Through the Trails to the ‘Chinese Fair’

“For ten years now, I’ve never missed a single Chinese fair,” says Ly Thi Xuan, who is of the Hoa ethnic group from Pho Bang town in Dong Van district, Ha Giang province in north-eastern Vietnam.

 The ‘Chinese fair’ is a weekly one held just five kilometres from this town -- but across the border in Yunnan, China, with which mountainous Ha Giang shares a border. Like Ly Thi Xuan, Pho Bang residents consider this fair in Ma Pung commune in Dong Cac district in Yunnan a big event, akin to a fair.

They are among the border communities in this part of Vietnam, many of them from different ethnic groups such as the Tay, Dao and Hmong and dressed in their colourful native attire, who go to Ma Pung regularly to check out what new products might be on sale.

But to get to Ma Pung, Vietnamese residents of Pho Bang need to go through the usual procedures to cross the border into China. Residents need an entry or exit visa at the border guard posts in both countries each time they cross to the other side. Passports for residents are issued by the People’s Committee in the commune.

This process seems fairly straightforward when it comes to facilitating the movement of people across an international land border, but it is not quite so for Pho Bang locals. Although just about everyone crosses over to the weekly market, not everyone has a passport – or sees the utility of getting one.

“I didn’t apply for the passport certificate,” Sung Thi Hoi, a 17-year-old resident who is with the Hoa (Chinese) ethnic group, said honestly. “I have used the shortcuts (to cross into China) since I was a little girl,” she continued. “There was a time I was caught by Chinese border patrol, but they let me go. I just buy miscellaneous things in the market without doing any harm.”

“Many Hmong ethnic minority people do not possess a passport too since they need to take a long, twisted road to get to the border patrol office to get an entry or exit visa,” she continued. “They would rather use shortcuts, which are much faster.”

These shortcuts are walking trails through rocky, mountainous terrain that many villagers prefer to use to cross the Vietnam-China border here at Vietnam’s northernmost point, even it they are physically more taxing than using the paved concrete roads that lead to the official border crossing.

From the Pho Bang border gate, people have to walk some three kilometres to the fair in Ma Pung. To avoid being accosted by Chinese border guards at the station located right on the road leading to the market, those coming from the Vietnamese side use a small path over the mountain that leads to the same market. Accustomed to using this rocky path, they walk swiftly and surely, not bothered a bit by the protruding rocky edges along the way.

Chinese influence in Pho Bang.

“Normally, people use the shortcuts with no problems. But there are times when they are stopped by Chinese border patrols who carry out careful examination at the checkpoint into the market,” explains Ly Thi Xuan.

According to Xuan, some Vietnamese villagers have been caught by Chinese border patrol and were punished by being asked to face the wall the whole day. That is light enough – if they did not obey those orders, they would get fined. This may be the case because the villagers from Pho Bang are just headed for a simple fair, so the patrol forces on both sides of the border are not too strict. Locals recall that when the border guards were stricter and barred people from using the trails, the visitors to the Chinese fair clearly thinned.

People from the Vietnam side of the border find the goods at the Ma Pung market cheaper than those at home. They are also on the lookout for items such as machines and gadgets like sewing machines, vegetable cutting machines and maize grinding machines, which are not easy to find in smaller markets in Ha Giang.

Xuan, for instance, is a tailor who often goes to Ma Pung to buy fabrics. She sometimes buys ready-made clothes to sell in the Ha Giang market as well.

Vua Mi No, a 17-year-old Hmong, is pleased with the vegetable cutting machine he bought at 200 renminbi (about 29 U.S. dollars), because he could not find one at home. “My mind is at rest with the machine’s one-year warranty,” he added.

At the market, it is not uncommon to hear several languages being spoken, or mixing languages in one conversation or commercial transaction. Pho Bang residents can be heard speaking to one another in more than language, since Ha Giang is a place where many ethnic groups are found. Some speak Kinh, the official Vietnamese language, but also Chinese. Some youngsters are fluent in Kinh and Chinese, as well as the language of groups like the Hmong.

Residents from towns farther than Pho Bang, such as those like Vua Thi Dinh from Yen Minh district, 30 km away, take the trouble of taking a bus to Pho Bang, staying overnight and going to the Ma Pung market early the next morning to purchase goods to sell again later. Some even make the trip across the border to Yunnan, China just to buy a kilogramme of meat or fruits for their families.

The Ma Pung market is busy for the first few hours of the morning, and soon winds down. As the market activity slows, the buyers who came to the market using the main, official road head home on the same route, and those who took the shortcut through the mountain trails will converge at a corner of the market before heading back that way.

No matter how heavy their purchase-filled baskets are on their backs, the visitors from the Vietnamese side make their way home on the winding, uneven paths as rapidly and as surely as they did on the way to Ma Pung.

(*This story, produced under the Imaging Our Mekong media fellowship programme 2007-08.)

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