Guizhou, southwest China, is an inland province with abundant resources and great potential for development. The raising of sheep has a long history in the province. As the major livestock of the Guizhou Plateau, sheep and goats are of both practical and social value for the local people.

As the word "sheep" is pronounced in a similar way to "auspicious" in Chinese, its image is widely applied to every aspect of local society, including religious rites, calendar calculation, arts and architecture. Thus a sheep-related culture has developed and prospered.

  Daily life

Local residents of the Guizhou Plateau cannot live without sheep and goats. They eat mutton, wear sheepskin clothes or wool fabrics, sleep on wool blankets and drink wine with vessels made from goat horns or sheep stomachs. Goat horn wine cups, popular in ethnic minority villages of Wumeng Mountains, are used to propose toasts to visitors during festivals and celebrations. In the Guizhou Provincial Museum there is a wine bottle made from a sheep's stomach and containing a gourd on the inside is on display. This wine bottle, collected from a Yi ethnic minority community, took several processes to make. First, the sheep stomach was cleaned and covered on the gourd while it was still wet. Then it was bonded tight at its mouth and left till it dried completely. Thus not only is the inside of the gourd protected from decaying but also the texture-shape of the sheep stomach is highlighted. Such wine bottles are very popular among Yi people.

Of all the daily objects, the most valuable are the parchment files. Yi people created their own written language and recorded their important documentations on paper. In order to keep these documentations from moisture, parchment was wrapped over them. These parchment files have already become a highly valuable part of the cultural heritage of the Yi ethnic group.

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