South Pacific Study Vol. 17, No. 1, 1996

103

Dynamics of Yao Genealogy(A Case Study of a Yen Stream Village)
Hoa: Dynamics of Yao Genealogy

Diep Dinh HOA 1)

Abstract

In this article, by means of a study of a Yao community in Yen Village, Tan Minh Commune, Da Bac District,
Hoa Binh Province, I try to add to our understanding of the relationship of the nature of the Yao community in themountain-forest environment. A social structure with a solid line of descent gives the Yao people a nature which
is open and receptive but which does not lose its specific ethnic character. This allows the Yao a great deal ofdifferentiation within the ethnic group and helps them to find a sustainable basis for the development of their lineof descent. In the current of eradicating hunger and poverty, this is of considerable advantage, though it also
creates for more than a few difficulties.
Key words: Yao, Hoa Binh province, social structure, adopted child, matrilocal marrige, inheritance right, migration en masse

Introduction
Yen Stream Village belongs to Tan Minh Commune, Da Bac District, Hoa Binh
Province. This article is mainly written depending on my fieldwork research conducted
there in 1991. Looking at the micro level to understand the macro level, looking closely to
see far, I have also used some fieldwork data on the Yao collected from 1961 to 1995, inorder to clarify some legal points. Yen Village is made up entirely of Yao Tien people, oneof sub-ethnic groups of the Yao.

Yao people in Hoa Binh Province
Hoa Binh Province was established on 22 June 1886 on the division of Hung Hoa
Province.(1) After numerous divisions of this sort Hoa Binh had, on 31 December 1990, aland area of 4,613.1 km2, a population of 673,500, and was made up of nine districts, onecity, nine towns and 201 communes and boroughs.(2) There are seven ethnic groups in Hoa
Binh Province. According to provincial statistics, of a total population of 348,859 on 1
1) National Center for Social Sciences and Humanities of Vietnam, Hanoi, Vietnam

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Table 1. The distribution of Yao people in four main districts of Hoa Binh Province

1
2
3
4

District

Population

Yao Population

Proportion of
Yao people
compared withtotal district
population (％)

Remarks

Luong Son
Kim Boi
Ky SonDa Bac48,666
46,89541,831
26,501

331
663
595
2,958

0.68
1.41
1.42
11.16

27 communes
35 communes
27 communes
23 communes

October 1968 the Muong comprised 66.16％, and the Yao 1.74％. The Yao are to be foundin four main districts, as the following figures from the provincial statistical department(1.10.1970) indicate (See Table 1). The Yao people are mainly concentrated in Da Bac
District.
Hoa Binh Province is well known for being home to the Hoabinhian culture,(3) an archaeological culture which gave rise to a technological revolution during the neolithic
period throughout ancient Southeast Asia. In the process of Vietnam’s modernisation, theprovince is known for the construction of the Hoa Binh hydroelectric dam on the Da River.
I have already discussed the influence of the dam project elsewhere.(4)In the campaign to come down from the mountains in order to make cultivation andresidence sedentary, the Yao is one of the ethnic groups which have responded the mostquickly and positively to sedentary settlement. With the migration process out of the Da
River lake-bed area, carried out over a number of years, Hoa Binh’s provincial authorities
have become aware of a very important aspect of the Yao people’s character. They cannot
live separated from a mountain-forest environment. The Yao need the forest not only foreconomic reasons but also for its importance to their psycho-physiology. Recognising this,since 1993 according to Programme 327, Hoa Binh Province has set up an in-province new
economic zone in the Thung Rech area of Du Sang Commune, in Kim Boi District. Thung
Rech, which originally had only two Yao villages, now houses more than a hundred Yao
families who have moved up from Da Bac.

Yao people in Da Bac District
Da Bac District now has twenty communes and a district town. Da Bac is one of the
districts which suffered most from the need for migration out of the Da River lake-bed area.
Sixteen of the communes in the districts were affected by the flooding, of which seven werecompletely submerged. The Yao in Hoa Binh and Da Bac consist of two sub-ethnic groups:
the Yao Tien (Yao who wear money) and Yao Tam Dao (Yao who wear tight trousers).

