Our journey to the Red Dao began at the side of a mountain road in northern Vietnam.
The bus driver spoke no English. He stopped, unloaded our bags and pointed upwards. So we started walking.
It was around 2°C. By the time we reached the high country around Cao Bồ, we were roughly 1,300 metres above sea level, around one-seventh of Everest's summit elevation. We carried everything we had brought with us into country colder, higher and more isolated than anything we had previously experienced.
Somewhere above us was the community we had come to meet. Foreign visitors, we were told, were extremely rare.
Cao Bồ is the closest public reference point we will provide. Beyond that, we politely stop.
The community asked that its exact location not be publicly displayed. We respect that request.
We know where they live because they trusted us enough to tell us. That trust is not ours to convert into directions.
Knowing where a place is does not make that information ours to share. When the people who live there specifically ask for privacy, we simply respect it.
Some places remain difficult to find for a reason.
The Dao comprise a number of regional groups, of which the Red Dao are one. Those modern group names are not the same thing as the older lineage system preserved in Dao origin traditions.
Those traditions repeatedly return to one ancestral figure: Bàn Vương.
One of the most important written traditions is preserved in versions of the Quá Sơn Bảng Văn, sometimes translated as a mountain-crossing charter. In one surviving manuscript version, Bàn Vương fathers twelve children, six sons and six daughters, from whom twelve ancestral surnames descend.
The same manuscript tradition then describes descendants of those twelve surnames dispersing into twelve branches and establishing themselves in different regions. That is why twelve ancestral surnames do not translate neatly into twelve modern Dao groups.
The document is therefore more than an origin story. It carries a memory of movement, lineage and continuity. Manuscripts were copied and recopied so that memory could continue travelling through generations.
Then, inside a Red Dao twelve-lamp Lễ Cấp Sắc tradition documented in Bát Xát, the twelve return.
The twelve lamps are explicitly connected with the twelve Dao lineages and remembrance of ancestral origins. The ceremony also gives the lamps celestial meaning, associating them with twelve lights or stars.
Lineage. Ancestors. Cosmos. Initiation.
The number twelve does not begin with the lamps.
For most of our time with the Red Dao, photography and video were welcome. We photographed plants, clothing, food, landscapes and ordinary moments of daily life.
Then the Lễ Cấp Sắc began and the rules changed.
The senior ritual elder made it clear that during the ceremony there would be no photography, no video recording and no note-taking. Even pens and writing pads were not permitted.
For four days and nights our role was not to collect material. We were there to bear witness to Lễ Cấp Sắc.
Modern travel has become so closely associated with collecting photographs that it is easy to forget an experience does not become more real because a camera records it.
The ceremonial photographs accompanying this story came to us much later. There was no usable mobile reception where we were staying. Months afterwards, when our guide travelled back to the city for a doctor's appointment, she was finally able to forward the authorised photographs to us.
They are not photographs we made in defiance of the boundary we were given.
No camera. No video. No notes.
Watch. Listen. Remember.
Lễ Cấp Sắc is frequently translated into English as a coming-of-age ceremony. That description is convenient. It is also far too small.
Among Dao communities, becoming older and becoming ritually recognised as mature are not necessarily the same thing. Through Cấp Sắc, the initiate is formally placed within relationships involving family, lineage, ancestors, ritual knowledge and responsibilities towards other people.
A ritual name is conferred. Lamps, seals, ritual documents and spiritual guardians can form part of that recognition.
The teachings are not concerned only with ritual technique. Documented Dao Cấp Sắc traditions include ten prohibitions and ten vows concerned with conduct: respect for parents and elders, honesty, responsibility towards family and community and an obligation to live well among other people.
This was not simply a community announcing that someone had reached a particular age.
What kind of person are you prepared to become?
The ceremony looks backwards towards ancestors and inherited authority, then forwards towards the obligations that come with carrying that inheritance.
Documented Red Dao traditions include Cấp Sắc at three, seven and twelve lamps. Twelve is the highest of those levels and is now comparatively rare.
The difference is not simply a larger number of lamps. In a documented twelve-lamp Red Dao ceremony in Bát Xát, male initiates faced ritual ordeals including walking on knife blades, running through fire and crossing heated bricks and ploughshares.
