The Li people like roast meat and pickled sour meat mixed with rice meal and wild herbs. Arica is a favorite with women, who chew it with shell ashes wrapped in green leaves; the juice dyes their lips red. The Lis are also heavy smokers and drinkers.
Several families related by blood live together, pooling their labor and sharing the harvest. They dwell in boat-shaped thatched bamboo houses with woven bamboo or rattan floors half a meter above the ground. These houses have mud plastered walls.
The Li people are monogamous, and close relatives are not allowed to marry each other. Before liberation in 1949, marriages were arranged by parents when their children were still young and bride prices were as high as several hundred silver dollars or several head of cattle. Those who could not afford the bride price were indentured to the bride's family for several years. Shortly after the wedding, the bride went back to live with her own parents until she knew she had become pregnant. These old customs have gradually gone out of practice since liberation.
Death was announced by the firing of guns, and the body was put into a coffin hewed out of a single log and was buried in the village cemetery. Before 1949, animism and ancestor worship were common among the Lis who also believed in witchcraft. All this has been abolished since the island was liberated in 1950.
The Lis are known for their skill in weaving kapok. They are also famed for their knowledge of herbal medicine. Their remedies for snakebites and rabies have proved very effective.
They keep a primitive calendar and calculate according to a 12-day cycle, with each day named after an animal, similar to the 12 earthly branches used by the Han people.
Socio-economic Conditions
The Li economy was backward and development was lopsided before liberation in 1949. Over 94 per cent of the Li area was in semi-colonial, semi-feudal society and the landlord economy was fairly developed. In general, the level of development in agriculture and handicraft there was lower than that of the Han areas, so were commerce and animal husbandry. People were impoverished under feudal exploitation and the Kuomintang government's heavy taxation.
In the heart of the Wuzhi Mountains, 13,000 Lis still lived a primitive communal life of collective farming by the time of liberation. A communal farm consisted of several families related by blood. They worked collectively and shared the harvests. This area was more backward than the rest of the island economically. The communal farms -- the "Hemus" -- fell into two major categories: smaller farms based on maternal or paternal blood relations and larger farms which admitted "outsiders" who had no blood ties with the original member families.
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