Jino

The Jino, whose autonym means those who honour the maternal uncle, formerly rendered Youle, are a small Tibeto-Burman people of the Jino Mountains in eastern Jinghong, Xishuangbanna, rainforest famed since the late Ming for Pu'er tea gardens. Han merchants arrived in the seventeenth century, and in 1729 the Yongzheng emperor built a brick city with a five-hundred-man garrison; malaria soon forced its withdrawal, and rule passed to a Youle chief and then the Dai tusi of Cheli, who annexed it by force.

They speak Jino, a Yi-branch Tibeto-Burman language without a script, keeping records by carved wooden notches, and live by hill farming, hunting, ironworking and bamboo weaving.

Their society kept matrilineal traces, and creation epics tell of the flood siblings Mahei and Maniu and the ancestress Yaobai, who shaped heaven and earth and scattered the tea seeds over their mountains.