The Thai Ethnic Group of Northern Vietnam
The Thai Ethnic Communities of Lai Châu: An Immersive Cultural Portrait
Distinctive Identities: Black Thai and White Thai in Lai Châu
Lai Châu Province, under the new administrative boundaries of 2025, remains a cultural mosaic in which the Thai ethnic community plays a central role. Accounting for just over thirty per cent of the provincial population, the Thai are the largest minority group in the province. Among them, two principal sub-groups are distinguished by costume, architecture and ritual life: the Black Thai (Tai Đen) and the White Thai (Tai Trắng)
The Black Thai tend to inhabit the southern reaches of Lai Châu Province, their dark-hued blouses and indigo skirts echoing the fertile valley soils they till. In contrast, the White Thai are more prevalent in the northern areas of the province, where their pale heart-shaped collar blouses and bright scarves catch the light of mist-shrouded mornings. These sartorial distinctions serve as immediate identifiers, yet they belie deeper nuances—differences in ancestral rites, numerical symbolism and even modes of speech that reflect centuries of cultural evolution.
Housing and Costume: Architectural Forms and Textile Expression
The stilt houses of both Black Thai and White Thai communities stand as evocative testaments to Thai ingenuity and spiritual symbolism. Black Thai dwellings typically feature turtle-shell-shaped roof forms, known as “khau cut”, their gently arcing ridges reminiscent of protective shell forms. White Thai houses often stand on flatter rectangular platforms, ringed by wooden railings, and framed by steps that carry cultural weight: each stair conveys taboos of gender and ritual, as well as ancestral reverence
Women’s attire communicates identity in colour, cut and ornament. White Thai women favour bright short-sleeved blouses fastened with silver buttons shaped like butterflies or bees, paired with unadorned dark skirts and a two-metre indigo headscarf. Black Thai women, by contrast, don darker blouses, often black or indigo with high collars. Their hair is styled either in ornate embroidered scarves (“khan pieu”) for unmarried women, or in distinctive buns (“tang cau”) for married women; widows may lower their buns; a subtle visual marker of social status. Jewellery; necklaces, bracelets, earrings, hair brooches enhances the costume’s resonance and reveals the wearers’ social standing and personal aesthetic.
Culture, Belief and Heritage in Thai Communities
Festivals, Belief Systems and Social Organisation
The cultural fabric of Thai communities in Lai Châu is interwoven with an agrarian cosmology and cycles of ancestral reverence. Both sub-groups engage in worship of ancestors, agricultural deities, and mountain and river spirits. Their rituals align with seasonal rhythms: the Black Thai perform ancestor offerings in the seventh and eighth lunar months; the White Thai mark the Lunar New Year with collective ceremony.
Lung Tung, the festival of field outreach, unfolds in the first lunar month in locations such as Than Uyên District; villagers bring offerings into their paddies in an act of respectful communion with land and life. The Han Khuong festival is another ceremonial keystone, unique to local Thai life, where music, dance and communal solidarity interlace the spiritual with the sensory.
Underlying social life is the traditional “bản mường” polity; a pre-state institution that governed Thai mường (chiefdoms). It is in Mường Lay, present-day Lai Châu City, that the White Thai leadership held sway, anchoring a legacy of local autonomy recognised as early as the late nineteenth century.
Origins, Linguistic Heritage and Everyday Life
The Thai across Lai Châu trace their origins to migratory movements from southern China, spanning the seventh to thirteenth centuries. They speak languages from the Tai–Kadai family, employing the Tai Việt script in cultural expression. They are historically connected through trade, kinship and governance to the broader region of Sip Song Châu Thai, a confederation of twelve mường that once held political resonance.
In everyday life, Thai communities practise wet-rice cultivation in terraced fields, manage sophisticated irrigation canals, cultivate sticky rice and com lam (bamboo-cooked rice), and raise livestock in the under-crofts of their stilt homes. Textile arts flourish; brocade woven by women through generations manifests stories of cosmology, clan motifs and identity. Music and oral poetry, such as xoe dance, flutes and sung verses, suffuse celebratory and labour contexts alike.
If you would like to visit the Nung and learn more about their community and culture, please see the following links:
