Someone recently told me they heard of this culture that lived in the mountains in China somewhere that was isolated from the world for a very, very long time. They said that this culture was completely led by women and that in their vocabulary they had no words for "war", "rape", or "father".
They said this culture, which apparently was a city of nearly 30,000 people, escaped war with the Han or the Ming dynasty (I dont recall which she said, I think it was Ming) because they were so isolated in the mountains that the Hans didnt even know they were there.
I took all this with a large grain of salt because this person has a habit of just believing stupid memes they see on facebook. I am not able to find any articles referencing this culture anywhere, despite searching (thought it is hard to craft a good search term for this).
Does anybody know of this culture? Can someone send me a legitimate article on this subject matter? Is this real or is it just somr made up crap someone is trying to spread on social media?
Edit" it seems that it is the Musuo people and that they are a matriarchal society but this painting of it as a feminist utopia is not true at all. They do have rape and murder, thought technically they dint have specific words for murder vs just to kill. Rape is punished by death. Women are also extremely pressured to have babies, women are not seen as "complete" unless they have kids, which is ridiculous. So the propaganda going around about this being the perfect utopia is simply false. Here is a good article about it https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/apr/01/the-kingdom-of-women-the-tibetan-tribe-where-a-man-is-never-the-boss
I believe what is going on here is an amalgamation of a variety of different stories. To deal with the easiest one first: the paradise society that exists in the high mountains is likely from the famous fifth century Chinese story of the "Peach Blossom Spring", in which a fisherman stumbles onto a hidden village that was founded by refugees during the Qin dynasty who had been cut off from all contact since that time (The orientalist version of this is Shangri-La, although as far as I know James Hilton, the author of Lost Horizon from which Shagri-La comes, did not know about "The Peach Blossom Spring" and instead went off a somewhat garbled understanding of Tibetan stories). Suffice to say there are no "hidden valleys" entirely secluded from the rest of the Chinese world, although this is a concept that crops up in many different concepts globally (Greg Woolf in Becoming Roman discusses the myth of "hidden valleys" in modern conceptions of Roman Gaul, given its greatest fame in the Asterix comics).
There is a grain of truth to the notion, there is a Chinese saying that "the mountains are high and the emperor is far way" referring to the weakness of central administrative capacity across many areas of the empire. This concept was recently explored in James C Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed on which he describes highland Southeast Asia as being an area that actively resisted incursions by lowland empires, far from being "cut off" and "unaware" of "the outside world" people in these areas were familiar enough with it to know they wanted to part of it. This could be interpreted as ignorance or savagery by chauvinistic officials officials, but of course that is their perspective.
This appears to have been grafted onto the Na or Mosuo people of Yunnan, who have attracted interest for being one of the few peoples plausibly described as "matriarchal". They were by no means "cut off" from the wider Chinese world (in fact they were administered through the tusi system of the Ming Dynasty, in which indigenous leaders were recognized as Ming imperial officials) and they are recognized as one of the 56 minorities of China (or more precisely, they are recognized as part of the Naxi minority). Among the Na, descent is reckoned matrilineally and women are considered as head of household, and they have a very complex marriage system that can best be described as "fluid"--rather than attempt to describe it I will instead recommend this short report by the anthropologist Tami Blumenfeld. Because of this it has attracted a great deal of interest, including plenty of popular articles if you are curious. However whether they can be described as "matriarchal" is a subject of a great deal of debate, particularly as political leadership tends to be male (although that could be an effect of the tusi system).
I would recommend asking /r/AskAnthropology about this, as it does not really fall within "history" as such.
So what I believe we have is a real anthropologically described people that have a gender structure that can appear quite liberated, grafted on to old stories of the hidden utopia--which I, personally, find quite fascinating.