Sin Chai Village

Four kilometers out of the center of Sa Pa, the houses thin and the fields begin. The road keeps climbing along the slope of the Hoàng Liên Sơn range. Then a small valley opens, quiet and ringed by forest, mountain and fields laid out in steps. This is the village of Sín Chải.

The Lào Cai newspaper describes Sín Chải as a fairly still place, held close by nature, with clean air. It is a hamlet of Hoàng Liên commune, in Sa Pa, in Lào Cai province. It is also one of the Mông villages nearest to the center of Sa Pa.

The people who live here are mostly Mông. Their way of life is bound to the shape of the land. Houses stand on steep slopes. Terraced fields cling to the mountain walls, and vegetable gardens and cornfields are tucked in around the houses.

According to the Lào Cai newspaper, the terraces here are hundreds of years old. People opened the land one level at a time along the mountainside and led water down from a stream high above. From that water came rice. Each season gives the fields a color of its own. In March and April the flooded terraces gleam silver-white. In May and June the young rice is a deep, glossy green. It turns gold in September and is harvested in October.

Craft here cannot be separated from daily life. The Lào Cai newspaper records that a Mông woman who reaches adulthood must know how to spin hemp, weave cloth and sew skirts and jackets. The work begins with growing the hemp, which is harvested in early August. The bark is stripped, the fiber is spun into thread, and the thread is woven into cloth. Then the cloth is dyed with indigo, using leaves and herbal ash water, until it takes its characteristic deep blue. On that cloth the woman embroiders geometric patterns, spirals and crosses. She uses colored thread, or draws the designs in beeswax. A single piece of cloth means many days, even weeks, at the loom and with needle and thread.

This is a working craft, not a performance. When a woman sits embroidering in front of her house, that is only an ordinary working hour in her day. Into every stitch and every strand of indigo goes the quiet, lasting rhythm of Mông life in this place.

Sín Chải also holds a memory for those who once climbed Fansipan on foot by the old way. Nhân Dân records that, before the cable car, the route through Sín Chải was one of the two main ways to the summit. It was shorter than the Cát Cát route, but the path through the forest was longer, steeper and harder going. This part of the history is seldom told. It ties the village to the long story of Fansipan and to the footsteps of people of the high country.

In the middle of the valley, there is the sound of water running from a stream down to the terraced fields. A scent of indigo drifts on the wind. And the tiers of fields change color with the seasons, like an enormous piece of embroidered cloth spread along the mountainside.

Up there on the slope of the Hoàng Liên Sơn range, clouds still drift across the peaks and kitchen smoke still hangs over the wooden houses. A Mông woman still bends over her loom and stitches on the same patterns that generations of mothers before her stitched.