A 43-year-old woman from Ziyun Miao and Buyei autonomous county in China has gained fame due to her special talent of climbing cliffs. Luo Dengpin climbs cliffs over 100 meters high without the use of a harness or gloves. Known as the ‘Chinese Spider-Woman’, Luo is the only woman who practices the ancient Miao tradition of climbing barehanded on rocks which many believe is an innate part of their heritage.
As per South China Morning Post (SCMP), Luo climbs vertical rocks, ascending heights up to 108 meters (354 feet) tall. Her feats are associated with the traditional Miao burial practices of people being buried on cliffs. According to the Miao people who live in China’s mountainous areas, the notion that burials should take place on elevated cliffs enabled the dead to “look towards their ancestral homeland” which is in central China today, the report added.
The tradition also served a purpose as it prevented farmland from being taken up and also shielded the bodies from animals. For generations, Miao men — and now, Luo — have developed this rock climbing skill to the extent that they were climbing cliffs without any form of equipment as we know it today.
Luo started practising at the age of 15 and was trained by her father. Being motivated to compete with her male counterparts and provide for her family, she ascended to gather medicinal plants, and birds’ droppings from swallows’ nests, which were considered a prized fertilizer. During an interview with the BBC in 2017, she had said, “They said this was only for boys, but I believe men and women are equal, so I learned. That is how my journey as a spider woman began.”
In her childhood, Luo climbed daily, and she gathered droppings of the swallows in addition to herbs. In a matter of years, she developed thick skin on her palms due to holding onto sharp rocks, and it was not long before she became adapted. “Foreigners were often frightened by our bare-handed climbing, but I grew accustomed to it,” she had said in the interview on Shandong TV.
Mastering this ancient art is not a simple matter of strength but of fine ability, and as per SCMP, it takes four to five hours of trekking to sites where herbs are gathered. Although this type of climbing was once integral to the community’s way of earning a living, up-to-date farming means that bird dropping cannot be used as manure any longer.
Luo’s climbing skills have presently developed into something that people go to watch from the tourism restroom window with immense curiosity, the report stated. “Many visitors wanted to see how we gathered the herbs and paid us to demonstrate,” Luo was quoted as saying by the publication. “My income isn’t high, but I take pride in being a spider woman,” she added.
Although there was a time when Luo left her hometown to work elsewhere, she came back in the year 2000 to start a family and keep the tradition of her people going. Today, she is the last woman known as part of the ‘spider people’ in the region performing an art of numerous generations and fascinating people from all over the world.
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