House of Tajik People for Celebration: Langaly

3 min read

The Tajik people live a life combining cropping and husbandry. They preserve a traditional semi-fixed living form, usually building fixed houses in their villages and also constructing in pasture housings for pasturing. Every year, when the spring sowing is finished, people will lead the livestock to the alpine pasture; when autumn comes, they will go back into their villages. Most of the villages lie in the steppe zone formed by the washing of the alpine snow-broth which flows through these villages. The housings are arranged along the river banks, which form a long, narrow village. The stock raising and the extensivecultivation agricultural economy lead to the fragmented distribution of the Tajik villages with a long distance from one family to another; the housings are usually single houses which have their own entrance and courtyard, with some housings also relating to one another and thus forming a small-scale settlement. In the past, housings were generally made of stone and wood, but housings nowadays usually have a civil engineering structure with a large building area of about 400 to 500 m2. Around the housings are a few trees. The major part of these housings is the principal room which is called by the Tajik people “Langaly”. The door is small and close to the left corner, facing east or south to avoid northwest wind. There is a dwarf wall after going into the entrance door, behind which people may stamp their feet and put their boots. Passing the cob wall is the principal room which is surrounded by the adobe heatable brick bed (a heatable adobe sleeping platform) and by the top of the kitchen range on the other side. Right above the top of the kitchen range is the skylight for illumination and ventilation.

The principle room is the main living area used by the Tajik people, where the whole family do their daily activities and conduct their wedding and funeralceremonies, so the room is also called “Merike oy”(the house of celebration).

There is only a bit of furniture in the room and there is a felt,a sheepskin or a “Palaz”(a kind of coarse woolen blanket) on the heatable brick bed with the daily-used bedclothes on the side folded up into a stacked bar shape. At dinner, the whole family will sit down in a circle with their legs crossed on the heatable brick bed.

After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, with the enhancement of the living standards of people of different ethnic groups in Xinjiang, their living conditions have greatly improved: their houses have taken on a new look, with interior furnishings such as the sofa, the big wardrobe and the tea table gradually appear in the daily life of people of various ethnic groups. Nowadays, the rich people are willing to make great efforts in room beautifying when they are building their new houses: the wood on the roof is painted with patterns of colorful blue and green oil color, the joint of the roof and the wall is painted with colorful patterns and there are big colorful paintings on the wall. In the room, there is not only the color TV, the fridge, the audio equipment, but also traditional hand-knitted articles such as the tapestry and the carpet, which is distinctive.