In this work Nicholas Tapp has written down the results of his extensive fieldwork in a Hmong (or Miao) village in Sichuan. This ethnography of a remarkable Chinese/Thai minority argues that Hmong culture cannot be understood in isolation from Chinese culture, whose dominant influence has shaped it to such an enormous extent. Still, the Hmong have always been creative participants in fashioning their own history from fragments of a forgotten past. The work deals with major issues concerning their identity, such as the interpretation of their cultural borrowings as signs of envy or subversion, farming and kinship relations, shamanism and ancestral worship, and, in part three, the legends of the Orphan, who achieves sovereignty through a mystic marriage. It is made clear that agency redefines context, through the power of imagination.