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105

Table 2. Distribution of Yao people in the communes of Da Bac, according to the fieldwork
conducted in July 1995
commune, town

Yao Tien

1
2
3
4
5
6

Dong Nghe
Suoi Nanh
Giap Dat
Tan Pheo
Doan Ket
Trung Thanh

X
X
X
X
X
X

7
8

Yen Hoa
Tan Dan

X
X

9
10
11
12

Vay Nua
Hien Luong
Tan Minh
Tu Ly

X
X
X
X

13
14
15

Toan Son
Da Bac District Town
Cao SonXX

Yao Tam Dao

X
X
X
X

Remarks
2 villages
1 village
1 village
2 villages
1 village
1 village, later moved
to Yen Hoa
1 village
1 village, moved toelsewhere
4 villages
1 village
1 village
2 Yao Tien villages and1 Yao Tam Dao village
ditto
ditto
3 villages

In 1995 more than 5,000 Yao people live in Da Bac, a population nearly twice that recordedby the 1970 statistics. They are concentrated in villages in fifteen out of the twenty-one
communes and towns of the district (See Table 2).
We can see from Table 2 that, except for those living in the district town, the Yao live
together in their own villages, according to sub-ethnic group. This may be perceived evenmore clearly in the process of migration from the Da River lake-bed area. Arranging themerging of different Yao sub-ethnic groups in a small residential area, such as a village,
does not usually give satisfactory results. This is not, however, to say that they are selfcontained. We shall explore the basis of their integration in a later section.
It is common for Yao people in Da Bac to regard the tending of household gardens andforest gardens as extremely important. Wooded areas entrusted to their care or protection
are all carefully preserved, especially those surrounding the village. On the other hand, they
are quite ready to emigrate to elsewhere and make swiddens, or remove timber from areasof forest which are not strictly guarded. These areas of forest may belong to other communities in the district, or they may cross into Thanh Son district in Vinh Phu Province. This
is not only linked to their particular relationsip with the mountain-forest environment as
mentioned above, but also bears upon their conception of woodland ownership rights. Everyhouse has its own rice storehouse situated in the garden. Although they invariably havegood harvests, Yao people never take their rice to market to sell. This shows that their main
worry remains hunger.

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Yao people in Tan Minh Commune
Tan Minh was one of the communes chosen to receive families moved up from the Da
River lake bed area. In the past it was made up of six villages situated along the road in anarrow valley. This road was upgraded more than ten years ago and cars can now go to all
the villages, even the furthest. Yen Stream Village is almost at the end of the commune; its
inhabitants are entirely Yaos. The last village is Enh Village, inhabited by Tay Da Bac
people. In 1957-58, village-size cooperatives were set up. When the movement to set up
commune-size cooperatives got underway, the Yen Stream Cooperative refused to work
together with Tay Da Bac people, and thus retained its village-size co-op. The Enh Village
Co-op, because it was separated from Yen Stream Village, also retained its original size.
The commune had three agricultural cooperatives at that time. Following Contract 10, in
1988, the larger co-op embracing four villages was split up into seven small ones, to form
a commune with nine villages and nine agricultural cooperatives.
Yen Village has only 2.8 hectares of wetrice fields, to support thirty-one families (180persons). It is the village with the smallest area of wetrice fields in Tan Minh commune,around 155 m2 per head, which is not even as much as the average field area in Thai Binhprovince, a place well known for having limited land and a high population. This shows thatthe main source of livelihood for Yao people is not the cultivation of wetrice fields.
The Yao of Yen Village fixed their residence at the time of the collectivisation movement, when they got wetrice fields. Before that they lived in the area of the commune andThanh Son, Vinh Phu, shifting their residence and cultivation. Swidden fields of the Tay Da
Bac people are often named after plants and trees, like nghe man (turmeric), mit man(jackfruit), che man (tea) etc., which indicates that this was originally land where the Yao
had swidden fields. In Yen Village, there are still some tea trees of which the trunk is so
thick that a man cannot close his arms around it. The house there are lined along the Yen
Stream, and face onto it. Most of them have kept an old look, but were built by craftsmen
from Thach That in Ha Tay. The Yao regard keeping springs clean as extremely important,and the community severely punishes people who pollute the water. But in the village there
are also three wells, dug since 1988, from which they can draw water for everyday use.
They still use water power to pound the rice, but also like to take their unhusked rice out
to a private shop near the commune people’s committee building for husking and polishing.
Yen Stream Village is unique in the commune as having water-powered electricity. The
small hydroelectric machine provides enough power to run lights, televisions and radios.
The village has a school with five grades, but Yao characters are only taught at home toadults, when they are old enough to make offerings. The ancestors’ altar is placed only at
the clan head’s house.
These general features also allow us to notice that, in terms of incorporating technology, they have a taste for the new. This makes them very hospitable, and welcoming toHoa: Dynamics of Yao Genealogy

