Blang

The Blang are an Austroasiatic people of southern Yunnan. Tang chronicles of 618 to 907 call them the Puzi man, and Yuan, Ming and Qing records call them the Puman. Their largest settlements lie in the Bulang mountains of Menghai in Xishuangbanna, and Chinese ethnographers trace them to the ancient Pu of the Hundred Pu tribes.

They speak Blang, a Palaungic Mon-Khmer language without a native script, and many also use Dai or Chinese. Organized in small land-owning clans in bamboo stilt-house villages, they are among the oldest known tea cultivators, tending ancient tea forests on the hills rather than monoculture plantations, and also grow rice and dry-land crops.

In Xishuangbanna they profess Theravada Buddhism learned from Dai neighbours, layered over ancestor worship and animist rites, while Bulangshan villages retain traces of matrilineal custom, linking a child's name to its mother's.