Qeej

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Musicians with lusheng of different sizes in the Miao village of Lang De Shang Zhai in the mountains of southwest China's Guizhou Province . This is how visitors to the mountain village are welcomed. The playing posture and the mouth organ type with straight pipes is typical for the Dong in southwest China, but not for the Hmong.

Qeej ( Hmong language ), less often gaeng (pronounced “kreng”), also lusheng ( Chinese  蘆笙  /  芦笙 , Pinyin lúshēng ), less often lusha ( Chinese  芦 沙  /  蘆 沙 ), is one of the Miao ethnic group , to the as largest ethnic group belonging to the Hmong , in southwest China and by the Hmong in Thailand , Laos , Vietnam and other countries, mouth organ with six pipes made of bamboo and a wind chamber made of hardwood. The Dong , Gelao , Lahu and Sui also belong to the lusheng- playing ethnic groups in China . The high Chinese name for this mouth organ is lusheng , "bamboo mouth organ " or liusheng , "six pipes", from sheng , the old Chinese word for mouth organs, which today denotes another type of mouth organ. The Hmong call their most important musical instrument qeej . The pierced tongue instruments are manufactured in different sizes. In Laos and Thailand, the slightly curved pipes of the Hmong mouth organs are a maximum of 1.5 meters long, while the straight pipes of the Dong in southern China can reach almost four meters in length.

The qeej , used for light music , religious rites and annual festivals, enjoys a similar esteem among the Hmong as a cultural symbol as the mouth organ khaen among the Lao in the northeastern Thai region of Isan and in Laos. Only men build and play qeej . The main task of the qeej is to transmit spoken language into music for communication with the soul of the deceased during funeral ceremonies. The music of the qeej builds a bridge between this world and the other world. The funeral ceremony, which is carried out strictly according to traditional regulations, promotes the cohesion of the family-based community. If the rules are not strictly observed, the Hmong believe that the spirit of the deceased can bring bad luck to the family.

Origin and Distribution

Probably a courtship dance. Lusheng players and dancers with hand cymbals . Chinese painting of the Qing Dynasty , before 1911.

Forerunners of the Chinese mouth organ sheng are already in the 3rd millennium BC. Presumed before the Shang dynasty (18th century BC to 11th century BC). Since the writings of the Zhou dynasty (11th century BC to 256 BC), the Chinese people's small mouth organs have been commonly called sheng . They are considered to be the origin of all musical instruments with a resounding tongue . The oldest finds of mouth organs are two small specimens with 14 pipes in two rows and a wind chamber made from a calabash , dating from around 433 BC. And come from the grave of Margrave Yi von Zeng . The oldest images of mouth organs can be found on Chinese bronze vessels from the Warring States Period (475–221 BC), on which the instruments of an entire ritual orchestra are shown.

The creator goddess Nüwa in Chinese mythology and her husband and brother Fu Xi are depicted with a human head, human upper body and snake or dragon abdomen. As a male-female couple, they are a central motif on the stone grave reliefs of the Eastern Han Dynasty (25 AD to 220 AD) and in large parts of China. The figures are endowed with various attributes that make them distinguishable: sun and moon, compasses and square measure, or panpipes and snare drum. In the Book of Rites ( Li chi ), which is one of the canonical texts of Confucianism , Nuwa is mentioned as the inventor of the mouth organ.

There has been evidence of the existence of mouth organs in Southeast Asia since the beginning of the Christian era. In Iran, mouth organs were Sassanian period (until mid-7th century) as Mustak known her later name Mushtaq Sini ( "Chinese Mushtaq") points to the acquisition of the Chinese mouth organ. Organs can be found on decorations on bronze dong-son drums and in the 8th century they were used in the court orchestras of the Pyu , although the Burmese mouth organ hnying has long since disappeared. Despite their widespread use in Southeast Asia, mouth organs seem to have been absent from medieval Cambodia; they are not shown on the temple walls of Angkor Wat . Their range is necessarily limited to regions where bamboo thrives.

The oldest known description of the lusheng among the Miao comes from the year 1664. The Chinese author Lu Tze Yun describes a courtship dance in which young men play and sing wind instruments with six pipes at night. Since then the role of the oral organ in courtship at night has been mentioned several times. This is also the case with the missionary Will H. Hudspeth in 1937, who raves about the qeej when it is blown by young men on the outskirts of the village on moonlit nights and the antiphonal singing of the dancing girls is mixed in with their sounds .

There are several home-sent reports from European missionaries and ministers in China from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, but they reveal little about the music of the Miao. The missionaries were more interested in teaching minority peoples to sing Christian chants. The ceremonial use of the lusheng by the Hmong Daw ("White Hmong") was first described by the French Catholic missionary Aloys Schotter (1909), the other European observers of this time in southwest China only mention the lusheng at entertainment events and for courtship purposes. The French military commander Étienne Edmond Lunet de Lajonquière (1906), the Danish major Erik Seidenfaden (1881–1958) in 1923 and the Austrian ethnologist Hugo Bernatzik 1936/37 were among the few who wrote about the Hmong in northern Thailand. The qeej only found silk thread at funerals of the Hmong Daw around Chiang Mai and according to Bernatzik the qeej was not used for entertainment in northern Thailand. One of the essential areas of Hmong culture, the ceremonial use of the qeej , was excluded by all European observers until more detailed ethnological research in the second half of the 20th century.

In addition to the more highly developed instruments with a wooden wind capsule such as sheng, khaen and lusheng / qeej , simpler types with wind capsules made from a calabash (pumpkin mouth organs) occur today from the Philippines to northeast India. Its Chinese generic term is hulusheng ("pumpkin mouth organ"). These include the Chinese hulusi , the rasem in northeast India in the state of Tripura - the western limit of distribution of the Asian mouth organs, sompoton in Borneo and m'buot and kenh in Vietnam . In the northeast of Thailand, as in Laos, the khaen ( khéne ) is widespread, otherwise several regional pumpkin mouth organs are known in the area of ​​distribution of the qeej , such as the naw of the Lahu, which is called fulu by the Akha lachi and the Lisu .

Design

Qeej players in Thailand or Laos in an approximately horizontal playing position. Curved type of the Hmong, recognizable by the thick bass pipe.
Three South China-type lusheng with straight pipes in the Yunnan Minority Museum in Kunming .

In the old Chinese musical instrument classification according to the material used, Bayin ("eight sounds"), the mouth organ is in the bottle gourd category, regardless of the material actually used for the wind chamber. In the qeej , the wind chamber ( deaf , “lungs”) consists of two correspondingly hollowed-out, long oval shells made of soft wood. The two halves are glued together and held together by straps made from a vegetable fiber or other material. As with the khaen, the bamboo tubes ( ntiv , "fingers") lead through holes in the wind chamber and protrude about a quarter or fifth of their length on the underside. This is the main difference to sheng , in which the tubes are stuck with their ends in the wind chamber. The tubes, arranged in two rows of three next to each other, consist of a very thin type of bamboo that grows up to three and a half meters high ( Thai mia hia ). In northeast Thailand they are sealed airtight on the wind chamber with beeswax or a black wax ( kisut ). The kisut is obtained from a species of insect and is used instead of beeswax to glue and seal panpipes ( wot ) and jew's harps ( hun ).

There are two different types of lusheng : In the Hmong, the bamboo tubes are slightly curved and usually have lengths between 60 centimeters and 1.5 meters, whereas the lusheng of the Dong in southern China can reach up to four meters with straight bamboo tubes. The tubes are closed at the lower end, at the upper end are sometimes thicker bamboo tubes or gourds as a bell (Chinese kuoyin guan ) put over. A punch tongue is required for every pipe ; it is located on the bamboo tube inside the wind chamber and is usually made of bronze . A thin sheet of bronze sheet is knocked out with a hammer while it is cold, then cut to size and inserted into a slot on the bamboo tube. An attached sheet metal sleeve serves as the mouthpiece ( ncauj ).

The six pipes of the qeej produce seven tones because the shortest, thickest and loudest sounding pipe, ntiv luav, produces two tones spaced apart by a whole tone. This pipe has two or three punch tongues. When the finger hole is closed, the lower tone sounds; if the finger hole remains open, the higher tone sounds as a drone tone . In addition to the smallest, the longest pipe is only used for a drone, the four middle pipes remain for the melody. Common tone sequences are g – a – c'– d'– e'– g 'and a – c'– d'– e'– g'– a'.

The player blows through a long pipe that is either fastened at an approximately right angle to the pipes on a narrow side of the wind capsule or is usually the extension of the wind capsule made of the same wood. The Hmong player holds the blowing pipe approximately vertically downwards and the chanter horizontally forwards with the curvature pointing upwards. In mouth organs with straight pipes in southern China, the blowing pipe and the pipes form an angle of up to 45 degrees to each other, so in these cases the pipes stick up almost vertically when the player holds the blowing pipe at an angle downwards. The long blow pipe distinguishes both types of lusheng from the khaen mouth organ , the wind chamber of which is held directly in front of the mouth when playing. Each whistle has an air hole at a distance of up to about ten centimeters above the wind capsule, which must be covered by the fingers of both hands, which are on the side of the wind capsule, before a tone can be heard in the respective whistle. When the air hole is open, the air escapes here and no sound-producing resonance vibrations build up in the tube. The pitch and sound depend on the shape of the tongue and the length of the tube. The bamboo tubes can be filed inside to optimize the sound.

Style of play and cultural significance

Chinese folklore group from Guizhou Province at a folklore festival in Prague , 2010. Straight bamboo tubes, vertical playing position in southern China.
Dance by students on the outskirts of Vientiane . The girls sing, the boys play qeej . Curved bamboo tubes, horizontal playing posture of the Hmong.

The external assessment of the Hmong as less civilized shifting farmers in the mountains on the edge of the Chinese high culture is a stereotype that in Chinese sources goes back to the 27th century BC. Goes back to BC. In contrast, the Hmong set a myth of origin that is passed on in stories, sung poems, ritual texts and a secret language. Recourse to the cultural tradition is of additional importance for the Hmong who have fled their homeland. Tradition has it that the Hmong migrated from a northern region to southern China many thousands of years ago. At the beginning of the 19th century, many Hmong from the mountains of southern China were pushed into the northern regions of Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. A third escape in the history of the Hmong forced many Hmong to leave their homeland after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. This experience and the cultural tradition ensure the cohesion of the non-homogeneous, multilingual ethnic group that is now scattered in many countries. In China, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam, there is still a sensitive relationship between the Hmong and state power to varying degrees.

In the absence of a written language, the myths were passed down orally until the 20th century. The explanation for the - emphatically in contrast to the Chinese - lack of writing in the Hmong is provided by several myths that deal with books that were once in existence, that were accidentally swallowed by someone (human or cow) and that now continue to exist as "entwined memories". The orally preserved, collective memory of the Hmong appears to be superior to the written tradition of the Chinese because it does not require any material form and can therefore neither be destroyed nor lost in any other way. With a lot of feeling, songs tell about the distant homeland, where the souls of the Hmong scattered around the world are supposed to return after death. For Hmong in the Diaspora, the use of qeej has this new utopian role. For today's Hmong in the United States, qeej cultural programs are an anchor of their national identity. Similar to traditional costumes, the qeej embodies the ethnicity of the ethnic minorities in the home region of the Hmong and on concert tours in entertainment shows for a foreign audience.

The qeej is used for entertaining, secular songs and for ceremonial music alike. She appears in various sizes in an ensemble and as a soloist, plays pop music in dance bands and karaoke songs. The qeej can be heard at funeral rites accompanied by drums, at New Year celebrations, harvest ceremonies and weddings. The qeej players also see themselves as dancers according to an old tradition. The musicians, dressed in colorful costumes, sometimes perform acrobatic shows for entertainment, while at funeral ceremonies they describe calm circular movements. If the monotonous melodies of several qeej used to be heard at nightly celebrations on the edge of the village, the girls were magically attracted. While the differences in design between the qeej and the mouth organs of other ethnic groups in the region are small, for the Hmong the qeej is a unique musical instrument that produces a ritualized language, a kind of voice of bamboo. The tonal language of the Hmong can be musically transmitted with the qeej .

education

In Thailand and Laos, boys usually begin to learn the qeej playing technique from an older member of the family when they are eight or ten years old. Daily practice includes blowing the qeej in the morning on the way to the rice field and in the house in the evening. The student first learns to cover the blow holes with the correct fingers. This includes walking around in small circles while playing. In the advanced training, going in circles becomes rotating dance movements and the simple melody sequences create the special tonal language. Each word in tonal language has a specific finger position that needs to be memorized. A master can reproduce the course of the melody with spoken words, almost creating a qeej melody , without operating the instrument. Creativity is not required here, each tone sequence should be learned exactly by heart together with its meaning. In contrast, pieces of light music may also contain improvised or self-composed elements. Ideally, a son in every family learns the game of qeej so that later on he will be able to perform the necessary burial rites. In almost all villages there are some men who can appear if necessary. A master on the qeej knows several hundred melodies in all genres of music and especially the funeral songs. Those who have mastered the entire corpus of melodies and storytelling traditions are treated with great respect by the villagers.

Funeral ceremony

The qeej is also played in popular music for a foreign audience when it comes to conveying the Hmong culture. In the sacred way of playing, the melodies of the qeej are aimed at one's own social group. The latter includes the melody genre qeej tuag (" qeej for the dead") or zaj qeej ("ritual qeej "). The funeral rites, in which the qeej plays an important role, represent the most elaborate ceremonies of the Hmong and only their correct execution enables the bridge to be built between past, present and future generations. The Hmong also practice this identity-establishing ceremony in the diaspora communities. Although the qeej player establishes a kind of connection with the afterlife during the funeral ceremonies, no magical abilities are ascribed to the musical instrument itself. The qeej is only considered a tool that is brought to life when it is used; the actual task of imparting it is done by the player. Likewise, there is no direct communication between the qeej and the deceased, it takes place through the player or the reciter.

A funeral is a lengthy and expensive affair involving many members of the village community. The body is washed in the house by the sons and then dressed in brightly colored cloths that were specially made for this purpose. The deceased can only begin the journey to the hereafter fully clothed. The body is kept in the house for at least three days. During this time the suitable day and place outside the village for the burial among the men is discussed and finally found. Three days is the minimum duration for a funeral ceremony, ideally twelve days. As soon as possible the male members of the village and from the neighboring villages should have rushed to participate. As long as the deceased receives food three times a day, as his soul demands according to the conception of the Hmong, and as long as possible, qeej and drums should be played all day and all night . The harmony of qeej and drum always means that someone has died in the village. For the mourning community, rice, vegetables and the meat of the slaughtered cows and pigs must be cooked for the entire time. Most adult men have some sort of job to do. At least one pig should be slaughtered per day. Over a hundred people can come together for lavish ceremonies.

Shortly after death, or ideally when death occurs, a ritual expert sings the epic song Qhuab Kev (also Tawv Ke , "Show the way") to the soul of the deceased . The song is supposed to show the soul the way through all adversities into the hereafter to the village of the ancestors, where he is supposed to live for a while before he is born again one day. The described path into the ancestral village on the other side is a metaphor for the historical migration of the Hmong, which began in a country in northern China.

Immediately after the Qhuab Kev , the qeej plays the Qeej Tu Siav ("Song of passing life"). This is necessary because if the deceased does not hear the sung version, he will definitely hear the language of qeej. The second night is followed by the verses Txiv Taiv ("Words of the Father"), which relatives recite before the body is brought out of the house. The Lusheng plays in the course of multi-day ceremony also repeatedly entertainment Songs ( Lusheng among others si or ntiv ) that have no linguistic meaning and are avowedly intended for the amusement of those present this world and the hereafter.

At larger funeral ceremonies, several qeej are played by professional musicians and amateurs. The amateurs perform with accompanying songs during the day, while the professional musicians perform the essential pieces at meals and in the evening. On each day of the ceremony, the morning, noon and evening meals are the cornerstones of the daily routine. Before meals, qeej and a special drum play a certain piece depending on the time of day, often interrupted by sung songs. The nkauj qeej ("Mrs. Qeej") is accompanied by a specially made drum Nraug Nruas ("Mr. Drum"), which is destroyed after the ceremony. Drum and qeej together are a symbol for death, in the broader sense of grief and suffering. By moving the qeej around the drum several times in a circle, the message reaches the world beyond.

The songs played on the qeej to perform the funeral rites ( qeej tuag ) express a special language in the polyphonic melody in conjunction with the drone tones. This musical language of the instrument is addressed directly to the dead and should be understood by them. The language of the qeej is powerful and can be dangerous: through the text conveyed by the melody of the qeej , souls living in the animistic religion of the Miao can be transported into the world beyond. In contrast to rational Western thinking, this understanding is based on the idea of ​​a similar existence in this world and the other world. Individual whistle tones can be translated into individual words, whereby the four central melody whistles provide linguistic communication with the spirits. The messages conveyed are a central part of the Miao's cultural identity. Instructions to the dead are given in sung songs and then in the language of the qeej . In the spoken language, hidden meanings are always operated in a way that is also characteristic of the Hmong for other means of expression - from artistic design to symbolic forms of social organization. Even for the Hmong, with the exception of professional qeej players, none of this can be discerned from the playing of the oral organ. The level of meaning conveyed is aimed primarily at the invisible audience, which consists of the deceased, certain household spirits and ancestors. The guests present at the funeral, on the other hand, simply perceive the sounds produced by the qeej on the dead, Qeej Tu Siav, together with the other noises produced during the ceremony. The ritual game of qeej is the task of professional musicians who are always male and who have the secret knowledge.

In addition to the qeej player, only at the funeral ceremony for a very old and highly respected member of the community does a “message speaker” ( txiv xaiv ) make contact with the afterlife without a musical instrument. He proclaims memorized ritual messages which he recites in non-rhythmic verses or in normal Hmong language. While the qeej player addresses the soul of the deceased, the txiv xaiv receives messages from the deceased from the afterlife and passes them on to the relatives. Occasionally a skilled qeej player will adopt both forms of messaging. The ceremony for someone who has passed away in old age is particularly extensive for other reasons, as there are five categories in addition to the other funeral songs that contain special songs and must be performed. The songs are about death in general, mourning deceased relatives and illness. In such lavish ceremonies, a group of songs, qeej lub , is performed that deal with the creation of the world ( lub ) and the origin of all living beings. The qeej lub is the most difficult to play because of the quick finger movements.

The ceremony described for Hmong villages in northern Thailand, Laos and southern China is also taken seriously by the Hmong in the diaspora and, according to tradition, is practiced against the background that this is the only way to maintain family ties. In the United States, larger Hmong communities organize post-school classes to teach young people about the ritual tradition and the play of qeej .

The execution of the funeral rites with the help of the qeej is based on myth. The creator god Saub and his wife imparted this knowledge to a dragon ( zaj , the oldest dragon is called Zaj Laug), who instructed the first Hmong in the construction and use of qeej . The story, with its different embellishments, takes place either at a time of persecution by the Chinese, when the Hmong suffered great suffering, after the great flood, or even earlier, when the first human being lost his immortality. This happened because the ruler of the underworld, Ntxwj Nyoog (Nzeu Nyong), sent sickness and death to earth. This is how the qeej explains it in the first piece of music addressed to the soul of the deceased.

Welcome to the Miao. Chinese painting, late 17th century.

According to one story, qeej came about when six brothers, each blowing a pipe, got together to raise their voices. In addition to the six game tubes, this also explains the relationship between melody and language. Originally people made offerings to gods and demons when a loved one died, but they did not know the oral organ and drum ceremony until a family started it. When their father died, six of his seven sons took a bamboo tube and blew on it while they walked around the body. The seventh son struck the drum. After three years they looked for a way to repeat the ceremony at a later date. So they tied the six bamboo tubes together to make a musical instrument. The different lengths of the tubes are due to the age of the brothers. In another version of the story recorded from Vietnam, six brothers were playing hide and seek. When they had all found each other, each of them blew into a bamboo tube, which resulted in six tones for a melody. Then they joined the six tubes of different lengths to form an instrument that symbolized their bond. Central aspects of the various stories are the loss of the books in which the ritual of the dead was described and how this loss can be compensated for through the use of the qeej , as well as the qeej as a symbol of the togetherness of the Hmong society.

It is unclear why the qeej (like the khaen ) made and played by men are considered female and the drum ( nruas ) male. Saub and his wife, the supreme pair of gods, can be seen as the archetype for the union of male-female opposites, which often occur in the mythology of the Hmong. According to one tradition, Saub gave the ability to play qeej only to men; according to another version, women may have played qeej at an earlier time, but not afterwards . In many cultures, contact with the ancestors, which is the responsibility of the qeej players among the Hmong , is the responsibility of men. Hmong women are also excluded from learning the formalized sacred texts that deal with the relationship with the ancestors. Her fields are entertaining poetic verses and textile art ( paj ntaub ).

literature

Web links

Commons : Qeej  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ A Miao Musical Welcoming. Youtube video
  2. ^ Kin-Woon Tong: Shang Musical Instruments: Part Two. In: Asian Music. Vol. 15, No. 1, 1983, pp. 102-184, here pp. 175f.
  3. ^ Käte Finsterbusch: On the Iconography of the Eastern Han Period (25–220 AD). Comments on Michael Loewe's 'Ways to Paradise'. In: Monumenta Serica. Vol. 34, 1979-1980, pp. 415-469, here p. 425.
  4. ^ Paul Collaer: Southeast Asia. (Werner Bachmann (Hrsg.): Music history in pictures. Volume I: Musikethnologie. Delivery 3 ) Deutscher Verlag für Musik, Leipzig 1979, p. 26.
  5. ^ Henry George Farmer : The Instruments of Music on the Ṭāq-i Bustān Bas-Reliefs. In: Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, No. 3, July 1938, pp. 397-412, here p. 404
  6. ^ Alain Daniélou , Laurence Picken : Some Remarks on the Review of the Musical Anthology of the Orient in the Journal of the International Folk Music Council. In: Journal of the International Folk Music Council, Vol. 15, 1963, pp. 162-165, here p. 164
  7. ^ Robert Garfias: The Development of the Modern Burmese Hsaing Ensemble. In: Asian Music, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1985, pp. 1–28, here p. 3
  8. ^ Roger Blench: The history and distribution of the free-reed mouth-organ in SE-Asia. Preprint, October 14, 2012, p. 10 (In: Helen Lewis (Ed.): Papers from EurASEAA 14, Dublin 2012. NUS Press, Singapore 2012)
  9. ↑ Will H. Hudspeth: Stone-Gateway and the Flowery Miao. The Cargate Press, London 1937.
  10. ^ P. Aloys Schotter: Notes ethnographiques sur les tribus du Kouy-chou (Chine), Ile partie, Les différentes tribus des Miao '. In :: Anthropos, Volume 4, 1909, pp. 318-353.
  11. ^ Catherine Falk, The Private and Public Lives of the Hmong Qeej and Miao Lusheng, 2004, pp. 132-135.
  12. ↑ Catherine Falk: Hmong Instructions to the Dead. What the Mouth Organ Qeej Says (Part One),  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 2004, p. 23.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.nanzan-u.ac.jp  
  13. ↑ Alan R. Trasher: Lusheng. In: The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. 2014, p. 324.
  14. ↑ Christian Culas, Jean Michaud: Contribution to the Study of Hmong (Miao) Migrations and History. In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 153. No. 2, Leiden 1997, pp. 211–243, here p. 212.
  15. ↑ To Amazing Hmong Qeej Player. Youtube video ( Qeej players and dancers)
  16. ↑ Catherine Falk: Hmong Instructions to the Dead. What the Mouth Organ Qeej Says (Part One),  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 2004, p. 6f.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.nanzan-u.ac.jp  
  17. ^ Gayle Morrison: The Hmong Qeej. Speaking to the Spirit World, Spring 1998, p. 7f.
  18. ↑ The Hmong-language words come from field research in Thailand, Laos or surveys of Hmong in the United States. The names in southern China can be different, just as the course of the funeral ceremony can differ in detail.
  19. ↑ Catherine Falk: The Dragon Taught Us, 2003/2004, pp. 24f.
  20. ^ Gayle Morrison: The Hmong Qeej. Speaking to the Spirit World, Spring 1998, p. 15.
  21. ↑ Nusit Chindarsi: The Religion of the Hmong Njua . The Siam Society, Bangkok 1976, pp. 82f.
  22. ↑ Joseph Davy: Por Thao's Funeral . In: Hmong Studies Journal. Vol. 2, No. 1, autumn 1997, p. 2.
  23. ↑ Nicholas Tapp: QHA Ke (Guiding the Way) From the Hmong Ntsu of China, 1943. In: Hmong Studies Journal 9. 2008, pp 1-36 (one in 1943 in Sichuan recorded version of Qhuab Kev , first published in: Ruey Yih-Fu: Marriage and Mortuary Customs of the Magpie Miao, Southern Sichuan, China. (Monograph Series A no. 29) Institute of History and Philology at the Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan 1962)
  24. ^ Nicholas Tapp: Hmong Religion. In: Asian Folklore Studies. Vol. 48, No. 1, 1989, pp. 59-94, here p. 81f.
  25. ↑ Catherine Falk: Hmong Instructions to the Dead. What the Mouth Organ Qeej Says (Part One),  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 2004, p. 9.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.nanzan-u.ac.jp  
  26. ↑ Catherine Falk: The Dragon Taught Us, 2003/2004, p. 26.
  27. ^ Gayle Morrison: The Hmong Qeej. Speaking to the Spirit World, spring 1998, p. 12 f.
  28. ^ Faith Nibbs: The Texas Two-Step, Hmong Style: A Delicate Dance Between Culture and Ethnicity. In: Hmong Studies Journal. 7, 2006, pp. 1–34, here p. 23.
  29. ↑ Catherine Falk: The Dragon Taught Us, 2003/2004, pp. 28, 38-40.