107

friends. Openness to attract the genius of other ethnic groups is a good characteristic, sowhy, despite this, do the Yao give the impression of being self-contained?

The structure of the Yao line of descent in Yen Village
The Yao follow the patrilineal system. So according to Table 3, the families of Yen
Village include surnames Ban, Trieu, Dang, Ly and Le. On the female side, the Dang does
not appear. In actual fact, there are marriages between three lines of descent. Ban, Trieu andDang make up 93.54％ of the families of Yen village.
The Yao use Chinese characters, which can be read in Han Viet, Yao or Cantonese
pronunciation. This means that each Yao Chinese character is one written symbol, but whentranscribed into Vietnamese (quoc ngu) they become different surnames. "Ban" is in Han
Viet pronunciation, while "Phan" is in Yao pronunciation. In the same way, "Dang" may be"Tau", "Tan" and so forth. Yao people obey the principle surname exogamy. But a marriage
between young couple who have the same surname may occur because the younger generation do not know Yao Chinese characters and they pronounce each surname in different
ways. We should explore further to understand clearly the cause of this problem.
According to Table 3, there are seven families in Yen Village whose husband and wives
have the same surname Ban. Does this mean that they are ignoring theprinciple？ Research showed that seven men, with surname Ban, have different origins:
three are of Viet origin, three are of Muong origin and one is of Tay Da Bac origin. In 1945,
at the time of the terible famine, people from Thai Binh drifted up to Thanh Son, Vinh Phu
Province, and Da Bac, Hoa Binh Province. Two Thai Binh children were adopted by theYao from Thanh Son. Two other Thai Binh children were adopted by the Yao from Yen
Village, one belonged to Dang, the other Ban. Two Thanh Son men came here to marry
Table 3. Yao families in Yen Village (1992)
Woman’ssurname
Ban

Trieu

Ly

Le

Surnameunknown

Ban

7

2

1

5

2

17

Trieu

1

2

4

7

Dang

2

2

5 (1 unmarried)

Ly

1

1

Le

1

1 (1 unmarried)

10

31

Man’s
surname

Total

10

1

3

1

7

Total

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1st generation

2nd generation

Dang

＝

A

C

B

＝

(younger)D(elder)E＝

FF

3rd generation: male: famale: adoption

Figure 1. Genealogy of a Dang family, Yen Village

matrilocally and had to change their surnames to their wives’. Of three Muong families withthe surname Ban, two are from Thanh Son, and one from Tu Ly; they came as matrilocal
husbands and took their wives’ surname Ban. The Tay Da Bac person was originally an
adopted child of the Ban family. This very procedure is very liberal, but is also closely
related to the surname Ban, the original family at Yen Village, which is in fact the surnameof seventeen out of the thirty-one families there. If you count two families who recently
split off on their own, the Ban make up 60％ of the families of this village.
Cases among the Yao of adopting people to keep up descent line not only involve theincorporation of people of different ethnicity, but also quite commonly bring people in fromthe affines. At Yen Stream Village, there is a case of husbands and wives having the name
Dang and Trieu (Figure 1).
At the 1st generation, the Dang family have no son, so they (A and B) adopt a child (C)to continue the line.
At the 2nd generation, the child (C) was a Tay from Enh Village, adopted by the Dang
family (Yao), and now a member of the Dang family. He married a Trieu woman (D), andbecame a father of five daughters. At the 3rd generation, the couple adopted a son (F) of
the wife’s elder brother to continue the line. He was a Trieu, who now becomes a Dang.
This allows us to affirm that the sustainable nature of the development of the line ofdescent is adhered to closely by the Yao. It allows them to defend their ethnic particuliarity.
This sustainability is of a social nature. The social nature does not, of course, always combine with physiological reality. To bring the latter into line with the social norm, the Yao
use methods like matrilocal marriage and adoption under many different forms to maintainthis sustainability. Ancestor worship ceremonies to change the family affiliation are strictly
observed.
As far as wives whose origin is not Yao are concerned, although ancestor worship rituals
are still properly carried out, the formalities of rituals are simpler and less expensive.
However it is not possible to change her family affiliation at any time. Of the twenty-one

