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Special issue: Storying multi-species relationships, commoning and the state in the Himalayas

Water as a relational being in Xishuangbanna: presence, scarcity and management

L'eau comme être relationnel dans le Xishuangbanna : présence, rareté et gestion
Zhen Ma

Résumés

L'eau est plus qu'une ressource naturelle dans les communautés Dai de la préfecture autonome Dai de Xishuangbanna (Sipsongpanna) dans la province du Yunnan, en Chine. C'est un être relationnel incarnant à la fois des valeurs mondaines et transcendantales chez les Dai. L'eau est une source d'irrigation essentielle à la culture du riz humide des Dai et constitue un élément important de leurs pratiques rituelles bouddhistes Theravada depuis les temps anciens. Cependant, au cours des soixante-dix dernières années, l'expansion des plantations d'hévéas, la déforestation continue et le détournement à grande échelle des rivières ont entraîné des pénuries d'eau dans de nombreux villages Dai. Dans ce contexte, cet article étudie le rapport des Dai à l'eau et les défis que pose la gestion de l'eau pour la culture du riz humide, de faible rapport mais gourmande en eau. En racontant les expériences des Dai, l'article éclaire la question plus large de la manière dont l'adaptation à une crise de l'eau croissante a façonné et continuera de façonner la vie quotidienne, les pratiques religieuses et la politique des peuples rizicoles.

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Introduction

1In early March 2020, I went back to the village of Manzhao, a Dai village in a fertile valley where the town of Menghun is to be found, in Yunnan’s southern Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, in southwest China. Amidst the ongoing worldwide spread of the coronavirus and the devastating news concerning it, I was expecting to hear people in the village conversing about the pandemic, the restrictions on travelling and the near standstill of the economy. To my surprise, the most frequent topic of conversation in private homes and public gatherings was the ongoing shortage of water.

2The shortage of water caused more palpable anxiety than the pandemic. Villagers recognised that the pandemic was a tragedy, yet they saw it as being temporary since they themselves did not have the means to remedy the situation. In comparison, the shortage of water has become a perennial crisis, which directly affects multiple aspects of people’s daily lives. As in many other villages in the region, early March was the beginning of the rice-transplanting season in the village of Manzhao. The rice, which had already been planted, was dying because there was no water to irrigate the paddies (see figures 1 and 2). Many households who had not planted rice found themselves caught in a dilemma. If they transplanted their rice seedlings, these would die because of the drought; if they did not transplant them, the seedlings on the seedbeds would grow too old and the yield would be low. After waiting two weeks, most households started to dig wells to pump up underground water to irrigate their paddies, even though digging wells is illegal.

Fig 1: A dry canal and dry paddies near the village of Manzhao in Menghun township

Fig 1: A dry canal and dry paddies near the village of Manzhao in Menghun township

Photo by the author, 15 March 2020.

Fig 2: Transplanted rice seedlings in a dried-up paddy near the village of Manzhao in Menghun township

Fig 2: Transplanted rice seedlings in a dried-up paddy near the village of Manzhao in Menghun township

Photo by the author, 15 March 2020.

3Droughts such as the one Manzhao and most villages in the Xishuangbanna region are experiencing used to be rare occurrences. This region has long been cherished by the Chinese for its tropical climate and exceptionally abundant water resources in a geographically large country, yet with very poor average water resources per capita (Han et al 2018: 946). However, water shortages have become more and more frequent, challenging Dai people’s traditional water use and management strategies in rice cultivation.

4Xishuangbanna is part of the Southeast Asian massif, also known as the Southeast Asian highlands (van Schendel 2002, Sturgeon 2005, Michaud 2006, Scott 2009, Smyer Yü and Michaud 2017), at the eastern end of the Himalayan mountain system (see figure 3). In Xishuangbanna, Dai people dwell in the fertile valleys and cultivate wet rice, while various other ethnic groups, such as the Bulang (Blang or Palaung), the Hani (Akha), the Jinuo, the Lahu, the Yao (Dao) and the Yi, reside in the hilly areas ranging from around 500m to around 2,000m above sea level. Xishuangbanna belongs to the Himalayan-Tibetan river system. It is located downstream of the Lancang River, which is known as Dzachu on the Tibetan Plateau and as the Mekong River in Southeast Asia.

Fig 3: Xishuangbanna at the eastern end of the Himalayas

Fig 3: Xishuangbanna at the eastern end of the Himalayas

Map made by the author based on data from the World Geodetic System.

5With abundant water, a humid subtropical climate and large fertile plains, Xishuangbanna has historically been an ideal place for cultivating wet rice. The Dai people have been cultivating rice paddies for around two thousand years (Guo 1998: 21). The significance of rice – the latter being dubbed ‘the bone of the people’ (Moerman 1968: 16) – and the plant’s reliance on water place unmeasurable value on this natural resource in Dai society. Indeed, water is more than a natural resource for Dai people. However, this intimate water-land-human relationship has changed because of the current water crisis.

6To understand the relationship between water and the Dai people in times of crisis, I use the concept of hydro-social cycle (Linton and Budds 2014). Instead of looking at water from a hydrological point of view, which reduces water to merely its material composition (Linton 2010), the notion of hydro-social cycle considers how water is socially constructed and where its political consequences lie (Linton and Budds 2014: 171). The concept of hydro-social cycles may be specific to water-related studies, but it also resonates with the broader more-than-human approach (O’Gorman and Gaynor 2020), which looks at the worlds of different beings who cohabit the earth. Inspired by the concepts of hydro-social cycle and more-than-human approach, this article looks at water, rice paddies and human beings in Xishuangbanna not as separate entities but rather as entangled ecological participants sharing the same history of co-becoming (van Dooren et al 2016: 1).

