Palaung - Settlements



The Palaungs live in compact villages located on hilltops or ridges between hills. The villages range in size from two to fifty houses, with an average of about ten. Houses cluster along both sides of a main road; in larger villages, there are additional houses flanking these down the slopes. The center of the village contains a market area, a rest house for visitors, a monastery, and a structure to house images of the Buddha. Additional structures include granaries and spirit shrines. Villages were formerly surrounded by protective stockades whose gates were closed at night, and some still have gates on which incantations or Buddhist scriptures are written for the purpose of warding off disease. There are also auxiliary houses in the tea gardens; they are used at plucking time, when most villagers work for extended periods picking and processing tea leaves. Houses are raised on wooden posts that vary from 3 to 12 feet in height, depending on the slope of the ground. The frames, floors, external walls, and internal partitions are usually of bamboo, although those who can afford it may have wooden-plank walls. The roofs, which extend to within a few feet of the ground, are of grass thatch. Beneath the house is a fenced area for keeping livestock and doing household tasks such as rice pounding. Houses vary in length from 9 to 24 meters, depending on the number of families in a dwelling. In Palaung villages just south of the Chinese border, as many as three to six families may occupy a single dwelling. In the central Palaung area in Taungpeng, one or at the most two families per house is normal. In single-family houses, verandas at each end are used for entrances and for kitchen tasks. In two-family houses in the central Palaung area, each veranda opens into a separate entrance room for each family. Additional smaller rooms are used for sleeping and storage. Entrance and sleeping rooms have fireplaces but are otherwise largely bare of furnishings.


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