These acts were explained as demonstrations of courage and fidelity to the responsibilities being assumed, not as spectacle. The night before the final conferral, ritual masters took their students into the forest and instructed them in morality and conduct. The rite culminated before the altar of the Jade Emperor, where the initiation was formally completed.
The wider ceremony requires experienced ritual masters, sacred paintings, ritual texts, ceremonial clothing, offerings, lamps, seals, music and precisely ordered actions. Drums, gongs, bells and horns can mark different movements through it.
The initiate is not standing before a collection of unrelated objects. He is standing within a system.
A lamp has a place. A name has a place. A robe has a place. A painting has a place. A teacher has a place. An ancestor has a place.
And within the twelve-lamp tradition of Bát Xát, the lamps themselves return the ceremony to the ancestral Dao lines.
Twelve descendants. Twelve lineages. Twelve lamps.
The ceremonial clothing was one of the things I found hardest to forget.
Human and celestial figures appeared among animals, mountains, plants and geometric forms. To somebody who does not know the language of the imagery, the first response may simply be that it is beautiful. But beauty is only the surface.
These garments belong to an inherited visual system. Meaning can be carried without a paragraph. A relationship can be stitched rather than written. A cosmology can be worn.
Before any ritual specialist can wear such a garment, somebody has to make it. That labour has traditionally rested heavily in the hands of Red Dao women, with embroidery knowledge learned through families and practised from childhood.
During our visit, the clothing produced one of the most human moments of the expedition. At 193 cm, I was considerably larger than almost everyone we met.
The problem became obvious as soon as they tried to fit me. Two garments were literally opened up and stitched together in front of us to make one large enough. People gathered, questions came from every direction and the whole process became a stream of playful jokes and laughter.
I remember one of my children calling out for me to smile. The photograph from that moment belongs because it shows something the formal images cannot: ancient ceremonial clothing being made to work in the middle of ordinary life.
People carrying ancient traditions are not museum figures frozen inside solemnity. They work, joke, laugh, raise families and solve practical problems together.
Tradition survives because it is lived.
We tend to imagine knowledge becoming durable when somebody writes it down. The Red Dao reminded me that writing is only one possibility.
Researchers working in Cao Bồ itself surveyed manuscript collections in the villages of Thăm Vè and Lùng Tao. In only three households they catalogued 140 books, including ritual works, teaching texts, songs, divination, medicine and genealogy.
More than half the manuscripts examined had been recopied within the preceding decades. Some had been copied by fathers and passed to sons. The same works existed in more than one household. People were still copying them.
This was not a dead archive. It was a living technology for cultural survival.
Our hosts described the same logic in practical terms. Important material was copied so knowledge did not exist in only one vulnerable place. Modern materials could be used to protect old knowledge. There was no contradiction in that.
The paper itself has a story. Red Dao communities have traditionally made paper from locally available plant materials for ritual texts, old books, teaching material and ceremonial documents.
Then there are ritual paintings, embroidered garments, Páo dung songs and the ritual sword, or kiếm pháp. Different media, but the same larger task: carrying memory forward.
A sword can remember. A garment can remember. A song can remember. A manuscript can remember.
There is more than one way to write a book.
We had come to Vietnam because plants were already central to our fieldwork. By the time we reached the Red Dao, their reputation had preceded them.
Among both Black Hmong and Flower Hmong people we met during our wider travels, conversations about medicinal plants repeatedly produced particular respect for Red Dao knowledge. We heard that in the field before the published research gave us any reason to expect it.
Studies of Dao communities have documented medicinal plant repertoires extending into the hundreds of species. But numbers are the easiest part of ethnobotany.
A list of species is not the same thing as knowledge. Which plant? Which part? Collected when? Prepared how? Combined with what? For whom? Who taught you?
One of our stranger moments came when we encountered mapacho, Nicotiana rustica, a plant we associated strongly with South American ethnobotanical contexts, growing in northern Vietnam.
Different landscape. Different cultural history. Different relationships.
Plants travel because people carry them. Knowledge travels too.
Perhaps the best-known expression of Red Dao medicinal plant knowledge outside the community is the traditional herbal bath. Commercial versions are now easy to encounter in northern Vietnam. The knowledge underneath them is much older.
One frequently repeated number is 39 plant species. That figure comes from a particular investigation of the Red Dao medicinal bath repertoire in the Sa Pa region. It does not mean every traditional bath contains exactly 39 plants.
