The La Chi dress simply. Men wear five-flip gowns stretching down to their knees, accessorised by bracelets. Women wear a four-flip blouse, waistband, skirt, headdress and earrings.

The La Chi have distinct cultural features. Each clan owns an exclusive set of drums and gongs used for festivities and worshipping. Children adopt their father’s surnames. At weddings, the groom’s family pays the bride’s family a certain amount of money in return for nurturing the bride until her marriage.

The ethnic group observes many lunar seasonal festivities, such as rituals to pray for rice seeds, post ploughing, new rice, and the Traditional Lunar New Year Festival (Tet). Their festivities and rituals are closely connected to agricultural practices. The New Year celebrations fall in February and are held in a common worshipping house to ask for productive rice seeds and a bumper crop. Follow-up festivities and rituals bear religious and cultural significance and are highly symbolic.

Ritual attendees prepare four rations of glutinous rice coloured in red, yellow, black and white, with four pieces of buffalo meat. These are accompanied by two buffalo horns filled with wine. The ritual aims to invite ancestor spirits home while praying for the smooth cultivation of rice. When the ritual is over, the father of the family puts on a conical hat and brings along with him a stick sharp pointed and curved like a buffalo horn. The mother carries a basket of rice on her back and their children take the family’s offerings to their newly reclaimed terraced field. Wine is poured out of the buffalo horns before planting the rice amidst prayers for a more plentiful crop than in previous years.

The La Chi will celebrate their biggest ritual in March, as they worship the Snake and Sun genies once every 13 years. An ox is used as a sacrifice and five-coloured steamed glutinous rice is offered. The ritual lasts two days and is attended by a male representative of each family. When the ritual is over, beef from the sacrificed ox is distributed to all households to eat at the worshipping place.

Young men and women enjoy singing to the accompaniment of special musical instruments including drums, gongs, and three-string or lip instruments. Local festivals often draw the participation of many people in diverse sports and games.

La Chi children are encouraged to attend school, where they learn the local dialect and the Vietnamese language. With intensive care and input from the Government, the ethnic group’s living conditions have improved considerably.