给……染色) sticky rice with bright colors. This brightly colored rice, known as Sister Rice, gives the festival its name. During the festival, the young women dress in beautiful traditional clothes with large amounts of silver jewelry.
The festival includes parades, horse races and musical performances. But the real focus is the interaction between the young women and the young men who visit from surrounding villages and sing songs. In one traditional type of song, a man and woman take turns singing to each other, and the first one to make a mistake loses the game. The loser must give the winner a gift, but the winner is expected to give a gift in return too.
After meeting the men, the women send them home with a bamboo basket containing dyed rice and hidden objects with special meanings. For example, a pair of chopsticks means she wants to marry the man, while garlic shows that she is not interested.
One of several stories is about the festival's beginning of a girl and a boy who fell in love. The girl's parents wanted her to marry her uncle's son as was traditional at the time. She refused, and the boy likewise refused to marry anyone else. For a time, they could only meet in a field and pass hidden messages to each other through rice in a bamboo basket. Finally, the pair overcame their parents' opposition and were allowed to marry.
The Sisters Rice Festival is perhaps the oldest festival in Asia that encourages love.