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109

wives I came across in the course of my fieldwork, one was Vietnamese, adopted into a
Trieu family and still not clear about her ethnicity; seven were from Thanh Son, who cameto Yen village as brides, of whom two were of the Ban families; three, none of them wereYao, came as brides from other places. The ancestor worship ceremony is entirely voluntary, but if it is not agreed, the community does not recognise the marriage. That means thatthe husband and wife do not exist in the eyes of the community.
In Tat Village there is a Muong woman of the Nguyen family who had married a Yao
from Yen Village. She did not agree, after the marriage, to become a Yao, so they divorced.
In Hao Ly there is a Viet woman, who has three times had to move out of the Da Riverlake-bed area, in each place she married a Yao man, and from each marriage had a child:
two chidren have the surname Ban and one Do (after the mother). She finally brought all
three children to live in Hao Ly.

A social structure both close-knit and open-natured
The close-knit social structure, as observed during fieldwork research with the Yao in
Yen Village, is a common phenomenon. This feature ensures that, despite their openness,
the Yao have been able to maintain their original ethnic culture. Of the Yao sub-ethnic
groups the Yao Dai Ban have liberal social relations, and find it easy to merge with communities of other ethnic groups. Nevertheless they still adhere to the principle of living together in villages by commnunity, and do not join up and interlock in "sawtooth pattern"with other ethnic groups. There are many Yao Dai Ban who leave and go to work as cadresat the district level or above, but when they return to their village they have to abide by thestrict rules of the community. Thanh Son Village, Quan Ba Commune, Ha Giang Province,
has two hamlets belonging to two sub-ethnic groups of Yao, Dai Ban and Thanh Y, whichshare a common cooperative. While the commune head is a Yao, if the village cadre is a
Yao Thanh Y, then the head of the cooperative must be a Yao Dai Ban, and vice versa. The
distinction between sub-ethnic groups of the Yao is thus rigorously enforced. This is rather
different from the Hmong. They also live together in villages by community, but within thevillage still join up with other sub-ethnic groups.
The sustainability of the community by sub-ethnic group is clear in many respects.
Migrating out of the Thac Ba lake-bed area in Yen Bai, and the Da River area in Hoa Binh,
the Yao usually go as whole groups. The Yao are different from other ethnic groups inmigration pattern. If they have to migrate, not only families who are flooded out, but also
those not flooded will move; then the whole village will migrate. In the migration to thesouth, to provinces like Dong Nai, Lam Dong, and Dac Lac, while they go of their own free
volition, they go as whole villages, including all social classes: teachers, doctors, religious

