8 / Manshuiwan: Nuosu Ethnicity in a Culturally Han Area Nobody walking into Manshuiwan would suspect that he was in a Nuosu village unless he listened carefully. The village is a few kilometers northeast of the Xichang satellite-launching station, and stands astride both the main north-south highway of the Anning Valley and the Chengdu-Kunming railroad, which stops at a station, also called Manshuiwan, about four kilometers downstream. In the middle of the night, when the express from Chengdu comes through, the whole village shakes; after a few nights, however, one gets used to it and barely wakes up, if at all. All but three of the village’s houses have been built in recent years, and they follow the southwestern Chinese rural variation on the classical Chinese four-sided courtyard, or siheyuan. Bright red couplets adorn the gate arches and doorways, and the front rooms of many houses are adorned with ancestral altars, prepared for the worship of heaven, earth, and country, and of the earth spirit. The little Nuosu-style altar in the corner of the front room is not at all obvious unless you look for it. The three oldest houses, built around the turn of the twentieth century, are even more classically Chinese, with wide concrete porches surrounding the central wells of the courtyards, which are paved with intricate pebble designs and open to the sky and to the full moon on clear nights (fig. 14). A few have elegant perennial and shrub gardens outside the walls, and numerous potted ornamental and medicinal plants in the courtyards. All this gives a sign of permanence that is utterly absent in the “slap it together and leave it when you’re tired of it” style of construction in most highland Nuosu villages. People in ordinary Chinese clothing, many of them quite prosperous-looking, walk on dirt paths or lounge after harvest on piles of straw at the edge of the concrete basketball court, at harvest season temporarily given over to rice drying in the sun. If one did not know about Manshuiwan ahead of time, it would be a shock, when one came near, to hear those people conversing in Nuosu ddoma. The initial appearance of prosperity in Manshuiwan is fairly accurate. The land is good, productive rice land, and all families received shares at the time of decollectivization in the early 1980s. Two hundred forty mu (16 ha.) of rice land for 302 people means almost a mu per person, and there is plenty of water for irrigation, so people can grow a spring wheat crop and a summer rice crop on the same land. There is slightly more dry land than wet-rice land, and people grow corn (mostly for pig-feed) on the dry land during the summer season. They also have vegetable gardens around their houses, replete with fruit trees and pumpkin vines; there are fresh vegetables all year long. Unlike highland Nuosu, people here keep their pigs penned, usually in the same room as the toilet, so that all the manure can be collected easily to put on the fields. Members of the Wang, or Jienuo lineage, have also been very successful in educational and bureaucratic mobility, so that in many families of this lineage only older people and small children are left at home, while the young adults are working in Xichang, Mianning, or other nearby cities. There is only one little store in the village; most people go to the town at Xihe, near the railway station, when they need to market. It is not far to walk or bicycle, but there are cars, trucks, and minibuses going up and down the highway at all hours, so that people walking are likely to be able to get a ride, especially in the rain. There are still some quite poor families, particularly in the Li (Aju) lineage and in one branch of the Wang who are descended from slaves, as well as among the ethnically Han Wu lineage and other Han families who live mostly above the railroad. But even these poorer people have electricity and running water, and some of them also black-and-white television sets and bicycles. It is fair to say that the poorest families in Manshuiwan, in terms of material standard of living, rank with the very wealthiest in the plains villages of Mishi, and with the upper-middle families in Baiwu. image FIG. 14. The open courtyard inside an old Manshuiwan house Manshuiwan is one...