7This co-becoming of water, land and humans in Xishuangbanna echoes the multispecies ethnographic approaches elaborated by scholars in the environmental humanities (O’Gorman and Gaynor 2020, van Dooren et al 2016). Instead of seeing humans as a distinct species separate from nature, multispecies approaches view nature and humans as ontologically co-constituted (O’Gorman and Gaynor 2020: 7). Ample evidence has shown that the seasonal water crisis in Xishuangbanna is part of a geological era that scientists call the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000: 17, Castree 2015, Waters et al 2016), during which time human-induced climate and environmental changes are becoming the norm.

8The data presented in this article regarding the Dai tradition of water, the cause of the shortage of water and its consequences for Dai people’s rice-planting techniques was mainly collected during ethnographic fieldwork from late December 2019 to late May 2020 in Xishuangbanna, and in particular in the village of Manzhao and its neighbouring villages in Menghun township. Besides immersive participant observation, I conducted in-depth one-to-one interviews as well as semi-structured group interviews with Dai villagers, monks and local officials. I also gathered local government archives, Dai legends and materials preserved in village temples, which are relevant to this study.

Dai indigenous water-land-human relations

9The most noticeable feature of the landscape in Xishuangbanna where wet rice has long been cultivated is that water is everywhere. The numerous aquaculture ponds cover all the plains, glimmering irrigation channels cut across fields and roads, and irrigated rice paddies reflect the blue sky. Rice paddies are so fundamental to people in Xishuangbanna that they named the place after rice paddies. The current official name of the region Xishuangbanna is a Chinese transliteration of the Dai language Sipsongpanna. Sip song means twelve, pan means one thousand and na means rice paddies. Thus, Sipsongpanna literally means twelve-thousand-rice-paddies. Each pan na formed a basic administrative unit of the ancient Dai kingdom (Liew-Herres et al 2012: 5).

10In Xishuangbanna and many other Dai kingdoms, na (rice field) is thought of as the origin of power and civilisation since ‘irrigated rice, then, is best understood politically as the most convenient and typical means of concentrating population and food stuff’ (Scott 2009: 65). It shapes people’s cosmology and plays a mediating role in their religious practices. For example, in the Dai-lue language, the word for land is nanm ling, which is a combination of water (nanm) and land (ling) (Ai 2010: 11, Zhen 2015: 214). Water is not considered as a separate element from land but as part of it.

11The cosmology of the Dai people is similar to that of the people in the lower Ganges Delta in Bengal. In the vast delta region, where three rivers (the Ganga, Brahmaputra and Meghna) meet the Indian Ocean, the land is waterlogged (Lahiri-Dutt 2014: 513). The land-water-binary approach loses its coherency once we understand this place which can be land, can be water and can be in between, or neither land nor water (ibid 513). Lahiri-Dutt proposed a useful ‘wet’ theory which challenges the deeply entrenched water-land dichotomy that sees water and land as fundamental, different geographical elements (ibid 510). This wet theory echoes the notion of a hydro-social cycle in the Andes (Boelens 2014). In the cosmology of the indigenous peoples of the Andes, water has different pathways in three different worlds, namely this world (kay pacha), the world-above (hanaq pacha) and the world-below (ukhu pacha) (Boelens 2014: 241). Water thus unifies this cosmological body through its circulation through different forms in these three worlds (Boelens 2014: 241–242). Even though land in Xishuangbanna is not saturated with water as it is in the Ganges Delta, nor is its relationship with water as explicit as it is in the cosmology of the Andes, water and land do co-exist and merge into one in the cosmology of Dai people: the unique way of understanding water and land as one reflects upon Dai people’s relationship with water, both metaphysically and ontologically.

Fig 4: A water-pagoda (ta nanm) with lit candles during a dan ta nanm ritual

Fig 4: A water-pagoda (ta nanm) with lit candles during a dan ta nanm ritual

Photo courtesy of Dubi Wen, the abbot of the village temple of Manzhao Village, 22 November 2018.

12Water is of a hybrid nature in many societies. It is not homogenous. Different states, forms and qualities of water endow the resource with distinct actions and meanings in many societies (Linton and Budd 2014: 177). It can be said that ‘the Dai developed their own culture of water’ (Zhen 2015: 213) and that water has been endowed with important symbolic values reflected in Dai people’s Buddhist beliefs and practices. ‘Water is a singular object with multiple ontologies’ (Alatout 2010, cited in Barnes and Alatout 2012: 484). It is involved in many aspects of the Dai people’s religious practices because of its sacredness. A ubiquitous practice that demonstrates Dai people’s receptiveness to water is the utilisation of water in transferring merit within their Theravada Buddhist rituals (Ai 2010: 203). The Dai people in Xishuangbanna practise Theravada Buddhism and accumulating merit is essential for them in seeking a better life and a good reincarnation (Tan 2005, Ma 2021). In every merit-making ritual, the last phase consists in pouring water on the ground (Walker 2011, Ma 2021). In the Dai language, the action of pouring water on the ground is ya nanm and is performed by each individual.

