Who are the Co Tu people and where do they live?
The Co Tu call themselves Co Tu, with other names including Ca Tu and Ka Tu. According to the official list of Vietnam's ethnic groups, the Co Tu are one of 54 ethnic groups, with recorded alternative names such as Ca-tu, Ca-tang, Moi, Cao, Ha, Phuong and Kan-tua, living in Quang Nam - Da Nang and Thua Thien Hue. They are long-standing inhabitants of the Truong Son - Central Highlands region.
Specifically, the Co Tu live in concentrated communities in the northwestern mountains of Quang Nam province and the southwestern mountains of Thua Thien Hue province, adjoining the Co Tu area in Laos. The districts named in the source include Hien and Giang (Quang Nam) and Phu Loc and A Luoi (Thua Thien Hue).
Population figures differ between surveys. The 2009 Population and Housing Census recorded 61,588 Co Tu people. The April 1, 2019 survey of 53 ethnic minorities recorded 74,173. When citing, state the year clearly, as these are two different statistical points rather than a substantive contradiction.
What is notable about the Co Tu language and script?
Co Tu belongs to the Mon-Khmer languages (Austroasiatic family) and is close to Ta Oi and Bru-Van Kieu. This helps position the Co Tu within the Mon-Khmer-speaking ethnic groups along the Truong Son range.
As for writing, sources record that a Co Tu script appeared before 1975, based on the Latin alphabet for transcription, but few people use it today. Its limited everyday use is a fact worth noting when studying the community's capacity to transmit texts.
How do the Co Tu farm and make a traditional living?
Swidden farming is the main production activity. Traditional cultivation involves clearing with axes and machetes, burning, then using a dibble stick to make holes for seed, weeding with a curved iron-bladed scraper, and threshing rice by hand. Fields are farmed with multiple and intercropped species, then left fallow for a long period after a few crops before cultivation resumes. Only one crop is sown each year.
Livestock are mainly buffalo, pigs, dogs and chickens. However, daily food comes largely from gathering, hunting and fishing. Crafts include weaving and pottery (earthenware) in some places near the Vietnam-Laos border, while basketry is widespread. Market exchange is limited, and barter remains common.
The characteristic means of transport is the back basket carried with two shoulder straps, made in thick or open weave and in sizes to suit the user. Men have their own three-compartment basket, called the bat-wing basket.
What is distinctive about Co Tu housing and village organisation?
The Co Tu live in stilt houses whose roofs curve down at both gables like a turtle shell. The ridge often rises into a simple carved finial. In the past, a house sheltered several married couples and daughters, usually the families of brothers. Each such house held many relatives, with each couple and their children forming a hearth with its own space inside.
All houses in a village are built in a circle around a central open space. Each village has a communal house called the Guol, the tallest and finest, used for meetings and public activities. The Co Tu regard the Guol as a symbol of community solidarity.
Socially, village community ties are fairly close. The village is a residential unit on a defined and separate territory, self-governed by custom and headed by a respected village elder. Social stratification is not deep. Wealth is measured in gongs and jars, buffalo, jewellery and cloth.
What are traditional clothing and food like?
The Co Tu favour clothing woven from black fabric with lead ornaments, followed by white bead patterns. Men wear a loincloth, usually bare-chested. Women wear a tube skirt; a long skirt covers from the chest down, while with a short skirt the upper body wears a sleeveless shirt. On festival days a plain white belt is added. Large cloth pieces are used for draping, wrapping and covering. Cloth with lead patterns is highly prized and expensive, with patterns concentrated at the two ends of the strip in geometric designs.
In daily meals the Co Tu eat ordinary rice, with glutinous rice added on festival days. Eating with the hands is a traditional custom. They like grilled and marinated foods and dishes fermented in bamboo tubes, drink unboiled water (though many now use boiled water), sugarcane wine, ta-vak wine made from a forest palm-like plant, and wine made from rice and cassava. They smoke tobacco with a pipe.
How are Co Tu worship customs practised?
In personal, family and village life there are many offerings tied to production and health. The system of offerings is graded by sacrifice: small rites need only a chicken, or even a chicken egg; larger ones use a pig; higher still, a buffalo; in the past the highest used human blood. In Co Tu belief, the blood of the sacrificial animal is especially important to the supernatural powers.
A village may have a sacred object, usually a stone, kept in the communal house as a talisman. Some individuals also have such a talisman.
Note that this describes traditional religious practice recorded in ethnographic sources. The grades above reflect the ritual hierarchy of the past; customs have changed greatly over time and should not be read as guidance for the present.