Recipes differ between families and communities. Selection itself is part of the expertise: knowing what is available, which plants belong together, which parts are required and how a preparation changes according to circumstance and tradition.
The finished water can become a deep reddish-brown, almost like extremely strong tea. Outside, winter air presses against the house and mist hangs across the valley. Inside, steam carries the smell of leaves, bark and hot wood.
Traditionally, preparations have been associated with postpartum care, recovery after demanding physical work and life in a cold mountain environment. Those are traditional uses, not promises of medical treatment.
A visitor can sit in the water. Learning why those particular plants are there may take generations.
Then there was the tea.
Shan Tuyết is not a processing style in the way green, oolong or Pu-erh describe what happens to tea after it is picked. It is the high-mountain tea material itself, recognised for large buds and leaves with a bright silver down. The same Shan Tuyết leaf can be processed in different ways.
Hà Giang Shan Tuyết is known for a natural aroma, gentle astringency and a long sweet finish. In Cao Bồ, a recognised stand of 220 ancient Shan Tuyết trees has been protected as Vietnamese heritage.
Before this expedition I had never properly understood that a tea plant could become something resembling a forest tree. Old trunks rise through cold, mist-heavy mountain country and harvesters may climb directly into them or use small ladders to reach fresh growth.
My height, for once, became genuinely useful. There were many trees to work through that morning, and what began as amusement at how easily I could reach the fresh growth became a practical question: would I like to help?
I was delighted. Helping to build, repair or harvest is one of the simplest ways I know to stop being only an observer and give a little physical effort back.
A basket was handed to me and, for a while, I went from curious visitor to a remarkably efficient piece of agricultural equipment. A local picker might need to reposition a small bamboo ladder several times around a tree. I could reach much of the fresh growth directly from the ground.
What made the morning special was that the singing never stopped. For the first time in my life I was picking tea with everyone else while the songs continued around us.
Our guide explained the songs as being directed towards the spirit within the tea tree, expressions of affection, gratitude and respect for what the tree continued to provide.
Then she told us that her grandfather had planted some of the trees around us. That changed the landscape completely. One generation had planted, another was harvesting and another would eventually inherit responsibility for them.
Botany, ancestry and memory occupied the same branches.
Harvest was only the beginning. The community's tea master seemed delighted that we were genuinely interested and showed us what happened next.
Fresh leaves met a large metal wok over a wood fire. Heat changed them. Hands moved them. Judgement determined when one stage had finished and another should begin.
Tea from the region can be made in several styles, including compressed Phổ Nhĩ intended to continue changing with age. Our host compared the idea to wine: some years were simply better than others. Weather mattered. Leaf quality mattered. Processing mattered. Storage mattered. Time mattered.
A great harvest could therefore become something like a vintage.
The tea master showed us one enormous compressed piece, almost the diameter of a cartwheel, which he described as coming from an exceptional harvest. He handled it less like ordinary stock than something being kept for the future.
When they prepared the tea for us, even without specialist vocabulary we could understand why it mattered. There was fragrance, gentle astringency and then a sweetness that lingered after the cup had gone down. What I personally remember most was a remarkable sense of clarity and cleanliness after drinking it.
Tea was one of the things connecting these remote mountains with an economy beyond them, but the details of those private relationships are not ours to publish.
A good tea was not finished when human hands finished making it. Time still had work to do.
The longer we stayed, the less useful our usual categories became.
A tea tree could be agriculture, inheritance and relationship at the same time. A medicinal plant could also be family knowledge. A ritual garment could carry cosmology and generations of women's labour. A manuscript could be prayer, genealogy, instruction and memory all at once.
Mountain. Forest. Water. Animals. Plants. Household. Ancestors. The living. Those who came before. Those who would come afterwards.
What mattered was not simply the pieces. It was the relationships between them.
The mountain had been present in everything we had learned. It shaped the plants people gathered, the tea trees they climbed, the cold they lived with and the distances that were simply part of ordinary life.
For us, none of it was ordinary.
While my mind was trying to absorb all of this, my body was deteriorating.
We had travelled rapidly from near sea level into the highlands after weeks of demanding fieldwork elsewhere in Vietnam. The elevation itself was not one I had regarded as particularly dangerous, which was partly why what happened caught me off guard.
By the second day I knew something was wrong. By the third I was becoming significantly worse. By the fourth day I was struggling to keep myself warm and felt as though my lungs were no longer doing their job properly.
