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Here are a couple of purchases from the summer, apparently from Hainan Island (and therefore presumably Li). They are of a slightly different type to Hainan textiles I've seen before, so I'd be interested to know if forum members have seen similar pieces recently. Of the two, the skirt seems older, but there are similarities between the embroidery on the base of the skirt and the red embroidery on the base of the jacket.

Both are cotton with silk embroidery.

The first 2 photos of the jacket that you show I would definitely say are of a Li jacket. Not quite sure which dialect as Qi, Meifu and Ha can have similar fronts. Qi can have an embroidered panel on the back and I think also Meifu. I like the embroidery on yours. I need to spend some more time pouring over references to get a better feel/idea of dialect group.

The skirt I am very much more unsure about and especially not sure if it is Li. It has quite a similarity to a couple I have seen billed as Dai from Yunnan. Mine that I show is more clearly linked to some Tai skirts from Vietnam with the supplementary warp stripes in the indigo which might support the Yunnan location.

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Pamela

http://www.tribaltextiles.info
on-line tribal textiles resource

Thanks Pamela, especially for the Dai skirt picture (very nice, I like the patterning very much).

I think you are right that the skirt i bought is Dai: the design at the base is quite similar. Now that you mention it, i realize that there is some similarity also with a skirt i bought some time ago that is definitely from this region (pictures below). This was described to me as being from the "Jing Hong" region of Yunnan, which is close to where the borders of Laos, Vietnam and Burma meet Yunnan. I didn't make the connection at first (the skirt is silk, supplementary weft and a different shape) but the designs are quite similar, especially in the colored stripes.

There's definitely a tendency amongst traders to label items as "from Hainan" .. i think this particular appelation sells!

Greetings All-
The three skirts posted are definitely Tai and are usually thought to come from NE Laos or adjacent Vietnam. I wasn't aware of them being in Yunnan, but that is always possible as the population of Xishuangbanna, in southern Yunnan Province, is predominantly Dai/Tai. The Tai skirts I'm including below were from either Laos or Vietnam. (Note that on Chris' second skirt the waistband is missing and what looks to be a waistband is actually a hemband.)

The Li jacket is from the Ha-speaking people and is a wedding jacket, or so I'm told. The embroidered panels are among my favorite embroideries- very fine work, enigmatic, archetypal designs, all done in silk. We have a nice old example available http://www.tribaltrappings.com/TACH_6.html. Below is a wedding jacket and the skirt offered to me in Kaili.

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Susan Stem

http://www.tribaltrappings.com
http://tribaltrappings.blogspot.com/

Thanks Susan for your very informative comments!

So that means the skirt I posted was the wrong way up, and what I had labelled the "waistband" was actually the hem. I've re-posted it below the right way up... The motifs are very similar to the ones on one of your two skirts

I have not seen many of these skirts with Chinese traders, so I suspect they are uncommon. There are a fair number of jackets around however that are also said to be "Dai", with distinctive hems that are either embroidered or decorated with parallel bands of recycled silk and other colored textiles. I attach a picture of one of these. The motifs seem to relate more to Chinese decorative traditions, in comparison with the skirts.

Thanks also for the identification of the Ha dialect jacket!

It has been a while since I originally posted the two skirts (CET34 and CET22) above but I thought I would update this post since I recently got a copy of Michael C Howard and Kim Be Howard's book "Textiles of the Daic Peoples of Vietnam" (Studies in the Material Cultures of SE Asia Vol 3, White Lotus, Bangkok, 2002), based on a recommendation from Pamela, and it has proved very useful for identifying these items.

As Susan says, the skirt CET22 is indeed Tai, and the Howard book (page 260 onwards) has several examples identified as "Tai Muang, Nghe An Province" that are so similar that mine can only have come from the same place or a nearby location.

The decoration and style of CET34 is generally similar to skirts that Howard identifies as "Tai Thanh, Nghe An province" (page 269 onwards).

The authors also say that related people weave similar items in nearby Laos: Nghe An is the "narrow" part of Vietnam and Laos is just a stone's throw away. The mystery is how these two skirts ended up in the hands of traders based in Kaili in Guizhou, since Nghe An is not near the China-Vietnam border, and Nghe An has its own thriving trade in old textiles. By rights they should have ended up for sale in Chiang Mai, during the period from 1995-2000. The traders who sold them to me had no idea they were from Vietnam.

The Howards mention the traditional trade in textiles between people of different ethnic groups, mentioning Tai fondness for Lao textiles for example, and it is possible that these items were simply sold or bartered decades ago and have been on the China side of the border for a long time.

By the way, Volume 4 in this series (by the same authors) " Textiles of the Central Highlands of Vietnam" is also proving very useful in identifying Yunnan textiles from the China side and I can thoroughly endorse Pamela's recommendation for these two books for anyone interested in Chinese ethnic minority textiles. I didn't think I was a collector of Vietnamese textiles, but it turns out that I am! Several other pieces I bought over the last year are turning out to have a provenance in Vietnam (might post something on that ... if i can catch up with all the photography and labelling...)