Living in the high mountains, the Cao Lan people are mainly concentrated in Lap Thach district, Vinh Phuc province. Their lives are based on cultivation of rice and other crops. Since the ancient days, the Cao Lan people have never been known for any art-level craft, they only practice some simple crafts on a community level such as basketry. There are always a few villagers, usually men, who are skilled weavers. They weave bamboo strips into fences of unique and beautiful designs and containers used for storing maize and rice.
The Cao Lan people also practice fabric weaving and embroidery. Every year, when clearing upland fields to growing rice and corn, the Cao Lan women will create another small field to grow cotton for weaving. Seeding around February - March and harvesting around June - July, by that time, in the evenings, it’s common to see the Cao Lan women with their hands moving non-stop, rolling cotton into yarn and weaving yarn into fabric. This is a year-round work to ensure that they have clothes to wear and blankets to keep warm. Rolling cotton can be a quite difficult task, cotton must be exposed to completely dry otherwise the cotton will attach to the seed and could not be rolled properly. Yarn spinning is also a meticulous stage which requires superior skills, or else the yarn will turn out to be rough, uneven, loose, and not durable and ultimately looks bad when woven into fabrics. After the spinning is the weaving stage, the weaving looms used by the Cao Lan people are complex looms like the ones often seen in the Tay or the Thai community. Today, it’s hard to find the complete loom set of the ancient Cao Lan people which includes cotton ginning, spinning reels and loom. A woven cloth is also considered by the Cao Lan people a criterion to evaluate the skilfulness of a girl. When the rich go ask for a bride, they also check the girl’s hand-woven fabrics before making a proposal.
Besides, the Cao Lan people also have some other crafts such as forging farm equipment and making weapons. Cao Lan’s crafts mostly are self-sufficient in order to provide for the needs of production and daily life; therefore they are diverse and carry a unique ethnic identity.
Cao Lan ethnic has a rich spiritual life, Cao Lan folk song is a unique cultural asset has been passed through generations of Cao Lan to today. In the minds of each Cao Lan people, always existing a sense of pride of their culture and history, that’s what unite them together in preserving and protecting it. Cao Lan folk songs are preserved in a very natural and simple way, because it is not bound by laws or regulations, nor depended on space or time to be performed. They are passing down simply through family singing sessions when celebrating a new year, a song sung to welcome guests, a wedding singing, a melody singing of parents’ merits, singing during work, singing as a way to exchange feelings between men and women, or today, to praise the Party and Uncle Ho. It shows all diverse aspects of cultural and spiritual life as well as traditions of the Cao Lan people.
Singing folk songs is a spiritual activity to help strengthen cohesion in the Cao Lan community. Singing would help the people forget all difficulties and hardship of the everyday life, also letting go of all bad feeling, leaving only heart-warming feelings from the melody. It is the love of couples, the love for the motherland, the encouragement to work hard and live a happy life, all positive feelings which draw people closer and becoming dear to each other.
During the trend of integration and development of modern life, the cultural, social and spiritual life of the Cao Lan people also have received some impacts. Cao Lan’s folk songs are being threatened as younger generations are gradually losing passion for it. Most of the Cao Lan’s Sinh songs were documented in Chinese characters, so only those who can read these ancient logograms can understand the songs. The middle ages and youngsters who do not know Chinese characters couldn’t understand the lyrics, although they still can sing the songs as having learnt the songs by heart. These are obstacles to the teaching and preserving this unique heritage of the Cao Lan.
In an effort to preserve and promote the heritage of Cao Lan folk songs, in December 2012, Cao Lan folk songs were put on the list of national intangible cultural heritage under the decision of the Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism, reaffirming the historic, cultural and scientific value of this type of folk art performance which is in need of preservation and promotion.
Thanh Nga
Vietnamese
