{ "schema": 1, "id": "chin-ming", "type": "tradition", "names": { "name": "Chin facial tattooing", "my": "ချင်း", "local": "Ming", "local_lang": "Chin", "aliases": [ "Ming", "Chin face tattoo" ], "said": "Lines and dots set across a woman's face, by tribe" }, "region": [ "mainland-southeast-asia", "south-asia" ], "facets": { "family": "poke", "status": "dormant" }, "when": { "from": 1800, "to": 1960, "circa": true, "label": "Banned in the 1960s; the last tattooed women are elderly" }, "practice": { "method": "poke", "ink": "indigo", "placement": [ "face" ], "marked": "women", "marks": "specialist", "status": "dormant", "countries": [ "MM" ], "first_record": 1900, "first_record_note": "the Gazetteer of Upper Burma notices it in passing, and with contempt", "break": [ 1965, 2026 ], "suppressed_by": "banned in the 1960s by Burma's Union Revolutionary Council; discouraged by Christian and Buddhist missionaries", "note": "Girls of fifteen to twenty. The design says which tribe, not which family." }, "text": { "what": "Women's faces, marked between fifteen and twenty, in a pattern that names the tribe: full-face, part-face, dots, lines, or both.", "story": "The designs differ by group and the differences are the point. M'kaan, Daai and Yin Du women are tattooed across the whole face; N'men and Matu women on certain parts of it; the Uppriu cover the face in dots; Ngagah mix vertical lines with dots; Daai set dots among vertical and horizontal lines on forehead and cheeks. Mro women wear small marks or stars on cheek, forehead or breast and tie them to fertility.\n\nThe explanation attached to the custom in almost every outside source is abduction: that a king took a beautiful Chin woman, that she disguised herself to get home, and that families marked their daughters so that no one would carry them off. The nineteenth-century British gazetteer repeats the abduction story and then adds that the anxiety \"seems hardly justified by any beauty in the women themselves.\"\n\n*Inference —* that sentence is worth leaving in. It is the clearest single demonstration on this site of what the colonial record is: the only written source for a great deal of this, and written by men who held the people they were describing in contempt. Read the fact, discount the frame.", "today": "Banned in the 1960s and discouraged by missionaries before that, the practice ended inside one generation. The women who carry it are elderly, and they are photographed constantly by visitors to the Chin hills. Whether that is documentation or a trade in faces is not a question this site settles.", "notes": "Northern and southern Chin groups differ; this record does not flatten sixty sub-groups into one design." }, "kin": [ { "to": "htoe-kwin", "as": "The other Burmese tradition, and the one that was not banned.", "rel": "tradition" }, { "to": "who-wrote-it-down", "as": "The clearest case of the problem with the only sources there are.", "rel": "issue" }, { "to": "derung-face", "as": "Another women's facial tattoo with an abduction story attached to it.", "rel": "tradition" }, { "to": "atayal-ptasan", "as": "And another, banned by another government in another decade.", "rel": "tradition" } ], "links": [ { "label": "Chin people", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chin_people" } ], "sources": [ "s:wp-chin-people", "s:wp-tattooing-in-myanmar", "s:gazetteer-1", "s:gazetteer-3" ], "provenance": { "default": { "tier": "cited", "source": "s:wp-chin-people" }, "fields": { "text.story": { "tier": "cited", "source": "s:gazetteer-3" } } }, "confidence": "medium", "tags": [ "women", "ban", "colonial-record" ], "images": [ { "file": "chin-ming/chin-ming-a-letu-chin-woman-with-a-tattoo-face.png", "source": "commons", "title": "File:A Letu Chin Woman with A Tattoo Face.png", "url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/A_Letu_Chin_Woman_with_A_Tattoo_Face.png?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=original", "page_url": "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AA_Letu_Chin_Woman_with_A_Tattoo_Face.png", "license": "CC BY-SA 4.0", "license_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/", "author": "AungLaytu", "credit": "Own work", "alt": "This Letu Chin Women is from Heyzawlay village, the Upper Sen Stream, Minbya township, Rakhine state.", "date": "2025-11-21", "primary": true, "sha256": "1c0b1f9657297be6954def47040553b14a681aaf174d6f90463f68183a49428e" }, { "file": "chin-ming/chin-ming-chin-women-with-face-tattoos-7479947494.jpg", "source": "commons", "title": "File:Chin women with face tattoos (7479947494).jpg", "url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Chin_women_with_face_tattoos_%287479947494%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=original", "page_url": "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AChin_women_with_face_tattoos_%287479947494%29.jpg", "license": "CC BY 2.0", "license_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/", "author": "DANIEL JULIE from Paris, France", "credit": "DSC00015/Burma/Chin State/Posing for the Photo", "alt": "Two mother tattooed accept easely the pose for my camera\nThe Chin tribe people , are one of the large ethnic minority groups in Burma. The Chin people are of Tibeto-Burman groups and they probably ca", "date": "2012-03-17 17:07", "primary": false, "sha256": "de291efbfa070177eca94101eafd4c39cd4abbecd8c8ad0f2cac7a5e39278115" } ], "geo": { "lat": 21.5, "lon": 93.6, "precision": "region", "source": "s:commons" }, "updated": "2026-09-19", "kin_in": [ { "from": "atayal-ptasan", "type": "tradition", "name": "Atayal ptasan", "as": "Another face, another government, thirty years apart." }, { "from": "derung-face", "type": "tradition", "name": "Derung face marks", "as": "The same story told about another set of women." }, { "from": "chin-grid", "type": "motif", "name": "The face grids", "as": "The tradition it belongs to." }, { "from": "chin-ban", "type": "story", "name": "The Chin ban", "as": "What was banned." }, { "from": "who-wrote-it-down", "type": "issue", "name": "Who wrote it down", "as": "Where the contempt is on the page." } ] }