Tsering Drölma and Tendor were born in the 1980s and are too young to remember the people's communes. However, Tsering Drölma's uncle, Jigmed Dorji, remembers this period well. The family then lived on the other side of the Dom River and was much less affluent than they are now. When the communes closed, the land was allocated to individual households. In 1983, Jigmed Dorji's parents (Tsering Drölma's grandparents) received a land lease contract stating that they were the legal users (though not formal owners) of new land in Soglung Valley. The contract had thirty years’ validity but was later extended to fifty years. When Jigmed Dorji's parents died, the contract was transferred to him and his sister, Tsering Drölma's mother. In addition to the land, the family received a share of livestock from the commune herds. In the production team they were part of, every person received twenty-one sheep and nine yaks. Other teams were wealthier and people got thirty sheep and fifteen yaks, or even as many as forty sheep and twenty-three yaks. Luckily, Jigmed Dorji's parents had some animals that were assigned to them by the commune for their private use. As a result, the nine-person family entered the new economic era with 189 sheep and eighty-one yaks from the commune herds as well as twelve yaks, twenty-one sheep and two horses which they had already owned.

Two decades later, when I conducted my research, the two families – Tsering Drölma's and Jigmed Dorji's – who lived on the land covered by the above contract were quite prosperous, even in their own eyes. During the survey, Tsering Drölma and Tendor declared that they (a family of three) had 123 yaks. In front of their house stretched a yak corral (zogra) where the dris and calves stay at night – one could see them through the kitchen window and hear their grunting (Figure 19). All the dris had names: Shiomo, Wobse, Keyig, Rogzylma, Horog, Thurog, Thiknag and so on. Dri is a general name for female yaks of reproductive age, but the group splits into several sub-categories. Pregnant females and those that just calved are called thima. Those that calved the year before and thus whose calves are yearlings are yaryma.