The little-known villages that may be China’s next Unesco stars

Hidden in the remote control valleys of southern China happen to be 1,000-year-old villages where time appears to have stood even now. These Dong minority communities contain intricate wooden buildings, web host unique festivals, and so are home to persons who worship nature, don elaborate outfits and favour ancient lifestyles.

Stilted homes and time-donned pagodas line the car-free streets of the villages, which are surrounded by fields that generate the wheat, rice and vegetables that feed it is residents, and the tea, cotton and rapeseed they sell off.

The Dong are among 55 ethnic minorities in China, and emerged more than a millennium ago. They don't rely heavily after tourism revenue, but it helps supplement their money, which otherwise stems largely from agriculture.

The remarkable minority communities and 20 of their villages are on Unesco’s tentative list to be granted World Heritage Internet site status. Such reputation by the esteemed governing physique of protected sites could have the tranquil villages stated alongside famed Chinese attractions including the Forbidden City in Beijing, the Terracotta Warriors in Xi’an, the fantastic Wall of China. Whereas foreign tourists swarm those Unesco sites, few venture in to the countryside of China’s Guizhou, Guangxi and Yunnan provinces to explore these villages.

The Dong persons also delight in showcasing their particular culture. My latest encounter with this community was 2 yrs ago at the Yunnan Nationalities Village in Kunming, where I fulfilled a young woman in classic Dong garb. She smiled from beneath her large, colourful headdress, which complemented her heavy, metallic neck-part and handwoven jacket and skirt. Although that sprawling complex in Kunming can be interesting, it’s a tourist appeal that gives but a shallow knowledge of the 25 ethnic minorities of Yunnan province.

My first encounter with Dong culture found in 2014 was a lot more authentic. A bumpy, five-hour bus ride from the favorite tourist city of Guilin brought me to Chengyang, a cluster of Dong communities in a far-flung place of Guangxi province. This minority offers resided in the picturesque valley for more than 1,000 years. While they’re a minority group in China, a country of just one 1.4 billion persons, the Dong inhabitants is relatively large, at near three million people.

Their religion centres in the worship of nature, plus they speak a dialect more closely related to Thai than to China’s dominant languages of Mandarin and Cantonese.

To the uneducated observer, it may be difficult to discern the Dong persons from some of China’s other ethnic minorities. They are thought to possess close genetic links to some of these other organizations, and their flamboyant traditional clothing can appear quite similar.

Yet as Unesco notes about its site: “The authenticity of the Dong language, festivals, song and dance, medicine, crafts and additional intangible heritages has been very well preserved in every the nominated Dong Villages, which makes the Dong village customs distinct from those of the neighborhood and encircling Han, Miao, Zhuang and other nationalities.”

Many Dong people, it must be said, do not stay in villages or dress in traditional garb. A large number have a home in China’s large cities, where do the job is more easily found. There is a particularly large population of Dong persons in Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou province. This metropolis is currently well connected to numerous Dong villages due to a high-speed rail line that operates between Guiyang and Guilin, through previously isolated farmland.

That bullet train symbolises how China is widely perceived by tourists, despite new challenges - as a swiftly modernising nation of cutting-edge technology, hulking infrastructure and massive cities.

Chengyang, rather delightfully, confounds this stereotype of modern-day China. Stilted homes constructed with Chinese fir real wood replace skyscrapers, meandering rivers replacement for highways, vegetable patches fill in for supermarkets, and people gather in village squares instead of at searching centres. Above these squares loom among the symbols of the Dong persons - the drum tower. These majestic wooden structures can stand 30 metres high and are decorated by up to a dozen layers of eaves, and also murals or carvings that depict Dong mythology.

Drum towers are the hubs of the communities. Narrow streets and alleys spoke off the village squares that adjoin the towers, and these general public spaces will be the venues for daily network gatherings and twelve-monthly festivals. Locals dance to live music supplied by lutes and lusheng pipes, in performances that are central to the countless Dong festivals. The most well-known of these may be the annual bullfighting event, when normal water buffalo battle the other person before cheering crowds.

Even more alluring compared to the Dong’s drum towers are their extraordinary covered bridges. My long quest to Chengyang would have been worth it merely to admire the Wind and Rainfall Bridge that delivers entry to this band of villages. Spanning the Linxi river, this 80-metre-long hardwood and stone bridge built in 1912 is like a functional masterpiece of design. Its five wooden pavilions each boast multi-eaved roofs decorated with delicate carvings of the phoenix.

With staircases positioned at either end, this bridge was designed limited to pedestrians, which is why there are no cars or trucks in the communities of Chengyang. And this may remain the position quo if China’s Dong villages happen to be granted prized Unesco position. In a region that’s surging in to the potential at a rare pace, these ancient communities give invaluable insight into China’s past.