Walking marriage in the Women's Kingdom

I have to say, bless him, it was Chris's idea to go to Lugu Lake. Talk about an absolutely stunning place! The whole region was completely isolated right up until the 1970s, and managed to survive China's upheavals unscathed because it really was a forgotten land. Even today, the only damn road in is barely passable.

At 2,600 m above sea level, it is the highest-altitude lake in Yunnan province, a place that excels in both beautiful lakes and high altitudes. Lugu is also the second-deepest body of water in China, at some points deeper than 90 meters. So the lake, right, it's beautiful, high, deep and all that, but the real reason to go there is that this is where the Mosou live.

These are the famous citizens of the Last Matriarchy in the World. Only one of China's 56 designated ethnic minorities, the Mosuo population of 53,000 people is beyond tiny compared with the country staggering overall population of 1.3 billion, but still they do make the news here.

Matriarchy they might be, which interested me greatly, but to most of the other tourists the attraction is a bit more puerile. The Mosuo are best known in China for their tradition of zouhun, or walking marriage, in which youths who have gone through a coming of age ceremony at the age of 13 are permitted to choose their own axia, or relationship. This non-traditional union means that men visit their lovers only by "walking" to them at night and leaving in the morning back to their mom's house.

Men only contribute to and work for their mother's household. If there's a kid born, it is raised and supported only by the mother and her brothers. Women are free to take different sexual partners (an ideal genetic situation which accounts for the surprising lack of inbreeding in such a small gene pool), and there is no stigma attached to bearing children with different partners. Mosuo women carry on the family name, deal with the money and run the households, which are usually made up of several families. Each household elects one woman as the head, and these head matriarchs of each village govern the region by committee.

I was amazed to find a fully fledged matriarchy still functioning in this crazy world. But then I found the existence of this system all the more amazing in that this is in China. In the Confucian-beriddled land where boys are, to put it mildly, preferred.

Matriarchy it may be, but I would suggest that this system is just absolutely brilliant for the men of the Musou. Think about it. They get to live with their Mom all their lives, with all the absolute unconditional love that entails. Mom or the sisters deal with all the business, the marketing, the finances and the bills. The guys don't have to worry about supporting the kids, and get to raise their nieces and nephews. They get the sex, companionship and the warm bed at night without the day to day grind, or even worse, the perils of having made a bad life-partner choice.

I tell you what, you have NEVER seen such content looking blokes in your life, I swear.

Lugu Lake's isolation allowed Musou society's matrilineal system to survive, even during the bad old days of Communist suppression of ethnic and religious groups. But what Communism couldn't do, tourism just might. More and more outsiders arrive expecting some sort of utopian free love commune, and get a nice quiet busy little fishing and farming community. Lugu is referred to as the 'real' Shangri-la so often it's nauseating - especially to those of us who know that regardless of whatever China says, Shangri-la is a blinking fictious place from a blinking piece of badly written fiction by an English opium fiend, dammit! But I digress.

Misconceptions (or canny exploitation) of the Mosuo's sexual proclivities -- depending on which way you look at it -- have brought prostitution to the area just outside Lugu Lake. Apparently Han Chinese women, from outside the region, don the funny hats and the bright shawls to pass themselves off as Mosuo, and a walking marriage costs 300 yuan.

Here's another World Only stat: the Mosuo language is not rendered in writing, but in Dongba, the only pictographic language used in the world today, a language which has no words for murder, war, rape or jail. Or commericalisation.