Lisu Villages, Chiang Rai

We traveled from Chiang Rai back into the hill area of the north. The plan for the day was to visit two Lisu villages. At Ban That village we spoke with the village leader. He would like to see more support from the government to encourage people to do the right things on the land. Without this support people do what they can to make a living. Lack of citizenship rights is still a major issue for many hill tribe people. In the past, as shifting cultivators, they didn’t know political boundaries. Many came as refugees from Myanmar (formerly known as Burma) about 30 years ago, where there is still conflict between the minority groups and the government.

From Ban That we traveled to Ban Pang Sa village to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Here we found people doing their traditional dancing.

Ban Pang Sa villagers dancing for the Chinese New Year
Ban Pang Sa villagers dancing for the Chinese New Year

The village musicians were playing the Seubeu, a traditional string instrument, and the Falous, a traditional wind instrument, as they led the dancers around the circle.

Ban Pang Sa musicians playing the Seubeu
Ban Pang Sa musicians playing the Seubeu
Ban Pang Sa musician playing the Falous
Ban Pang Sa musician playing the Falous

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.