Research On Traditional Use Of Aquatic Plants Of Xishuangbanna Dai People

With high temperature and humidity climate, Xishuangbanna is one of the key areas with rich biodiversity in China and breeds diverse ethnical culture. Dai people is the dominant nationality of this area, they migrated and lived along rivers in the history. Nowadays, most of the Dai villages settle along rivers and at the foot of mountains. All aspects of their livelihood eg. Medical healthcare, ritnals, and faming practices have close relationship with the forests of mountains and the water of rivers, which forms the unique"water culture"based on forests. This environment provides facilities for Dai people to contact and utilize aquatic plants. Moreover, they subjective needs for the useful plants, and then the ethnical knowledge system of aquatic plants has been formed.In this article, we mainly apply the research of ethnobotany, integrating fixed villages and the area to study the used aquatic plants and their traditional knowledge of Xishuangbanna Dai people. The method of semi–instructed interview is applied to find out information about aquatic plants and its correlation knowledge in the three fixed villages if Mansan, Man'an and Manjiang, which have great differences in environment and eco-society. Then statistic methods for understanding the use and maintenance of aquatic plants between genders and ages were used by the study. Besides, the further study to the algae most unique aquatic plants used by Dai people...