There were too many possible explanations. Altitude. Cold. Exhaustion. Very little sleep. Days of continuous ceremony. Something I had eaten. An ordinary travel illness. Or several things arriving together.
I still cannot honestly tell you exactly what happened medically.
What I can describe is the urgency of the decision.
At around eleven o'clock that night, waiting until morning stopped feeling acceptable. My children could see how quickly I was deteriorating and our guide was deeply concerned. There was no practical medical help where we were. Whatever else we had planned no longer mattered. We were leaving immediately.
We started down the mountain in darkness.
The descent took roughly six hours. By the time we finally reached the highway, the sky was beginning to change from black to the pale blue-grey that comes just before morning.
Reaching the road was only the first part. The next town was still a long way away and from there we had to organise an emergency sleeper bus to take us much further down. I cannot remember what it cost. I remember the feeling much more clearly: just take it. The price had stopped mattering.
The ride itself was frightening. The driver appeared exhausted and the roads gave us very little confidence. Somewhere in the first couple of hours I reached that strange, grimly absurd point where fear itself had almost run out of energy. I remember thinking that if the ride was going to kill me, it probably would have done it already.
But as the hours passed and the road kept dropping, my body began to respond. The change was gradual but unmistakable. By the time we were close to sea level, the freezing mountain environment had become warmth and the progression that had frightened us so badly was reversing.
I do not need a retrospective diagnosis to know that leaving was the right decision.
There was no heroic ending in which the traveller conquered the landscape.
If the story ended with illness, it would give the mountain too much of the final word.
That is not what remains strongest in our memory.
We remember people.
We had arrived as complete strangers with two small children. The community found us somewhere to sleep, fed us, clothed us, taught us, showed us around, ate and drank with us, laughed with us and welcomed our children into the rhythm of daily life.
Our trusted guide moved constantly between languages and worlds so relationships could form where conversation otherwise would have stopped.
Then they allowed us to witness something we had no entitlement to see: four days of the twelve-lamp Lễ Cấp Sắc.
No photographs. No recording. No notes. Just the rare privilege of being present.
That generosity still feels extraordinary. Not because it gave us a story to tell, but because people with no obligation to us made space for us inside their homes, their routines and one of their most important ceremonies.
The illness ended our time on the mountain. It did not diminish what had happened there.
The greatest gift was not access. It was trust.
The easiest outsider's story would be that something ancient is disappearing and needs to be saved. That is not what we saw.
The Red Dao we met were already doing the work themselves, as generations before them had done. Manuscripts were being copied. Knowledge was duplicated and protected. Modern materials were used when they helped something older survive. Their language, ceremony, plant knowledge, textiles, songs and memory were being carried forward with extraordinary care.
Preservation did not mean pretending the present did not exist. It meant knowing what they refused to lose.
Fieldwork is often described in terms of access: where somebody went, what they discovered and how unusual it was to be allowed inside. Perhaps a better measure is what they chose not to take.
We left without a recording of Lễ Cấp Sắc, without publishing the route to the community and without turning private relationships into content. Being welcomed inside did not make any of those things ours.
We did not preserve the Red Dao. They did not need us to.
What stays with me is not the rarity of where we went. It is what people gave us once we arrived: shelter, food, clothing, laughter, patience, teaching and the extraordinary honour of being allowed to witness four days of ceremony from inside the life around it.
For a few days we ate together, drank together, slept under the same roofs and learned as much from ordinary moments as we did from formal ritual.
For a few days, however briefly and imperfectly, the world we had come to witness became one we were allowed to live inside.
Our deepest thanks to the Red Dao community who welcomed us into their homes, shared their food, knowledge, laughter and time, and allowed us the extraordinary privilege of witnessing Lễ Cấp Sắc.
To the elders and community leaders who trusted us with experiences that were never ours to own, and to our guide, without whom almost none of those doors could have opened, we remain profoundly grateful.
Thank you also for allowing us to share a small part of what we were entrusted with beyond the mountain and with the outside world. Those days, and the generosity with which we were received, will remain with our family for the rest of our lives.
Field photographs are from the Sacred Plants Australia expedition archive and photographs supplied with permission.
Mapacho photograph by David Ebro, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Two Red Dao contextual photographs by Peter Olshevsky, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Bàn Vương ritual paintings from the Điện Biên Provincial Museum archival collection.