13This practice of pouring water on the earth is widespread across mainland Southeast Asian Buddhist countries. It can also be found in Buddhist Bulang and Lahu communities in Xishuangbanna and other communities in Yunnan, in southwest China. Although the origin of this action is not clear to most Dai people, some elders believe that the reason why this action is so crucial to merit-making is that the power of water marks their merit-making wish in the ground and thus they believe the Buddha will be informed. ‘The meaning of pouring water on the ground is to give evidence of what we donated and the oath we made. Only through ya nanm can the merit we made be transferred to our dead parents, monks and any person we want to share our merit with’, as explained by Ai Wen, a Dai man in his early seventies. Water in this sense has transcendental value for mediating between the living and the dead. It transfers the abstract capital of merit to a specific dead person through its spiritual value.

14Water not only plays an important role as mediator in merit-making rituals but is also donated to Buddha as a precious gift to gain merit on ritualistic occasions. The most commonly practised collective ritual of donating water is the ritual dan namn. Dan is the Dai word for dāna in Pāli, which means gift, alms or donation. Together with sīla (virtue or good conduct) and bhāvanā (meditation or, more broadly speaking, mental development), dāna is one of the three main actions that might purify people’s existence and help them to accumulate merit. Conventionally, Dai people carry water to their village temple or pagoda to show their respect to the Buddha. From around 2015 onwards, villages in Xishuangbanna invented a more sophisticated way of donating water, namely dan ta nanm. This method is usually performed in conjunction with rituals either in the middle or at the end of Vassa (Pāli). Vassa means the rain’s retreat, which is from the start of the ninth month to the end of the eleventh month in the Dai Calendar (roughly from mid-July to mid-October in the Gregorian calendar).

15In the Theravada Buddhist tradition, every year during Vassa, monks and novices are not allowed to travel. They have to reside in a temple to study and meditate. In Xishuangbanna, the Buddhist Dai and Bulang hold many rituals during this period. During the dan ta nanm ritual, monks and novices create a model pagoda out of plastic water bottles (Figure 4). The purpose of this ritual is threefold: first, individuals who contribute to purchasing water will gain merit. Second, the village as a unit will be blessed by Buddha with abundant water resources and prosperity. Third, these bottles of water will be stored in the temple after monks have recited Buddhist Sutras in front of this structure. They will be served as refreshments during other rituals.

16The symbolic value of water in Dai communities can be observed on many other occasions. For example, Dai people believe that water has the auspicious power to wash away bad luck and bring good luck. The most celebrated and well-known ritual of ushering in the Dai New Year (Sangkran in Dai), known as the Water Festival, manifests this belief. Traditionally, on the first day of the New Year, in the sixth month of the Dai Calendar, all the villagers gather in the temple or in a public space such as a square. The nape of everyone’s neck is splashed with a small amount of water, which is believed to bring good luck. Although the Water Festival has been reoriented by both the state and local government towards an animated regional touristy event in urban areas as part of the process of developing ethnic tourism in Xishuangbanna (Komlosy 2004), Dai people in both urban and rural areas still firmly believe that being splashed with water bestows a blessing on a person. By splashing water on each other, Dai people enter a new year full of good fortune. In this sense, they undergo self-renewal each year only by acting out their relationship with water.

  • 1 Cheli Xuanweisi was one of the Xuanwei divisions in the southwest region of China. It was establis (...)

17Water management is intertwined with the historic Dai sociopolitical system. Robert Hunt and Eva Hunt (1974: 129) have demonstrated that people who oversee water resources and maintain an efficient irrigation system wield power in irrigation-based societies. Irrigation is a vital part of the elite’s power in these societies (Hunt and Hunt 1974: 153). The close link between water management and the polity of Xishuangbanna is found in the Bok (Buak) system. Local chronicles in Mengham and Menglong show that an administrative unit called Bok oversaw the traditional irrigation system (Liew-Herres et al 2012: 25). Officials in charge of water management could also be found in the Cheli High Pacification Commissioner’s Office (Cheli Xuanweisi, 1384–1913).1 These positions were specifically established for management of the irrigation system and of related issues in Jinghong (Jiang 2008: 23). As recalled by elders in the village of Manzhao in Menghun, although the Bok did not have any authority over other aspects of social life in the Dai societies with which they were associated, they had absolute discretionary power over the use of water. It was these people in each village who decided when to irrigate paddies, how much water should flow and which paddy fields should receive it, and the time sequence of irrigation among the different villages in the plain. ‘Water runs into the fields with order. Without the permission of the Bok, nobody dares to dig any canals’, said Ai Guang, a Dai man in his sixties. The intertwining of water management and the political system in Xishuangbanna reveals how their society shapes and is shaped by water both materially and discursively (Linton and Budds 2014: 174). Water-land-human connections in traditional Dai society demonstrate how water reconfigures social relations which in turn transform the movement of water, formulating a hydro-social cycle (Linton and Budds 2014), in which the dualistic categories of water and society can be replaced by relational co-becoming beings.

Anthropogenic transformations of water in Xishuangbanna

18The Lancang River (Mekong) flows across Xishuangbanna in a northeast-southwest direction, dividing the region into two almost equal parts (Liew-Herres et al 2012: 5). The four main tributaries of the Lancang, namely the rivers Liu Sha, Luo Suo, Nan La and Nan Lan together with their fourteen plus sub-tributaries, shape Xishuangbanna into a river basin with rich groundwater reserves. The riverine land, together with the annual average 1,136–1,513mm of monsoon rain from late May to early October (Zi et al 2019: 61), nourishes Xishuangbanna with an exceptional abundance of water.

