The keeper of lost tools

A unique collection

The museum housed in a two-story building is organized into four sections: production tools, daily life items, hunting gear, and ritual objects.

Crossbows of bamboo and sinew hang on the walls — the kind Lisu men once carried into the high mountains. Nearby sit intricately woven bamboo rice containers, once carried to the fields by women. Hemp blankets, hand-loomed with traditional patterns, lie folded on shelves. Among them, small delicate cowrie-shell ornaments catch the light. Some of them tell a much larger story.

"Cowrie shells don't come from the mountains," Gao explains. "They come from the Indian Ocean."

The shells, she says, made their way through ancient trade routes from India to Myanmar, into the Nujiang Grand Canyon, and beyond to Lisu communities, and even to other ethnic groups like the Yi.

"These objects show that for thousands of years, these peoples were never isolated," Gao says. "They were connected — through trade, through marriage, through the exchange of ideas. This is the physical evidence of ethnic exchange and integration."