Jingpo (Kachin) (景颇族)

The Jingpo, about 160,000 people at China's 2020 census, are one of the country's 56 officially recognised ethnic groups, living mainly in Dehong Dai and Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture — a stretch of western Yunnan that borders Myanmar's Kachin State, where their kin form the largest subgroup of the Kachin peoples. Their social fabric sorts lineages into chiefly and commoner houses governed by elders' councils, and their great collective rite — Munao Zongge — gathers tens of thousands into synchronized procession around carved pillar-boards depicting sun, mountain, and migration paths.

Munao festivals were once royal ceremonies of the Jingpo aristocracy; in 1983 the Dehong prefecture people's congress made Munao Zongge a legal prefecture festival, fixed to the fifteenth and sixteenth days of the first lunar month, and in 2006 it entered China's first national list of intangible cultural heritage, declared by Longchuan county in Yunnan. The dance is held on both sides of the border. Women's tubular skirts blaze with woven sun-ray patterns that Jingpo tradition traces to descent from a sun-born ancestor, while hospitality feasts serve rice in folded leaves — the "green leaf banquet" that codes generosity into edible form.

The Jingpo language, Jingpho, belongs to the Tibeto-Burman family and is written in a Latin-based alphabet introduced by American Baptist missionaries in the late nineteenth century and later reformed; China has used an improved Latin orthography since 1957. It has no traditional script of its own — before the alphabet, records were kept by notching wood or tying knots. In China "Jingpo" is an umbrella name for five related groups, of which Jingpo proper belongs to the Jingpo branch while Zaiwa, Leqi, Lang'e and Bola are Burmish languages closer to Burmese and Achang. The Jingpho creation epic Manau Jaiwa was added to the national list in 2011.