WEARING beaded necklaces and traditional wool costumes, members of the Lhoba people recently danced around the Yin-Yang Tree in a real-life version of the Tree of Souls from the movie “Avatar.”

    Unlike the mysterious Na’Vis depicted in the hit film, though, the Lhoba people, with a total population of more than 3,100, were performing a traditional sword dance to entertain visitors to the forest-concealed area in the southeast of the Tibet Autonomous Region.

    “The costume has been listed as a national-level intangible cultural heritage,” said Dawa Chodron, a 31-year-old local tour guide who returned to her hometown after graduating from high school in a second-tier city in southwestern China.

    The sword dance is a Lhoba tradition celebrating the harvest, hunting and the practice of becoming sworn brothers, according to Chodron.

    Most of the Lhoba, one of China’s smallest ethnic minorities in terms of population, live in Mainling County of Nyingchi Prefecture in Tibet.

    Located near the Brahmaputra River, Chodron’s hometown of Qionglin Village in Nanyi Lhoba Ethnic Township is home to the largest cluster of the ethnic group.

    Chodron’s ancestors were the first people to cultivate the Himalayas and the ethnic group continued to lead a primitive life as late as 1950.

    The Lhoba have their own spoken language, but no written form. They once kept records by carving notches in wood or tying knots, and most of them also speak Tibetan.

    To avoid attacks by bigger clans, the Lhoba lived a sequestered life of hunting and planting highland barley and buckwheat. They cut trees, processed timber and collected herbal medicines to occasionally trade for food.

    Tourists have been coming to the Lhoba’s secret world since the 1990s. The completion of Mainling Airport in 2005 freed visitors from troublesome mountain treks.

    To protect the environment, Mainling County caps the number of visitors at 2,000 per day. Visitors are not allowed to drive vehicles in the villages, leaving them at the tourist center instead.

    A two-story white building next to log cabins is the home of a villager named Penba. As basic as the building looks from the outside, its well-decorated rooms are full of modern household devices, including a television, washing machine and refrigerator.

    Though the natural conditions are unfavorable, the Lhoba people have managed to glimpse the outside world through the magic of Weibo and WeChat, China’s popular platforms for social networking and instant messaging, respectively.

    Penba’s family bought a computer and installed Internet service a few years ago at the request of his daughter, Zhoima, who studies online.

    “Now we are no longer labeled barbarians, as ecotourism has transformed hunters and loggers into cultural entertainers,” said the 50-year-old man.

    One of the shows that Penba often presents to visitors involves fortune-telling by burning an egg. He puts an egg in a stove on a wooden frame, then sets it on fire. Penba said egg whites flowing through the cracks indicate good luck, but if yolk leaks out, it’s a bad sign.

    “It’s one of many fortune-telling means we had before. When people got sick or suffered from something bad, we turned to fortune-tellers or witch doctors,” Penba said. “Now we go to the township hospital instead. They have doctors who graduated from colleges in big cities and they are really good.”

    All 176 residents of Qionglin Village are covered by the national medical care system. For serious illnesses, reimbursements can reach as high as 80,000 yuan (US$13,064).

    Penba’s family earned 60,000 yuan last year by growing highland barley, corn, and Chinese caterpillar fungus, and from tourism-related revenue.

    Gesang, chief of the county publicity office and the first Lhoba university graduate, said tourism has aroused the Lhoba people’s awareness of passing on their culture and preserving the ecological environment.

    Gesang has completed almost three years of field research and published a book on the development of Lhoba culture.

    “It’s our responsibility to carry on the Lhoba civilization as we try to keep pace with the times,” he said.

    (SD-Agencies)