Manchunman has been promoted as a domestic ethnic tourism destination for tourists expecting a pristine, feminine and mysterious Dai culture in the Xishuang Banna Dai minority autonomous prefecture (hereafter, Banna), P.R. China. Tourism development turns the village not only into a destination to meet tourists’ thirst for cultural exoticness but also a frontier of interacting with the outside world for Dai villagers. Women in the village are actively engaged in tourism business through receiving tourists to visit their Dai-styled bamboo houses and selling tourists crafts at home. Rather than being a passive symbol of beauty and simplicity for tourist consumption, these women display skills and strategies of marketing and trading Dai culture as desirable commodities. Manchunman women as a group actively shape the construction of Dai-ness through tourism development as consumable “Others.” The villagers confront their interactions between a staged self and a self in reality. The significance of women’s performance in such a process underlines the importance of embracing gender analysis as a perspective in tourism. This paper shows that claiming Dai identity among these women occurs in a multi-layered and heterogeneous self-construction process. They carry out the practices of being contemporary Dai women through continuously creating value-laden distances between the Dai and the Han Chinese while demonstrating diversity in self-representation due to their various business experiences in tourism.