Baima

The Baima, whose name means White Horse, are a people of the mountains on the Sichuan and Gansu border, chiefly in Pingwu, Jiuzhaigou and Wen County, where they call themselves Bai. They descend from the Baima Di, a Di tribe of western China linked with the Qiang.

After Songtsen Gampo built the Tibetan Empire in the 600s, the Baima were drawn into the Tibetan world and gradually exchanged their old Di speech for an Amdo Tibetan tongue; their language stays unwritten, its symbol system used only in ritual.

They kept a religion of nature and totem worship, later coloured by Bon, honouring the Mountain God as their highest deity through dances such as the Caogai, and absorbed Buddhist and Daoist ideas without their own monasteries or lamas.