Seventeen peoples live on the Dong Van karst plateau; across the province the number is higher still. For someone passing through, that easily becomes a line in a guidebook. But ride these passes for a week and the differences become very concrete: the roofs change shape, the greeting changes sound, the colour of the women’s clothes changes completely just over one pass.
This is not meant as a checklist. It is meant to help you recognise whose community you are in, and understand why they live the way they do.
Reading a village by its roofs
The quickest way to tell communities apart is not dress — on an ordinary day many people wear ordinary clothes — but architecture.
- Rammed-earth houses, with thick beaten-earth walls, yin-yang roof tiles and a dry-stone wall around the yard: the H’Mong, the Lo Lo and the other communities of the high stone country. Thick earth walls hold the heat in winter and keep the house cool in summer, in a place where firewood has to be carried a long way.
- Stilt houses of timber, raised high, with tools and livestock underneath: the Tay, Nung, Giay and some Dao groups, mostly in the lower valleys and the hills in the south of the province.
The two forms are not a matter of taste. They are two answers to two different problems: living on waterless rock, and living in a damp valley full of mosquitoes.
The H’Mong
The most numerous people on the plateau, divided into groups — White H’Mong, Flower H’Mong, Black H’Mong — told apart by the women’s dress.
What sets the H’Mong here apart is growing maize in the rock. On this jagged limestone there is almost no flat soil, so the H’Mong carry earth up and pour it into individual pockets in the stone, then stack rocks around the lip so the rain cannot wash it away. A single field can be thousands of such pockets. Seen from a pass above, a whole hillside is a stone chessboard laid out by generations.
Hemp is the axis of a H’Mong woman’s working life: growing it, stripping the fibre, spinning, weaving, dyeing with indigo, drawing in beeswax and dyeing again to bring out the pattern. One skirt can take a year. In many villages people will still tell you a H’Mong girl should know how to work hemp before she marries.
The H’Mong khen is more than an instrument. It is the voice used at funerals, the declaration made at a market day, and a dance in which the player turns, leaps and tumbles while still playing — a skill learned from childhood.
The Gau Tao festival opens in early spring: a bamboo pole is raised on a patch of level ground, the family hosting it prays for children and for health, and it becomes a gathering for the whole area.
The Dao
Ha Giang has several Dao groups — Red Dao, Long-Coat Dao, Coin Dao — each with its own way of tying the headcloth and its own embroidery. Red Dao women are the easiest to recognise: a large red headcloth, a coat densely embroidered in coloured thread, and silver covering the chest.
The most important Dao rite is the cap sac, the ordination. It marks a man’s coming of age in the spiritual sense: he receives a ritual name, may act as a shaman, and is acknowledged by the ancestors. In Dao thinking, a man who has not been through it is not yet fully an adult, however old he is. The ceremony runs for several days, costs a great deal, and the whole lineage contributes.
The Dao also hold a body of knowledge about medicinal plants that is still in daily use. The herbal bath Red Dao women take after childbirth is something many foreign visitors seek out, and at many homestays you will be offered a wooden tub filled with water boiled from dozens of forest plants.
The Tay and the Nung
Two peoples close in language and in way of life, living mainly in the valleys and lower hills in the south of the province, where there is wet rice.
The Tay live in stilt houses facing the paddy, and keep Then singing with the tinh lute — a ritual repertoire performed by a Then practitioner, used for blessings, for warding off misfortune, for a new house. The Nung are known for blacksmithing: in many places the knives, ploughshares and hoes of the whole district still come out of a Nung forge.
In early spring both peoples hold the Long Tong festival, the going-down-to-the-fields. The first furrow of the year is ploughed, cloth balls are thrown, songs are exchanged, and people pray for a good season. It is where you see most clearly the difference between the wet-rice culture of the valleys and the maize-on-rock culture of the plateau.
The Giay and the Bo Y
The Giay live in Quan Ba and Yen Minh, usually in stilt or half-stilt houses, and are known for their cooking and their busy market days.
The Bo Y are one of the smallest peoples in Vietnam; in Ha Giang they are concentrated in Quan Ba district. Their ancestors migrated from the Guizhou region a few centuries ago, and they are also known by other names, among them Chung Cha and Trong Gia. Bo Y women’s dress is among the most elaborate in the region: a short cross-fastened jacket, a layered headcloth and a great deal of silver ornament.
