Ten Thousand Things

"Ten Thousand Things" is a Buddhist expression representing the dynamic interconnection and simultaneous unity and diversity of everything in the universe.

Where Women Rule in Asia – Xiaoli Zhou's "The Women's Kingdom" – Matriarchal Mosuo in the Tibetan Himalayas


Shanghai-born filmmaker Xiaoli Zhou's "The Women's Kingdom" offers a wonderful window into the world of the Mosuo, an exuberant and engaging matriarchal people who live in a beautiful region near Lugu Lake in the Tibetan Himalayas in southwest China.

American public television program "Frontline/World Rough Cut" features an excellent background interview with Zhou and both the full-length twenty-minute and an edited nine-minute viewing of Zhou's documentary at its website:

"I enjoy being a girl," beams 16-year-old La Mu. "Girls can do anything. Isn't that great?"

It's an unusual sentiment to hear in China, a country whose traditional preference for boys combined with its stringent population control policy limiting urban couples to one child has resulted in an inconvenient shortage of women and wives. Male babies in China now outnumber girls by a ratio of 112 to 100; some researchers say it's 117 to 100. But La Mu lives beyond the strictures of mainstream Chinese society. She is part of the Mosuo, an ethnic minority that has a matriarchal society, one of the last in the world.

On Rough Cut this week, you'll meet La Mu and several extraordinary Mosuo women as we travel to "The Women's Kingdom" in southwest China, not far from the Tibetan Buddhist city the Chinese have renamed Shangri-La. Reporter Xiaoli Zhou, who comes from Shanghai, told us she had always wanted to visit the Mosuo region to see for herself how much freedom a woman might enjoy in China...

In the 1970s, a road was built into the mountainous area where the Mosuo live. Before that time, the region was very isolated. But, since then, it has opened up to the outside world, and in recent years, the Chinese have marketed the area – particularly the beautiful Lugu Lake region – as a tourist destination...

"Why would you want the marriage license to handcuff yourself?" a blunt-spoken Mosuo woman named Cha Cuo asks Zhou. For Mosuo women, it is not an idle question. In their matriarchal society, they do not marry. They practice what they call "walking marriage" in which a woman may invite a man into her hut to spend a "sweet night," but he must leave by daybreak. If a pregnancy results from this union, the child will be raised by the woman and her family.

"You Han people [the majority Chinese] are so different," Cha Cuo tells Zhou in the film. "If the kid doesn't have a father, only a mother, and lives in the city, people would call him a wild child. Who would ever say that here?"

The 27-year-old Cha Cuo is one of the most memorable characters you are likely to meet on screen. Self-assured, physically strong, emotionally direct, we see her singing and dancing, and rowing across a deep blue lake. But in frank conversations with Zhou, she also reveals the strains in her life and her doubts about the future of Mosuo culture.

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