What are the main festivals and celebrations?
The largest rite is the buffalo sacrifice, held at village level and by individual households, along with the reburial ceremony. The Co Tu celebrate Tet by village, around January or February of the solar calendar, after the rice-threshing season, beginning with offerings at home and at the communal house. Tet is also a time for feasting and welcoming guests. Today many places celebrate Tet at Lunar New Year.
As for funerals, a dugout coffin of good wood is buried sealed or without earth covering. Wealthier families keep the body longer, sacrifice a buffalo at the funeral, and build a fine, elaborate wooden grave house with carved and painted decorations. The Co Tu practise reburial: after a few years of burial, when the family has enough means, the remains of families in the village are gathered and the rite carried out on one day.
Summary table of main festivals and rites
| Name of festival/rite | Scale | Key features |
|---|---|---|
| Small offering | Individual, family | Chicken offering, possibly a chicken egg; tied to production and health |
| Pig offering | Family | A higher sacrifice grade than the chicken rite |
| Buffalo offering | Family, village | A higher sacrifice grade than the pig rite |
| Buffalo sacrifice | Village or individual household | The largest rite together with the reburial ceremony |
| Reburial ceremony | Lineage, village | Gathering of remains after a few years of burial, when means allow |
| Village Tet | Village | Around January or February of the solar calendar, after the threshing season |
What is distinctive about their calendar and spiritual culture?
The Co Tu count the days of the month by the cycle of the moon's changing shape, using it to name each day, so some days share a name. By experience and folk belief, certain days are good for planting cassava and sweet potato for many tubers, certain days for planting eggplant and chilli for heavy fruit, and certain days for building a house or holding a wedding.
In the arts, the Co Tu have many folktales about origins, human society and the emergence of lineages. Festivals often feature group dances: women perform the Da da dance and men the Ting tung dance. Common instruments are a set of three gongs, one larger gong, drums, flutes, stringed instruments and fiddles. Women are skilled at weaving colourful geometric patterns, combining lead and beads on cloth. Men excel at carving decorations for grave houses and communal houses with buffalo heads, birds, snakes, forest animals and chickens, as well as painting patterns on the post to which the sacrificial buffalo is tied. The Co Tu have their own songs.
What should be known about marriage and childbirth customs?
In marriage, the groom's family must pay wealth to the bride's family and hold a wedding. Taking a wife passes through ritual steps: inquiry, engagement, wedding, and later, when better off, often a second wedding. Common forms are a maternal uncle's son marrying his paternal aunt's daughter, and a widow marrying her late husband's brother. Marriage ties are one-way: if family A has given a daughter to family B, family B may not give a daughter to family A. In the past, wealthy men favoured wife capture.
For childbirth, a woman gives birth in a hut built behind the house or beside the hearth inside, with a few women helping. The placenta is put in a gourd shell or wrapped in cloth and banana leaves and buried behind the house. After three to four days or a week the mother can return to work. The baby is named after a few months.
The Co Tu within Vietnam's 54 ethnic groups
According to the official list of Vietnam's ethnic groups, Vietnam has exactly 54 ethnic groups, of which the Kinh make up more than 85.4% of the national population, with the remaining 53 called minorities, about 14.6% of the total. The Co Tu are among the ethnic minorities living mainly in mountainous areas with complex, fragmented terrain.
Ethnic minorities today live across all regions of the country but mainly in high mountains, border areas and remote places, concentrated in some northern mountainous provinces, the Central Highlands, North Central and South Central Coast, and the Southwest. The Co Tu area lies in the Truong Son range, exposed to climate change and natural disasters such as drought, storms, floods, landslides, flash floods and flash landslides.
In this context, the traditional cultural values of some ethnic minorities tend to fade, while material and spiritual life still lags behind the national average. This is the wider setting to keep in mind alongside learning about each group's own cultural values, such as those of the Co Tu.
Points to note when learning about the Co Tu
Ethnographic materials on the Co Tu are recorded in publications such as The Cultural Picture of Vietnam's Ethnic Groups (Education Publishing House) and information pages of the state agency for ethnic affairs. When reading, distinguish clearly between descriptions of past customs and present practice, since many cultural features have changed over time, for example celebrating Tet at Lunar New Year in many places instead of the traditional village Tet.
Population figures also differ between survey periods, and names have many variants such as Ca Tu, Ka Tu and Co Tu. These points call for specific sourcing rather than merging everything into a single number.