Because the community is so small, much of Bo Y culture is disappearing fast. If you are invited into a Bo Y house, that is not a stop on an itinerary — it is a rare thing.
The Hoa
The Hoa of Ha Giang live largely in Dong Van, Meo Vac and the border towns, associated with trade and craft. Their clearest mark is architectural: the old quarter of Dong Van, with its two-storey earth-walled houses, yin-yang tiles, timber columns and doorway carving in a southern Chinese manner, built in the early twentieth century when this was the trading point of the whole border country.
Sitting in the square in front of the Dong Van old quarter in the evening, you are sitting in a different layer of history from the rest of the plateau: the history of people who came here to trade, not to grow maize in stone.
Lo Lo, Pu Peo, Co Lao — the smallest communities
This is what makes Ha Giang exceptional on the ethnographic map of Vietnam. Each of these peoples numbers only a few thousand, and they are found almost nowhere else.
The Lo Lo are concentrated at Lung Cu and in Meo Vac, in villages of rammed-earth houses under yin-yang tiles that are among the most beautiful on the plateau. Lo Lo women’s dress is assembled by hand from thousands of small pieces of coloured cloth. Most striking of all: the Lo Lo still keep bronze drums and use them at funerals — a thread running straight back to the Dong Son culture, and rarely still alive anywhere else.
The Pu Peo and the Co Lao are scattered across Dong Van, Yen Minh and Hoang Su Phi. Both keep the rite of making offerings to the forest spirit: each village has a patch of forbidden forest that no one may cut, and the annual ceremony is when the village restates that covenant. It is a form of forest protection older than any regulation.
The Pa Then and the fire dance
The Pa Then live in Quang Binh district, in the south of the province. Their fire-dancing festival is held on the 16th day of the tenth lunar month, once the harvest is in, and was added to the national list of intangible cultural heritage in December 2012.
The shaman lights incense, strikes his instrument and shakes a ring to call the spirits; his students fall into trance and dance barefoot into the heart of the embers without being burned. The festival is bound up with passing the craft to the next generation of shamans, so it is not a performance — and it does not take place on a tourist’s schedule.
Market day — where everyone meets
If you could choose only one morning to understand this country, choose a market. Highland markets fall on a fixed day of the week, a different day in each place, and people set out on foot around midnight to be there.
A market is not only for buying and selling. It is where young people meet, where men sit all morning around a cauldron of thang co, where a woman shows the skirt that took her a year. Four or five peoples press into one square, and you can tell them apart just by looking.
The Khau Vai love market in Meo Vac, held on the 27th day of the third lunar month, is a rare custom of its own: people who once loved each other but could not marry meet again one day a year, and their spouses accept it.
How to behave in a village
This is the part we go through with every group before setting off, because it decides whether you are welcomed or merely tolerated.
- Ask before photographing people, especially children and the elderly. A nod takes two seconds and completely changes what the photograph is.
- Do not give children money or sweets. It has already created begging at a few roadside spots and it spoils the very thing you came to find. If you want to help, give through the school or through village projects.
- The ancestral altar and the main house post are not things to touch. In H’Mong and Dao houses certain places carry ritual meaning; watch your host and follow.
- If a village is holding a forest ceremony or is closed for a rite, there will be a sign at the entrance — leafy branches, a cord strung across. It means outsiders do not enter. Our guides can read these signs.
- Maize spirit is an invitation, not a contest. Accepting one cup is courtesy; declining politely is also fine, particularly if you still have to ride.
- Buy handicrafts from the person who made them, and do not bargain to an absurd price. A panel of beeswax-drawn hemp cloth represents months of work.
One last thing
What is written above describes general patterns, and every general pattern has exceptions. Culture here does not stand still: young people leave for work, phones have reached the highest village, and many rites are being shortened. We do not bring travellers to an open-air museum. We bring them to meet people who are living, right now, in their own way.
Ha Giang Experts’ guides are from the local ethnic minority communities, born and raised in these very valleys. That means you hear the story from the inside — and it means that when you sit down to eat in a stilt house or a rammed-earth house, you are not a stranger who simply turned up.