Lunan Yi Nationality Autonomous County



Lunan Yi Nationality Autonomous County is in the southeast of Kunming City. It is 78km from the main
urban area of Kunming and covers a land area of 1,719 square kilometers, Its permanent population
amounts to 240,300, wherein the ethnic minorities account for 34%. With long history and colorful ethnic
culture, it is the gate for Southeast Yunnan and the coastal area like Guangdong Province and Guangxi
Province to enter Kunming, as well as the key passage for the Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam to
enter China.

On October 1998, Lunan Yi Nationality Autonomous County was renamed as Shilin Yi Nationality Autonomous County. Because the famous
scenery Stone Forest is situated here, which composed mainly of peculiar rock pillars supplemented with karst caves, lakes, waterfalls and other
scenic attractions and tinged with rich local flavor. The stone forest is scattered throughout the 300 square kilometers of Lunan County. It is a
special type of karst landform. These rock pillars, high- and stragely shaped, spread widely and are well preserved.

Shilin County has been listed into the 47 experimental counties for accelerated county economic development, 10 special cultural industry
counties and 40 experimental counties for key county construction in the province. It is a national sanitary county, a provincial garden county and
a provincial peaceful county.

The Yi are the second largest minority Nationality in Southwest China with a population in 1995 of just over 7 million. Some 3 million live in Yunnan
Province with large numbers around Lake Dianchi, Kunming and Lunan.

Festivals with religious overtones are important for the Yi, their most important being the Torch Festival on the
24th day of the 6th lunar month. This commemorates the occasion in the distant past when a Yi deity sent a
plague of locusts to support their protest against an unfair grain tax and the people burned flares and torches
made of bunches of reeds to disperse the locusts after having the tax removed. Festival activities include
horse racing, bull fighting, wrestling, singing and dancing, the festivities culminating in a night-time torch
parade. Women traditionally carry yellow umbrellas and the men drink maize wine out of a communal
earthenware jar through very long straws.