19However, Xishuangbanna is now facing seasonal droughts. More and more of its aquafarms completely dried up during the dry season, from October to May, over the last decade. Rice paddies are irrigated for only a few days instead of for one or two months prior to the transplantation of rice seedlings, as was the practice before the water shortage. The shortage of water has been much more marked over the last five years, rendering irrigation in the rice-planting season increasingly challenging in many villages in Xishuangbanna.

20The abundance of water in Xishuangbanna has drastically dwindled over the last four decades and has indeed been noticeable for at least two decades, with mention of the phenomenon now found in academic studies (Ai 2010: 221–226, Zhen 2015: 224). As we now see, the water crisis in the region has been mainly induced by three factors: rubber plantations, water-relocation projects that prioritise industrial use over local agricultural needs and global climate change that causes longer droughts during the dry season and less rain during the wet season.

21Among the three primary causes of the water crisis in Xishuangbanna, the industrial scale of planting rubber trees has the greatest impact, according to existing studies (Liu et al 2014, Sturgeon et al 2014, Xu 2006, Xu et al 2005, Yao et al 2020, Yin 2014) and my own observations. Facing an international embargo on trade between the 1950s and the 1970s, the newly established Chinese government decided to plant rubber trees in the tropical areas of its territory, particularly in Xishuangbanna and Hainan Island in 1951 (Xu 2006: 254). From the mid-1950s to the early 1980s, twelve state-owned rubber farms were set up in Xishuangbanna. Collective campaigns for rubber plantations caused intense damage to Xishuangbanna’s ecosystem, yet the scale of these state farms was relatively small and damage was limited.

22The expansion of rubber plantations gained pace from the early 1980s to the end of the 1990s. In tandem with efforts to sedentarise the shifting (swidden) agriculture practised among upland peoples such as Hani, Lahu, Jinuo and Bulang in Xishuangbanna, the government encouraged many lowland Dai and upland Hani and Jinuo households to plant rubber trees in their swidden fields (Xu 2006: 260, Xu et al 2005). According to the local people, state-owned rubber farms had only opened windows (small plots) in the dense rain forest in Xishuangbanna. Yet from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, households and private companies also claimed forest for the cultivation of rubber, which resulted in connecting the windows created earlier by the state-owned rubber farms into larger plots of rubber trees. The cultivation of rubber further expanded after China joined the WTO (World Trade Organization) in 2001, and the price of rubber in the region skyrocketed. The high prices created a frenzy of investment in rubber trees, with private companies joining state-owned farms and local households in the expansion and development of rubber plantations. By 2010, 22% of the total land cover of Xishuangbanna was covered by rubber plantations (Chen et al 2016: 1).

23The extent of rubber tree plantations eventually surpassed the surface area occupied by swidden fields and encroached upon wild rain forests both on the ridges and shoulders of many mountains in the region. For a long time, rubber plantations were considered the legitimate landscape (Xu 2006: 257, Scott 1998) because they were deemed to be not only a profitable plant but also protectors of the watersheds by their perceived ecological function of reducing soil erosion. They were (and are) therefore counted as forest cover in China (Xu 2006: 261). However, by the time local people and the state came to terms with the fact that ‘forest cover does not necessarily equate with better watershed protection’ (Xu 2006: 261, Calder 2002), it was too late. In fact, by contrast, rubber trees have the ability to take up a large proportion of shallow soil water after rainfall, and cause severe drought in shallow soil layers (Liu et al 2014: 1234). Research found a significant correlation between areas that have rubber plantations, and (local) changes in their climate. Extensive rubber plantations have resulted in an increase in temperature and a decrease in relative humidity in Xishuangbanna (Yao et al 2020).

24Even though rubber trees in China were officially counted as forest cover, the endemic forest cover of Xishuangbanna decreased drastically from the early 1950s to the mid-1980s, dwindling from 63% in 1950 to 34% in 1985 (Xu 2006: 255). This statistic clearly demonstrates that rubber plantations were not the only cause of the loss of tropical and subtropical rainforests in the region, even though these contributed enormously to the changing landscape of Xishuangbanna’s valleys and mountain slopes (Sturgeon et al 2014). The rapid expansion of various cash crops, mostly tea, banana and sugar cane, as well as an increase in the cultivation of coffee, tapioca, watermelon and the like, has also been responsible for this process. One of the ramifications of rapid, large-scale deforestation in Xishuangbanna is that it disrupted the diverse land use systems practised by different ethnic groups, which earlier protected the region’s watersheds and biodiversity. As a result of the loss of forests in the hills, water resources in the lowlands dwindled.

