China Part 8: The World's Largest and Most Culturally Significant Mudfight

Tiny old ethnic-minority women, one key ingredient in drawing crowds of Beijing tourists toting two-foot camera lenses.

The Chinese government knows how to popularize new tourist attractions. First, find a strange minority people (not Han Chinese) lurking in remote mountains near the country’s borders. Second, find a gaggle of foreigners to go join in their ethnic celebrations and admire their exotic traditions. Finally, unleash thousands of Han Chinese tourists upon said gaggle of foreigners.

Who will these thousands of Chinese people be unleashed on today? Read on to find out.

Many foreigners have walked right into this scheme close to the Laos border during the Dai minority water-splashing festivals. They report processions of Dai women playfully sprinkling them with rice bowls full of water, and then gangs of Beijing tourists unloading Super Soakers into their faces from three feet away. With exotic minority festivals attracting a constant stream of sitting-duck foreigners and enjoying wild success among Beijing tourists, tourism companies have been expanding the model to more and more remote areas. We were lucky enough to experience it firsthand in the Wa minority people’s 摸你黑 or “Smear You Black” festival.

A foreigner friend told us that a tourist company was giving away all-expenses-paid trips to some Smear You Black festival in Cangyuan, a 10-hour bus ride outside Kunming. On top of the bus ride, meals, accommodation, and entrance fee, they’d give us $15.
“Why would they do all this for free?”
“They said it was to raise awareness of this festival, to encourage foreigners to come in the future.”
“Oh, cool.”
So we hopped on a bus at 9am and rode all day. It turned out 10 hours was overly optimistic for the narrow, windy roads leading up into Wa territory. We rolled into Cangyuan at midnight. We scarfed down some spicy, unrecognizable local dishes and stumbled off to our hotel. Why does riding a bus for 15 hours always leave us as tired as hiking a mountain?

We visited a Wa village, a clump of bamboo-thatched roofs nestled high in the hills. Villagers decorated their houses with cow skulls.
“Are cow heads important symbols in Wa culture?”
“Traditionally, they displayed human heads.”
“They were headhunters?”
“Yes, but in the 1960s the communists convinced them to collect cow heads instead.”
“Oh.”

With her smooth and symmetrical head, Emmy would have received quite a warm welcome here fifty years ago.

We ate a traditional Wa meal, in which all kinds of meat and non-meat substances were barbecued and dumped on the banana leaves covering our table. We grabbed chunks of beef and hocks of lamb (forgoing the intestines and congealed pork blood), until the Wa mayor began toasting everyone with baijiu, the Chinese equivalent of cheap vodka. Then scantily clad Wa teenagers performed high-flying traditional dances and served us baijiu. They asked our flock of foreigners to reciprocate. We sang the traditional Western melodies “Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Chest” and “I Will Survive,” and the dancers rewarded us with baijiu.

The traditional long table of the Wa people, covered with banana leaves

Amos contemplates a fresh serving of lamb hock and purple sticky rice.

We gradually decided that the Wa were the wildest Chinese minority we had ever met. The Wa men grow their hair long, bang enormous cowhide drums and can often be caught bare-chested. They have the darkest skin in China. As they say, 以黑为美，or “black is beautiful.” The Smear You Black festival celebrates dark skin by giving everyone the chance to become black and beautiful. Smear You Black is the world’s largest and most culturally significant mud fight.

On the afternoon of the Great Mud Fight, we met the other foreigners at the entrance to the Smear You Black Arena. Regiments of bare-chested Wa men brandishing bows and arrows followed colorful Wa matrons parading into the arena. The tour guides shepherded us in after them. Throngs of Beijing and Shanghai tourists paid an arm and a leg ($45) to get in to the Great Mud Fight, and they seethed with excitement when our gaggle of foreigners walked by. The crowd was bursting with apprehension, and every person who saw us inched toward the giant mud pots, which the Chinese military had placed under armed guard. An announcer shouted something harshly unintelligible into the microphone. The soldiers opened the mud pots and ran for cover. Our pale skin gleamed in the fierce Wa sun, but there would be no need for sunscreen.

These Wa matrons kept their traditionally clad parade a safe distance away from Smear You Black Arena.

A soldier removed this mud pot cover specially for this picture. The arena contained about 50 of these.

We have never, and probably will never again experience anything remotely like the Great Mud Fight. Every way you turned, five Chinese people flung mud and lunged at you with their mud-covered hands. They particularly aimed for your eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. We stumbled from pot to pot, trying to refill our mud bowls with our eyes half closed, our ears clogged and our mouths soured. We twisted and dodged like running backs, pausing only to greet other foreigners who appeared suddenly in front of us, smiled with grotesquely mud-studded teeth, and then disappeared in the chaos. After fifteen minutes, we noticed that people had stopped chasing us. The once pristine soccer field had been so completely caked with mud that it was impossible to run without sliding erratically. More importantly, we were so entirely coated with mud that our predators couldn’t tell we were foreigners. After half an hour, most of the crowd had begun dancing wildly and flinging mud at reporters hiding behind customized plastic screens on the mud-spattered stage. The mud fighters had emptied all the pots, so people began trickling out of Smear You Black Arena and scraping mud off their bodies to hurl at the onlookers watching enviously from outside. Amos cautiously unwrapped his camera and snapped a few photos. We slid our way out of Smear You Black Arena and scrubbed ten pounds of mud off of our skin.

Imagine thousands of these creatures flinging, smearing, and falling down in a giant sea of mud. That's Smear You Black.

This festival must be the Chinese military's most feared assignment.

Emmy and our Wa friends cleaned up with water dripping from giant bamboo pipes. Her pores look very clean.

The tour guides took us to other events after the Great Mud Fight, but nothing could compete with it. Even when we joined two other Americans to sing “We Will Survive” on stage to a thousand gaping Wa people, a little voice in our head muttered “This is way less intense than the mud fight.” The next morning, we got on the all-day bus back to Kunming. Emmy felt sick all day, and we never figured out whether her nausea came from eating Wa barbecue, drinking baijiu, or swallowing vast, vast quantities of mud. We do have our suspicions.