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Fun and games

With 158 festivals a year, the Miao people of Guizhou have plenty to celebrate, unlike their livestock. Words and pictures by Trefor Moss

Reading Time:4 minutes
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The village of Langde.

It starts with a holler. The crowd answers by leaping from the path and sprinting, splashing through the paddy fields as two fighting dogs fly off their chains. Within seconds, the animals disappear into an O of spectators that forms but then shifts fluidly to accommodate the dogs' random movements as they snarl and tumble in the muck, the oohs and aahs providing anyone who didn't dash for a front-row spot with a vivid commentary.

When it's over, there's a sense that it could have been far worse. Neither animal looks badly mauled. More to the point, most of the other dogs at this event are being cooked and eaten. When you order a hot dog at a party in Guizhou province, you get what you ask for.

It's early November, and the Miao people are celebrating their New Year. The Miao are all about festivals - they have 158 of them a year, it's said - but the New Year festival in Chongan, a small town in eastern Guizhou, has a reputation for being one of the best. Two-thousand people have come, the men in shabby work clothes and the women in spectacular traditional costume, all rainbow colours and flamboyant silver jewellery.

The dog fights are only the prelude: the buffalo fights draw the big crowds. These encounters start slowly, as the lumbering beasts size each other up and lazily butt heads. Onlookers stand-ing recklessly close savour the moment of tension. Hundreds of others have found much more sensible vantage points, on the surrounding ridges. Then comes the explosion: the buffalo suddenly stampede, horns flailing and hooves thudding, towards one doomed corner of the crowd. Panic sets in. People fall over each other, slipping in the mud, desperate to avoid being crushed by the charging bulls. At the last second, a gap opens in the floundering human wall and the beasts - one fleeing, the other pursuing - tear off across the fields.

Shaken, I ask a fellow spectator - an old peasant who smokes a black cigar inserted vertically into the bowl of a worn brass pipe - how this dangerous spectacle compares with past festivals.

"Oh, it's always like this," he shrugs. And do people ever die? "Not recently they haven't."

It's a party that befits this tough, no-nonsense part of China. Not that the Chongan festival is just about violence and thrill-seeking: there's singing and dancing, traditional musical troupes, a bouncy castle for the children and other funfair-style attractions. But as you enjoy these gentler diversions, just keep an eye on your surroundings: young men are staging impromptu horse races, blowing whistles to warn the strolling partygoers that they're galloping along the footpaths. And there's always the risk of being bulldozed by half a tonne of bovine fury that's just burst clear of the fighting pen.

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