Customs of the Kucong

The Kucong are one of the poorest minorities of China. Until the fifties of the XXth century they were taking a nomadic existence in the forests of the Mounts Ailaoshan. Then they were captured and placed in some villages, but many traces of that one still support his nomadic culture, and his subsistence of the hunting and the compilation.

Earlier his isolation was such that were considered to be "invisible men", even the commerce to satisfy his needs for salt, clothes and metal articles, they realized it without allowing to see. Since they were placing some herbs or fungi of the forest appreciated by his neighbors at the edge of the way, and when someone was happening, they knew that the Kucong wanted to trade, and that it could take these products of the forest leaving to them in return a knife, a shirt or little salt. The Kucong were observing hidden, hanging with his prepared arches, of which the walker really should leave something.

The base of the feeding of the Kucong is the corn, which they cook with some vegetables that they gather and the animals that they hunt, sometimes roasting it to the fire straight or cooking them in bamboo pipes or wrapped in banana sheets. Where they place the corn and little water and covering the gap with a few sheets they put it to the fire. The vegetables or the meat cook them of equal form, but without adding water. Scarcely they add salt, since it is very scarce and only they obtain it for the commerce with other peoples.

As soon as the meal was cooked, they place it on banana sheets, and, of course, they eat it with toothpicks.

The houses of the Kucong are small and narrow. Very low, of scarcely a meter high. The structure is of wood or of bamboo, with a roof formed with sheets of banana or of bamboo. Sheets that since at once they wither, must change every month or two months. They are so small that sometimes there seem the huts that the peasants of the vales construct to take care of his cultivation.

They consist of only one room without divisions, in the center of the same one there is the hearth, about which the whole family sleeps, as well as his dogs, funks and gluttons. This quarter is usually very dark since there are no windows and only it receives the light of the door and of the fire. They have no blankets and wrap up only with some grasses or banana sheets, therefore throughout the year they always support the burning fire.

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