25In addition to the rise in the scale of rubber plantations, the expansion of hydroelectric power stations and water reservoirs has affected surface water resources enormously in Xishuangbanna. Although only one hydroelectric power station has been built on the Lancang River, with two others planned in Xishuangbanna, over two hundred water conservation projects have been set up on its tributaries and subtributaries (Wen et al 2020: 13). Taking as an example the Liusha River, the largest tributary of the Lancang in Xishuangbanna, more than fourteen projects for water management and water energy exploitation have been built along this river from the late 1950s to today. The two largest are Mengbang Water Reservoir and Na Da Meng Water Reservoir (see figure 5). Although these reservoirs are of a relatively small scale, with a capacity of between 100,000 m3 and 1,000,000 m3, they have unavoidably had an impact on rivers, reducing the flow of water downstream, therefore causing wetlands to dry up (Wen et al 2020: 13). Moreover, since all the reservoirs are state-owned and managed by the Bureau of Water Resources at county level, the accessibility of water for local Dai people depends entirely on the decisions taken by the Bureau of Water Resources for their jurisdiction. I will show below how surface water resources and water management have changed in recent years in Xishuangbanna by presenting the case of Menghun.

Fig 5: Menghun and its water system

Fig 5: Menghun and its water system

Map made by the author based on data from the World Geodetic System.

  • 2 There are currently two Dai scripts in Xishuangbanna. One is an old script which is widely used by (...)
  • 3 Meng refers to a premodern, semi-independent principality that had its own ruler, administration a (...)

26Menghun is located on the west bank of the Lancang River in south-western Xishuangbanna (see figure 5). Liusha River, the largest tributary of the Lancang River, runs through the Menghun plain. The name of this plain refers to the unique property of this river. In Dai language, the reach of the Liusha River that runs through this plain is called nanm hun. Nanm means water and hun means water flows upwards or water changes its direction. The flow of the Liusha River changes its direction from westward to run northward in Menghun. Menghun relates to water not only because it was named after water, but also because it owes its existence to the flow of water in Dai people’s cosmology. According to a legend written in old Dai-lue script and widely circulated in Xishuangbanna, entitled ‘The Legend of Lord Buddha’s Journey around the World’, Menghun was once referred to as Meng Zhuangba.2 It recounts that Buddha travelled to the place where Menghun is located and saw a huge fishpond. An old man was fishing with his grandson by the fishpond. Buddha then named this place Meng Zhuangba, meaning the meng where people go fishing.3 As the legend goes, Buddha saw that most of the meng was waterlogged because the water had no way of flowing out of the plain. He therefore opened a river near the village of Jingzhen using a stick; the river then flowed into the Lancang River through Menghai. From then on, the ancestors of the Dai people in Menghun started to settle on this land.

27Even if the roots of the legend are hard to trace, there is a kernel of truth to it: there were many aquafarms on the plain from ancient times up until recent years. ‘Menghun had lots of fishponds in the past. If you drove along the way from Menghun to Mengzhe, you saw countless fishponds sparkling in the sun’, recalled Ai La, a Dai man in the village of Man Sao, who was in his early fifties, when I interviewed him in March 2020. Besides growing lotuses or raising fish, fishponds were used to irrigate paddies (Bray 1986: 78). The abundance of water in the villages of Menghun came from the six rivers – other than the Nanm Hun –­ which run through Menghun, namely Nanm Kai, Nanm Wai, Nanm Yang, Nanm Ge, Nanm Ga Lang and Nanm Ka (see figure 5). These rivers flow through different parts of the plain, supplying water to irrigate rice paddies and for the daily needs of humans and animals. They are an inextricable part of local communities’ lives, human and animal alike. In Menghun, most Dai villages were built along the Nanm Hun and its sub-tributaries to facilitate irrigation. Hence, local human dwelling patterns and modes of subsistence are an integral part of the riverine environment.

  • 4 Xishuangbanna Tongji Nianjian 2020, [2020 Statistical Yearbook of Xishuangbanna]: https://www.xsbn. (...)
  • 5 I gathered information on the number of water reservoirs and dams from an official document availa (...)

28As already mentioned, the change in Menghun’s waterscape has been the result of many factors. First and foremost, both overall and seasonal changes in the local climate have been consistent with an increase in average temperatures as well as in droughts caused by the rapid expansion of the rubber plantation area (Yao et al 2020). The total acreage of rubber plantations in Xishuangbanna increased from 351 mu (1 mu is approximately 1/6 acre) in 1956 to 2,100,000 mu in 2002 (Yin 2004: 329), and then reached 4,462,909 mu in 2020.4 A second factor has been the allocation of water to reservoirs and the building of dams. Since the 1950s, 144 dams and water reservoirs have built in Xishuangbanna.5 In the case of Menghun, two main water reservoirs, namely Mengbang Water Reservoir and Na Da Meng Water Reservoir, were built in the late 1950s and the mid-1990s, respectively. Together with five small-scale water reservoirs, they have had a negative impact on the flow and direction of many rivers in the region. Third, wetlands have been reclaimed because of the expansion of villages, farmland and factories. For example, draining fishponds is a widespread practice throughout Xishuangbanna to make room for houses, factories and farms. Although it is hard to estimate the exact losses, we can confidently say that the number of fishponds has been drastically reduced. Last but not least, increased water usage has been due to industrial activities and the cultivation of water-consuming cash crops. Amid the growth of the market economy in Xishuangbanna since the 1990s, many business people from eastern Chinese provinces have invested in banana, watermelon, blueberry and many other crops in Menghun. These crops further drain the region’s surface water.

29Consequently, the water crisis in Xishuangbanna is now reaching a critical level and the situation appears to be irreversible. In the spring of 2020, more than ten water reservoirs in Xishuangbanna dried up both due to a shortage of rain and because of the increase in water consumption. During the entire course of my fieldwork from February to June 2020, the village of Manzhao in Menhun where I stayed and many other villages in Menghai and Menghun did not have tap water. For drinking water, families had to buy bottled water from nearby towns. The increasing scarcity of water resources, as mentioned, disrupts wet-rice cultivation and the daily lives of the Dai. This has also had an impact on how people relate to water.

Water shortages, withering rice and Dai suffering in Menghun

30The severest impact of the water shortages is on local rice cultivation in Menghun and in many of the other plains in Xishuangbanna. The water crisis in this sector has had a large-scale impact on life for the Dai, because of the co-becoming of water, land and Dai people. This co-becoming is visible in the wealth of knowledge about water management that they have developed over thousands of years of wet-rice cultivation. This knowledge is well summarised by and widely known in the region thanks to this Dai proverb: ‘Only when there is forest can there be water. Only when there is water can there be rice fields. Only when there are rice fields can there be grain. Only when there is grain can there be humans’ (Wang 2010: 58).

31Amid the rapid growth of the market economy, Dai families have come to rely more and more on trade, small-scale business activities and rents from the lease of land. However, many Dai families living in rural areas of Xishuangbanna have never stopped planting rice. They usually plant rice on a small portion of their land for subsistence consumption. Parallel to this, large-scale cultivation of rice paddy has been maintained in Menghun and Mengzhe in Basic Grain Farmland Protection Areas which are designated as such by the local government. In these two regions, rice is the main source of income for the families cultivating it. Yet farmers are facing a twofold predicament of higher water demands to irrigate their rice fields and a decrease in the water supply. This epitomises the drastic environmental changes that have taken place in the region over the last seven decades.

32In 2020, because the Mengbang Water Reservoir had dried up, the government postponed for two months the release of water downstream from the Na Da Meng Water Reservoir, which is usually scheduled between mid- and late February. ‘The problem of water we had before was that there was too much water. Who would foresee that we could face a water shortage now’, lamented Yu Guang, a Dai woman in her late thirties. The unexpected water crisis disrupted the traditional calendar for rice planting. ‘Every year when Han people start to celebrate the Spring Festival, we Dai people start to make rice seedbeds and to cultivate rice seedlings. We usually cultivate rice seedlings in late January and early February. After about one month we then start to transplant these rice seedlings’, I was told by Bo La, a Dai man in his late forties. ‘Usually the government would release water from the reservoirs by late February at the latest. But this year, we are still waiting for water and the only information the government gives us is “Don’t transplant rice”’!

33It was mid-March when I interviewed Bo La. From the local cadres’ perspective, the problem is that rice farmers are disobedient and do not apply the directives given by government officials. ‘We told them not to plant rice early this year’, a local cadre I met at a house-warming celebration in the village of Mansao complained. ‘But farmers don’t listen to us. We informed every head of the village committee and asked them to make the announcement through the village speaker in early March, but they (rice farmers) just don’t listen to us. Now what you see is rice drying to death’. In Xishuangbanna and many other so-called ethnic minority areas in Yunnan, each village assigns a spokesperson to represent the village committee members and religious leaders and to give out notices and instructions on collective affairs.

34However, from a traditional Dai perspective, it was not too early to transplant rice in March. ‘Rice has to be planted at the right time, not too early, not too late’, said Yu Jiao, a Dai woman in her early thirties, when we were transplanting her rice seedlings together in early April 2020. She and three other families, whose fields are contiguous, together dug a well to irrigate their paddy fields. She explained the reason to me, ‘I can’t wait anymore for the government to release water for us to irrigate our paddies. My rice seedlings have already grown too tall. We didn’t receive any information when we cultivated the seedlings in early February’. Indeed, it is very important to transplant rice seedlings at the right time. While transplanting them too early will damage the germinating seedlings, transplanting them too late will lead to a shorter tilling phase and a lower yield (Moerman 1968: 39).

35The discordant understandings of the right time to plant, between villagers and government officials, reveal a crucial change in the relationship between Dai people and their water. Water management in Xishuangbanna, as in most irrigated regions of mainland China, has shifted from a farmer-led irrigation system (Liebrand 2019) to ‘large-scale hydraulic bureaucracies, which have been increasingly integrated with an overarching authority’ (Wang et al 2021: 322). Before the building of the Na Da Meng Water Reservoir in the mid-1990s, which made it the main water reservoir in the town of Menghun, all villages in the Menghun valley managed their own water systems. As recalled by elders in the village of Manzhao, each year their village Bok managed the water. Traditionally, every year around early May, before the monsoon season hits the region, Menghun’s chief water manager, the Meng Bok, would convene a meeting with the Boks from all the villages in the region. The purpose of the meeting was to decide when to repair the dykes and canals to prepare for irrigation, how much manpower each village should contribute, and so on.

36This traditional Dai Bok irrigation management system is comparable to farmer-led or farmer-managed irrigation in the greater Himalaya region, for example in Nepal (Liebrand 2019: 138). Both Dai and Nepali farmers did not traditionally rely on government resources when they worked to maximise the irrigation potential using the available water to grow crops (Liebrand 2019: 129) but, for Dai, this has drastically changed. The state-led water management system has not only failed to develop the irrigation potential of the water available in present-day Menghun, but has also given priority to industrial water use to the detriment of its use for agriculture. What most upset rice farmers in Menghun was the realisation that the government was prioritising the water supply to Menghai, the region’s largest city. It is common for authorities to give preference to industrial, urban domestic and commercial water use over its use in the agricultural sector.

