The Miao and Poison: Interactions on China's Southwest Frontier

A few months after returning from field research in Yunnan, southwest China, I met with a visiting Chinese anthropologist. When he learned that I had been working among the Hua Miao (Flowery Miao), he became very concerned. Did I not realize the danger I had put myself in, he wanted to know. Had I taken meals with them? Was I not aware that these people were likely to poison outsiders with a secret brew that all the women know how to make and use? I assured him that I had not been ill with anything except flu during my entire stay. He was not reassured. The poison, he assured me solemnly, has a delayed effect: if I returned in time, I might be given an antidote (secretly, of course) and would be all right. It was one of the more bizarre of the dinner conversations I have had in Ann Arbor. But that linkage of the Miao and poison clicked with something I had been reading a short time earlier. In the Fall of 1904, a Methodist missionary named Samuel Pollard was involved in the early stages of a wide-spread conversion movement among the Hua Miao and was traveling around visiting various villages between Zhaotong (Yunnan) and Weining (Guizhou). In his (Pollard 1904) diary entry for Sept. 4, 1904, he notes: