Figures
1 Religious paraphernalia including two seals used by ritual practitioners 56
2 An altar from a t͡ɕai ritual 84
3 Mask and phallus used during the offerings to Iu-kɔng 98
4 Women cooking rice 118
5 Young men preparing meat 118
6 The head of a t͡ɕam-lɔŋ 121
7 An initiate wrapped up ‘in the womb’ 129
8 Shigong apprentices assisting in the initiation of a youth 130
9 The three strata of ritual activity 140
10 Ritual texts 145
11 The ‘Tower’ 162
12 ‘List of the Instated’ of the Shigong pantheon 162
13 Exorcising the ills of the household 173
14 Transcribing an antiphonal song 193
15 A diagrammatic representation of the Kim Mun language system 195
16 Making paper 210
17 Excerpt from a song celebrating the New Year 224
18 A page from the Siyu Jizi (四語集字) dictionary 229
19 First page of a history of the migration of the Kim Mun from China to Laos 237
Maps
1 Distribution of Hmong-Mien language family in Southeast Asia and China 20
2 Mainland Southeast Asia 37
3 Kim Mun villages in northwest Laos 45
4 Origins and destinations of Kim Mun letters 207
Tables
1 Population of Luang Namtha province by ethno-linguistic classification 38
2 List of current Kim Mun villages by province 46
3 Key Events in the History of Luang Namtha 53
4 The village deities 108
5 The five common household deities in Laos 110
6 Leadership positions of a Kim Mun village 111
7 The fourteen basic types of offerings 120
8 The Ten Kings of the Ten Courts of Hell 121
9 The Kim Mun generation-names 125
10 The six masters of the initiation rite 127
11 Examples of compilations of Daogong codices 143
12 Ritual Mun phonetic contrast between two ritual practitioners 146
13 Comparison of Kim Mun ritual, literary and vernacular languages 197
14 Contrast between literary language recitations 198
15 Entries from a collation of variant character dictionaries (乱集古今字) 231
16 Variant graphs from Kim Mun ritual and literary texts in Laos 233
17 Examples of Kim Mun variant graphs: phonetic substitution based on Vernacular Mun reading 233
18 Examples of Kim Mun variant graphs: homophonic substitution based on Sinitic/Literary Mun reading 234
19 Examples of Kim Mun variant graphs: aesthetic variant graphs that use phonetic or semantic principles 234