37Many families in the village of Manzhao managed to prevent their newly transplanted rice from dying by irrigating it with well water, a common phenomenon among farmers across East Asia who are situated downstream from reservoirs and only have access to very limited supplies of surface water (Wang et al 2021: 323, Barker and Molle 2004: 28). However, in China, using well water is a last resort because digging wells without official permission is illegal. There are at least four hidden problems concerning the use of well water to irrigate paddy fields. First, the cost of diesel for digging wells and for operating water pumps reduces the already small profit margin of rice planting even further. Villagers can easily spend CNY 800 on renting a special machine to dig a well. Note that this amount of money is often spent for nothing because ground water is not found every time a well hole is drilled. One of the villagers told me, ‘We have to dig as deep as 18 metres to be able to pump up enough water. Sometimes no matter how deep we dig, there is too little water. Then we have to dig another hole’. In addition to the expenses for digging wells, it costs as much as CNY 1,000 to 2,000 for the diesel that is used over the long hours required for pumping water.

38Second, using well water is very labour intensive. To avoid attracting the attention of and enquiries from cadres, villagers usually dig wells outside official working hours (8am to 6pm) and pump water at night. At least one person (usually a young or middle-aged man) has to stay next to the pump in the field during the night. ‘It is the most difficult thing for me’, Ai Kan, a Dai man in his late thirties, shared with me, ‘the noise of the pump and staying up all night in the field are not easy, but I have to stay alert throughout the night’.

39Third, according to villagers, the quality of ground water is not comparable to rainwater or river water. The low temperature of ground water affects newly planted rice seedlings. Ai Jiao, a Dai villager in the town of Menghun told me, ‘The seedlings stop growing for several days after we’ve irrigated them with groundwater. I think rice requires water at a suitable temperature. We usually pump water at night and so the temperature of the water is even lower. It takes several days for the fragile seedlings to get used to the water temperature’. In the Dai language, water from different origins has different names. The best water for irrigating paddy fields is nanm hai (big river water, such as from the Lancang or Liusha River), nanm huang (water from streams) and nanm peng (rainwater). The problems Ai Jiao experienced with ground water are rooted in folklore and are well documented in existing studies. Irrigation is not only about getting water to the fields but also about providing paddies with the right nutrition to (Bray 1986: 28). Ground water may provide a lifeline for rice, but it is not as nutritious as water from rivers or streams, or from rainwater.

40The shortage of water to irrigate paddy rice is only one aspect of the changes in Dai people’s appreciation of water. The decreasing availability of river water has prompted a transformation in their relationship to the rivers running over their ancestral land. For the Dai who live next to the Liusha river, as its banks are made up of less and less sand, it has become dangerous. For villagers of Manzhao, the river has changed from a space for relaxation and a space full of fond memories of the past, to a space of danger and with memories of loss. Yu Wo, a Dai woman in her late thirties, told me a story of a sad accident:

Six years ago, a middle-school boy in our village drowned in the river. We couldn’t find his body for five days. He fell into the river when he and several of his friends went to play near a hot spring. His parents went crazy for several years.
When I was a young girl, both sides of the river were full of sand. That was why Han people call Nanm Hun the Liusha River (liumeans flow andshameans sand). There were lots of hot springs along the river near our village. We bathed in the river every day. We took two sets of clothes there. Having taken a bath, we washed our clothes and played near the river until the washed clothes had dried. But they took all the sand away for industrial use. The riverbanks have been deepened, leaving a four-metre high precipice on both sides. Nobody dares to even go near the river, especially after the boy died. We are afraid of the river now.

41Dai people’s intimate relationship with water has undergone a radical change. People now have to cope with severe water shortages that affect rice planting and daily life. They may attempt to accommodate the water crisis by shifting from the water-intensive cultivation of rice to other crops that are less water dependent, which is already widespread in the region. However, their memories of rivers and the affection they held for them have changed forever.

Conclusion

42In her study of Andean indigenous people’s relationships with water, Malene Brandshaug writes, ‘Water is both a sentient being and a passive object, as well as anything in between’ (Brandshaug 2019: 539). This could also be said in the case of Xishuangbanna, though for Dai people, water is never merely a passive object. It is a relational being. The Dai relate to water in so many ways that one could say that the history of Dai people is the history of water. As part of these people’s self-identity, water can be of great significance to their lifeway, including in religious beliefs and economic activities. Water, rice paddies and the Dai people in Xishuangbanna co-exist in this shared habitat as part of a contact zone, defined by Kirksey and his colleagues as a place ‘where lines separating nature from culture have broken down, where encounters between Homo sapiens and other beings generate mutual ecologies and coproduced niches’ (Kirksey et al 2010: 546). Water has become emblematic of the Dai in the region of Xishuangbanna.

43Here, I have focused on the coexistence and co-becoming of water, land and humans not only because this triangular relationship is a fundamental part of traditional Dai society, but also because the environmental issues of southern Xishuangbanna can be clearly identified in the co-becoming of water, land and people. Indigenous water management practices developed by the Dai have long been more-than-human interactions (Brandshaug 2019: 539). Traditional water management among Dai people take into account spiritual beliefs that recognise water as being endowed with spirits. However, the ongoing water crisis has profoundly affected both Dai people’s water-intensive rice cultivation and their relationship to water. The radical transformation of ecosystems, as a result of a series of cash-crop campaigns aimed at boosting regional development, and the massive reallocation of water by a variety of water conservation projects have had two consequences. First, they have changed the natural flow of water: its quantity, velocity and mineral content. Second, they are not only endangering the reproduction of indigenous knowledge about water management, but are also alienating local people from the rivers that have nourished them since time immemorial.