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leaders, as well as the secretary of the Party cell to lead the people. This phenomenon has
led many researchers to conclude that they have a narrow-minded psychology. Such a
conclusion is insufficient. In the past, with their migratory lifestyle, if they did not have aclose-knit social structure, how could they protect their ethnicity in the face of a difficultand arduous life of migrating？ In the process of migration, they have never stopped opening up the community and incorporating members of other ethnic groups.
The practice that a husband lives matrilocally with his wife’s parents ("o’re" inVietnamese) is not uncommon among many groups with patrilineal-patrilocal systems. But
the Yao are different from other ethnic groups in this practice. Their pracitice is highly
suited to Vietnamese civil law concerning inheritance rights following the blood line andmarriage. In other ethnic groups who have patrilineal systems, a matrilocal husband has tofeed the whole of his family but does not change his surname. His children will take theirfather’s surname and thereby their inheritance rights are established through patrilineal line.
In Yao society where they usually marry patrilocally, a matrilocal husband has to change
his surname to his wife’s father’s. Then, in theory and practice, his children will have theirmother’s surname. As a result the practice of matrilocal residence poses no problems forinheritance rights among the Yao.
Furthermore, if the rule were not so strict, differentiation within the community mighttake place. While I was working in Nam Ban Commune, Yen Minh District, Ha Giang
Province in 1961, a number of Yao Dai Ban told me that their paternal grandfather was a
Lo Lo according to their family records. In 1995 while I was working in Meo Vac, some
Lo Lo people said that there came people from Nam Ban to research their genealogy andreturned little before my visit. Their research was only intended to find out their origins andthe two groups did not take any relations further than that.
The Yao are among the poorest people in Vietnam. Despite that, when living alongsideother groups with higher standards of living, like the Tay, Nung, Thai, Muong etc., the latergroups still hold that the Yao are well off. The important thing here is that while theyremain poor, the Yao are very prompt to pick up anything new, and are well able to adapt
to new technology. In 1963, at the time I was working in Na Hang, Tuyen Quang, the Yao
there had already bought improved oil-fired lamps, which they used for light and heated up
to run batteries and listen to the radio. The Tay in that area consider this a sign of wealth.
In 1968, I was shown a hydroelectric project in Loc Binh; while the offices of the district
party and people’s committee and the collective residence of the workers remained without
electric light, the Yao village nearby was already lit electrically. People explained this withreference to air defense during the war, but this is unlikely to be the whole story. During the1970s, the Yao region was the first to have water-powered electricity, common in Lang Son
and Cao Bang, which they set up with their own capital.

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111

Concluding remarks
The Yao are a people at one with a mountain-forest environnent. In the process of changing the structure of agricultural production, regional planning should take the above points
into account. In other words, differentiation between Yao sub-ethnic groups something thatshould be strictly respected in group settlement and the creation of villages. Their strong
sense of community has given them a close-knit social structure. This is an issue whichshould be addressed in administrative management. In the current process of eradicating
hunger and poverty, this feature of the Yao character gives them many advantages, but also
creates considerable difficulties. The spirit of community has already contributed to thesuccess of projects such as the digging of clean water wells for everyday use, the buildingof new schools, the protection of designated forest. On the other hand, there are difficulties:
the need for the whole village to migrate en masse, the refusal to accept members of thesame ethnic group into the village, the refusal to accept members of other groups into thecommune, the availability of help for poor people in times of difficulties only at commune
level and according to the name list (so that people have to go to the community for help
which is also distributed evenly [not according to need]), destruction of the forest in moredistant areas, etc. The social structure, then, is close-knit, but open in its contribution tomaintaining sustainability in the process of development and its relations with the line ofdescent.

Notes(1) Bui Van Kin (ed). 1972. Gop phan tim hieu tinh Hoa Binh (Contribution to the understanding of the province of Hoa Binh). Hoa Binh Provincial Culture and Information
Department: 17.
(2) Tong Cuc Thong Ke. 1992. Nien giam thong ke (Statistical yearbook). NXB thong ke:
5.
(3) UBKHXVN. VKCH. 1989. Van hoa Hoa Binh o Viet Nam (Hoabinbian culture in
Vietnam). Hanoi.
(4) Diep Dinh Hoa. 1995-1996. Nhung dac diem ve cong dong dan toc phat trien xa hoi
vung Tay Bac Viet Nam duoi tac dong cua cac cong trinh thuy dien (Some featuresof ethnic communities’ social development in the Northwest of Vietnam under the
influence of the hydroelectric project). NXB KHXH. Hanoi.
Tac Dong cua cong trinh thuy dien Hoa Binh den cong dong cac dan toc Tay Bac (Theinfluence of the Hoa Binh hydroelectric project on the ethnic communities of theNorthwest). NXB KHXH. Hanoi. (forthcoming)(Accepted July 31, 1996)

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