The Dao Ethnic Group of Northern Vietnam

Origins and Identity

The Dao are one of Vietnam’s fifty-four recognised ethnic groups. Oral histories, combined with historical records, trace their migration southwards from the highlands of southern China beginning as early as the thirteenth century. They travelled in waves, carrying with them not only agricultural knowledge but also ritual systems, textile traditions, and a cosmology deeply bound to the forest and the mountains. Today, nearly nine hundred thousand Dao live in Vietnam, dispersed across provinces such as Lào Cai, Lai Châu, and Tuyên Quang.

What unites them is a shared sense of belonging to a broader Dao lineage, even as each subgroup has forged its own distinctive identity. These differences are most visibly expressed through clothing, hairstyles, and ritual practices, which act as living archives of history and identity.

The Red Dao are among the most visible and culturally vibrant communities in the Sapa region. Villages such as Tả Phìn, Nậm Cang, and Trung Chải are closely associated with their presence. What first captures a visitor’s attention is their attire: women wear indigo-dyed garments embroidered with geometric and floral motifs in brilliant shades of red, yellow, white, and blue. Their headdresses, often large red turbans decorated with tassels, silver coins, or pompoms, are not only striking but also symbolic, carrying connotations of fertility, prosperity, and ancestral honour.

Daily life for the Red Dao remains deeply interwoven with the land. Families cultivate rice, maize, and cardamom in terraced fields carved into steep slopes. Women spend countless hours embroidering cloth, each stitch part of an inherited vocabulary of patterns that carry meanings beyond the decorative. Herbal knowledge is equally important: the Red Dao are renowned for their forest-based pharmacopoeia and their herbal baths, which combine dozens of plants to create a restorative soak. These practices have become well known in Sapa, offering travellers a sensory gateway into Dao healing traditions, while also sustaining local livelihoods.

Socially, Red Dao families are structured around strong kinship ties and ritual observances. Weddings, funerals, and the coming-of-age ceremony known as the “cap sac” reaffirm links between generations and bind the living to ancestral spirits. To sit in a Red Dao household during such an event is to hear the rhythms of chanting, the clashing of ritual instruments, and to sense the closeness of the community gathered

The Red Dao of Sapa

While Sapa has become more familiar to travellers, Sin Ho district in Lai Châu remains quieter and more remote. At more than 1,500 metres above sea level, Sin Ho is often shrouded in mist, its terraces and limestone ridges forming a dramatic landscape. Dao communities here live alongside Hmong neighbours, creating a patchwork of cultural life that feels less touched by tourism.

Dao households in Sin Ho continue to practise shifting cultivation, weaving, and herbal medicine. The market in Sin Ho town, held weekly, is a vivid scene where Dao women in richly embroidered jackets trade medicinal plants, honey, and brocades. Unlike in Sapa, where commercialisation has altered the pace of life, Sin Ho offers a sense of continuity, where traditions feel less performed and more lived. For the traveller, it is not spectacle but encounter: a chance to walk through mountain hamlets, share tea with a family, and witness the persistence of customs in a place where modern roads have only recently arrived.

The Dao in Sin Ho

In southern Lao Cai Province, not too far from the shores of Thac Ba Lake, the Dao population includes several subgroups: the Red Dao, the Tight-trouser Dao, the Indigo Dao, and the White-trouser Dao, known locally as Dao Quần Trắng. The name itself points to their most recognisable feature: men and women alike wear white trousers, often paired with indigo tunics embroidered in contrasting threads.

Clothing here functions as a marker of both identity and continuity. To wear the white trousers is to assert belonging to a specific lineage, one that carries not only a dress code but also dialectal and ritual distinctions. Many White-trouser Dao villages are perched on forested hillsides, where households maintain orchards, maize fields, and bamboo groves. Festivals are marked by drumming, singing, and communal feasts, reinforcing ties not only within villages but across kin groups scattered through the valleys.

The preservation of these traditions is not simply about costume or folklore. It represents a deeper assertion of cultural sovereignty in the face of pressures from assimilation and modernisation. By holding onto their unique clothing and rituals, the White-trouser Dao remind themselves and others of the resilience embedded in everyday life.

The White-Trousers Dao

To walk among Dao communities in northern Vietnam is to witness a heritage that is not frozen in time but continually renewed. In Sapa, the Red Dao weave tradition into encounters with travellers, sharing their embroidery, their herbal wisdom, and their homes. In Sin Ho, Dao communities sustain their lifeways with quiet dignity, inviting visitors to slow down and listen. In Lao Cai, the White-trouser Dao declare their presence through fabric and ritual, making visible their bonds to history and land.

Taken together, these communities form a mosaic of Dao identity, each subgroup distinct, yet all bound by shared ancestry and a collective memory of migration and resilience. For the respectful traveller, to journey among them is to step into a dialogue with culture, landscape, and the enduring creativity of people who have made the mountains their home.

Living Heritage