44The importance of water for the Dai, as discussed, is not only relevant to gaining insights into how people interpret and cope with water crises, but it also caters to the broader topic of more-than-human interactions from an environmental humanist perspective. It is worth noting that, although Dai culture is deeply intertwined with water and the severity of water issues in Xishuangbanna is best embodied by the changing water-land-human relationships amongst the Dai, the shortage of water in Xishuangbanna not only affects rice cultivation and the supply of drinking water of the Dai in the valleys, but also profoundly impacts on water supplies among many highland ethnic groups in the nearby mountains. To understand how humans and water continue to co-exist in this increasingly dry land once characterised by its abundant water, we might need to ‘destabilize our ideas of what water is, or at least of what counts as water in the first place’ as suggested by Andrea Ballestero (2019: 415). This article, in that sense, is a small contribution to an urgently needed field of research.

Acknowledgements
The fieldwork for this article was supported by the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. I would like to thank the Himalayan University Consortium for inviting me to participate in the ‘Environmental Humanities Publishing Seminar’ co-organised by HUC Thematic Working Group on Himalayan Environmental Humanities and Yunnan University from 30 November to 11 December 2020. I am particularly indebted to the Thematic Group Co-lead Professor Dan Smyer Yü for his comments and suggestions that have helped me shape and fine-tune this article. Special thanks go to Professor Erik de Maaker and the three anonymous reviewers who read and provided engaging and constructive comments on this article. I also want to acknowledge the people in Manzhao Village and the other villages in the Menghun Plain, especially Dubi Wen, Yu Wo and Khanan La Neng, who not only tolerated my naïve questions, but also nourished me with their unbeatable food. Their kindness, wisdom and knowledge made my fieldwork during the Covid-19 pandemic a delightful success.

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Notes

1 Cheli Xuanweisi was one of the Xuanwei divisions in the southwest region of China. It was established during the Yuan Dynasty in 1296 and governed today’s Xishuangbanna area. The Cheli Xuanweisi lasted until 1956 when it was officially abolished by the central government of the People’s Republic of China.

2 There are currently two Dai scripts in Xishuangbanna. One is an old script which is widely used by Dai people living in northern Thailand, Shan State of eastern Myanmar and Xishuangbanna. Another script was invented by Chinese scholars in the 1950s and was promoted in public schools and public spaces in Xishuangbanna. Use of the old script was forbidden from the late 1950s to the mid-1980s. However, because all Buddhist manuscripts were written in the old Dai script, it saw a revival in the 1980s, but is currently used only in Buddhist contexts; Pa Zhao is the Dai name for Lord Buddha.

3 Meng refers to a premodern, semi-independent principality that had its own ruler, administration and irrigation system. Today it is the commonest word for ‘town’ in the Thai, Shan and Dai languages.

4 Xishuangbanna Tongji Nianjian 2020, [2020 Statistical Yearbook of Xishuangbanna]: https://www.xsbn.gov.cn/tjj/324798.news.detail.dhtml?news_id=2835554, accessed on 28 April 2022.

5 I gathered information on the number of water reservoirs and dams from an official document available on the website of The People’s Government of Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture: https://www.xsbn.gov.cn/slj/48386.news.detail.dhtml?news_id=2170204, accessed on 1 May 2022.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Fig 1: A dry canal and dry paddies near the village of Manzhao in Menghun township
Crédits Photo by the author, 15 March 2020.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/504/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 2,5M
Titre Fig 2: Transplanted rice seedlings in a dried-up paddy near the village of Manzhao in Menghun township
Crédits Photo by the author, 15 March 2020.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/504/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 3,7M
Titre Fig 3: Xishuangbanna at the eastern end of the Himalayas
Crédits Map made by the author based on data from the World Geodetic System.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/504/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/png, 357k
Titre Fig 4: A water-pagoda (ta nanm) with lit candles during a dan ta nanm ritual
Crédits Photo courtesy of Dubi Wen, the abbot of the village temple of Manzhao Village, 22 November 2018.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/504/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 2,4M
Titre Fig 5: Menghun and its water system
Crédits Map made by the author based on data from the World Geodetic System.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/504/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/png, 482k
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Zhen Ma, « Water as a relational being in Xishuangbanna: presence, scarcity and management »European Bulletin of Himalayan Research [En ligne], 58 | 2022, mis en ligne le 15 juillet 2022, consulté le 08 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/504 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ebhr.504

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Auteur

Zhen Ma

Zhen Ma (PhD, 2016, Minzu University of China) is a researcher at the Institute of National Culture Research of Dali University (Southwest China). She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (Germany, 2017–2021). Her research focuses on material culture, Theravada Buddhism and environmental change in contemporary China. She has published in the Journal of Material Culture, Social Analysis and the Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology. Her ethnographic film ‘Living on Tea’ (2017) about tea culture in Southwest China was declared ‘outstanding’ at the Second Beijing Ethnographic Film Festival. ORCID ID: 0000-0002-4431-8534.

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