Lahu

The traditional Lahu religion is polytheistic. The Lahu, a Tibeto-Burman people of the mountains along the Lancang River in southern Yunnan, believed in a great number of spirits, against which they held exorcism rites, and the outcome was checked by reading an egg oracle.

Their creation epic, the Mupa Mipa, whose title means making heaven and earth, runs to seventeen chapters and some 2,300 lines. It was chanted by village singers called pokuo gakuo, and tells how the sky, earth, sun, moon, living things and humankind came to be. Lahu tradition also holds that their ancestors came out of a gourd. Buddhism reached the Lahu in the late seventeenth century and became widespread among them.