Harvest

2020 90m 4K

Background (the Hmong in Vietnam)

The Hmong are the fourth largest minority ethnic group in Vietnam, with an estimated population of around 1.4 million. First settled in China’s Yellow River basin, communities survived on shifting cultivation, where crops were rotated until the land became infertile. The Hmong were forced further south from the late 18th century into the mountainous borders of Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. With little uninhabited land remaining in the region, the Hmong settled at high altitudes to plant maize, opium and millet – later switching to permanent cultivation on a single plot of land.

After the French Indochina War, while the Hmong had predominantly sided with the Việt Minh, Christian communities were forced to flee to the south having aligned themselves with the French. During the American War in Vietnam, many Hmong in Laos were recruited by the CIA to fight the Pathet Lao and communist forces in Vietnam in what is now known as the "Secret War." As a consequence, the Hmong still face prejudice and discrimination from some sectors of Vietnamese society today.

In recent years, the Hmong have benefited from the rise of mass tourism by offering homestays for foreign guests, finding employment as tour guides and selling local handicrafts. The Hmong community in Vietnam has therefore been disproportionately affected by the closure of borders during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Today, the Hmong in Vietnam primarily remain reliant on subsistence agriculture to survive, often with little or no surplus. Nowhere is this lifestyle more apparent than in the village of Tả Giàng Phình, where ancient petroglyphs attest the continuance of wet rice cultivation spans millennia.