Fathers have little to do with the children, if anything. The women are the property owners and decisionmakers, while the men labor in the background.

On checking into a lodge by the lake, I had to negotiate the rate with the eldest daughter of the grandmother, not the man standing behind her, who turned out to be her brother and was told by the sister to take my luggage to the room.

The next day, it was the same lady who directed her younger brother and a nephew to row me in a dugout wooden canoe across the clear blue lake.

On the way back, the pair confirmed that grandma is the one who collects the money earned by each member of the family from the various farms and tourist work available. She is also the one who holds the purse strings and doles out pocket money when needed.

As for the "walking marriage" practice in the Mosuo community (where a woman is free to choose her lover and ask him to stop seeing her when the relationship is over) you can catch a facsimile of this practice re-enacted nightly as part of the song-and-dance story of the Mosuo people.

It is performed by community performers at tourist theaters in the bigger villages of Luoshui. What you do not see behind the scenes is the community-based effort of putting on the show, with each household contributing performers and sharing the profits at the end of the night.

There is no better evidence that woman power still exists in this part of Yunnan than in the way the Mosuos worship. On the 25th day of every seventh lunar month for what is the grandest festival of the year, Mosuo families in all their finery trek up Goddess Mountain to worship at the shrine of Gemu, their female deity, then feast, sing and dance to celebrate their womanhood.

Editor: Feng Hui