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Longing to do more with her life than herd goats, Yang Erche Namu ran away from Zuosuo, a tiny village at the foot of the Tibetan plateau. As the 13-year-old girl fled, her appalled mother hurled rocks at her. For the next week, Namu walked on dirt paths before arriving at Yanyuan, the nearest county. She joined a song-and-dance troupe there, won a scholarship to study music in Shanghai, became a well-known lounge singer, married an American, divorced, and became China's first writer to lay bare her sexual adventures. In 1997, 14 years after abandoning her village, Namu wrote a best-selling book, Leaving the Kingdom of Daughters, which speaks candidly of her eight foreign lovers. She presented her libidinous ways as a natural part of her tempestuous life: after all, Namu belongs to the Mosuo, a matrilineal tribe with a tradition of letting women take many lovers and bear children without marrying.
Sex appeals. And today, the area around Lugu Lake, the Mosuo homeland where Namu grew up, has become a chic tourist destination, thanks almost entirely to the renown that Namu's book has brought it. With her words as a guide, some 50,000 mainland tourists are expected to flock this year to what used to be an unknown backwater. That's up from almost zero five years ago. This sudden influx of visitors has led to the usual excesses of prostitution, crime and karaoke. But it's also led to something vital and unexpected. Far from merely exploiting the Mosuo (pronounced "mwo-swo") as a kind of tribal freak show, the swarm of tourists has engendered a native pride that helps the Mosuo keep their traditions alive. "They think if thousands of Chinese come to see their lifestyle, it must be valuable," says Eileen Walsh, who recently completed a doctorate at Temple University on tourism's impact on the Mosuo.
Minorities occupy an uncomfortable place in Chinese society. The loyalty of Tibetans and Uighurs, for example, is often questioned, with their monasteries and mosques heavily monitored to detect signs of an independence movement. In a country where the overwhelming majority belongs to the Han group, minority culture tends to be subsumed. For instance, the Manchus, who governed during China's last imperial dynasty, are today nearly indistinguishable from the other "old 100 names," as Han Chinese call themselves. So the Mosuo's cultural survival is both surprising and heartening.
The Mosuo's success stems in large part from their knack for preserving their traditions while shrewdly exploiting them. The people of Luoshui, a village on the banks of Lugu Lake, have proved especially adept at this, transforming their entire settlement into a tourist collective. All of Luoshui's families participate in the three main visitor events—rowing dugout canoes, guiding horses and dancing around an evening bonfire—and they share the profits. Village elders have wisely barred motorboats from the lake so that it remains a peaceful, pristine attraction. And they have further safeguarded the waterfront's natural beauty by creating a red-light district a kilometer away, next to the police station. On a darker note, the district once attracted Chinese prostitutes from neighboring Sichuan province who wore Mosuo costumes. These days the working girls come mostly from Mosuo villages.
The Mosuo have a culture so marketable it could have been designed by anthropologists and tour guides. Mosuo shamans cure diseases by chanting volumes of memorized liturgies to drive off ghosts. Women carry on the family name and run households, adding a dollop of feminism to a male-dominated country. Most unique, though, is the Mosuo tradition of "walking marriage." Arranged matches, for centuries the Chinese norm, are unheard of. Instead, women commonly take several lovers during lives of serial monogamy, without suffering scarlet letter opprobrium. The men visit the women's homes at night, often secretly; any resulting children are raised by the woman's family. Even the name of the woman's trysting room is brochure-perfect: the "flower chamber."
Chinese writers often eroticize the Mosuo as denizens of a lakeside love nest. And the locals wink at the visitors' romantic expectations, cannily recognizing the commercial potential. At the popular Mosuo Folk Culture Museum, which sits in a cornfield near the lake, employees perform a mating ritual. A man sings of his love from outside his sweetheart's window. She answers in a beguiling falsetto that "My uncle lies awake; you must wait." But he can't wait, and, to ribald encouragement from the crowd, he scales his way into her second-story window. Although jumping from window to window does sometimes happen, the singing doesn't follow the pattern, and a guide quickly explains that men "never walk chaotically from house to house." There follows a lengthy lecture on how walking marriages underpin stable families. One Chinese man asks if he can have a walking marriage too. "If the woman will have you," comes the coy reply. It's pleasant entertainment, and the tourists leave understanding something of this unique tradition.
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