Update Dec 2022. From publication in 2010 until now this post was called 'Ma'an and the Longsheng Rice Terraces'. While producing a map for the updated post I learned that Ma'an (actually Maan) is a very minor part of Chengyang, eight linked Dong villages in the Sanjiang Dong Autonomous County. We maybe had lunch in Maan, but our visited was clearly to Chengyang more generally, so I have changed the title to reflect this.
A Dong Metropolis and a Masterpiece of Agricultural Engineering
Chengyang, a Major Dong Settlement
06-Nov-2010
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| China |
Driving southeast, we left Guizhou Province and entered Guangxi. The first town we encountered was Sanjiang, the administrative capital of the Sanjiang Dong Autonomous County in the north eastern corner of Liuxhou Prefecture. We stopped here for Dylan, our excellent Guizhou guide to hand is over to Liu who would be our Guangxi guide.
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| Guangxi Province and its position in SW China |
Liu suggested lunch in Sanjiang, but the power was off and anyway a half hour drive to the Dong villages of Chengyang promised more interesting fair.
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| Approaching Chengyang |
It was quickly clear the eight villages making up Chengyang cluster together to form a small town. They had the usual Dong features including several drum towers....
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| Drum Tower, Chengyang |
...a wind and rain bridge...
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| Wind and Rain Bridge, Chengyang |
...perhaps even one each...
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| Another Wind and Rain Bridge, Chengyang |
...and plenty of wooden houses.
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| Wooden Houses, Chengyang |
Unlike remote, rural Guizhou, where nobody had tried to sell us anything, the bridges were lined with souvenir stalls. Several older women hawking only handfuls of tenpenny tat employed the persistent, wheedling sales tactics that are barely half a step up from aggressive begging.
The stalls are a consequence of a regular supply of tourists; the aggressive selling/begging starts when enough of those tourists are rich westerners (though few of us would actually consider ourselves ‘rich’). A critical mass of foreigners then drags in the chancers and con men intent on separating easy targets from the contents of their overstuffed wallets. As each side loses sight of the other’s humanity a tourist industry evolves dedicated to guaranteeing foreigners only meet ‘safe’ Chinese. They explain a watered down culture, take the character out of the food and generally ensure the experience never becomes too demanding. In Guizhou we had met people who were proud of their culture for what it was, not for what they could get out of us. The Miao found us as exotic as we found them, but we were only two – plus the excellent Dylan – so they could show us genuine hospitality and we treated each other with courtesy and respect. Foreigners in Chengyang were still short of the critical mass, but Liu was part of a tourist industry primed and ready.
The smartest restaurant was full so Liu, rather reluctantly, took us to her second choice. Travelling with Liu was obviously going to be different. Dylan, Miao himself, entered Miao villages with a sense of belonging and was equally comfortable among the Dong, though our comments about Dong villages’ relative untidiness produced a distinct glow of Miao pride. Liu, a tall, thin, rather prim Han, kept using words like ‘primitive’ and ‘simple’. She regarded the Dong as quaint, if rather grubby, exhibits in a museum, whilst we were porcelain dolls that she must not allow to become dirty or broken.
If she had fussed around the open kitchen any harder she would have been doing the cooking. Unfamiliar flavours must not be allowed to upset our delicate palates, so she ensured every dish was appropriately bland and policed a rigid ban on chillies. We said we liked chillies, so she permitted the token sprinkling of three dried flakes on the top of one dish. We sent it back for more. Eventually we negotiated a tolerable if unexciting meal.
We continued our tour, pausng to observe, among other things, the treatment of harvested rice...
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| Harvested rice, Ma'an |
...and a woman picking sticky rice, stalk by stalk, on a field leading down to the river.
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| Picking sticky rice |
We stopped for some oil tea, a Dong speciality that had so far passed us by. Tea leaves are first fried in oil to bringing out their bitterness, then water is added along with a few peanuts and other less recognisable solids. The result is poured into a soup bowl and served with a spoon. It was a pleasant, though rather insipid brew. As we left Liu said, “she didn’t fry it as long as usual because that would have been too bitter for you, and of course she left out the chillies.” Liu was part of an industry that had told her that she knew more about our tastes than we did, and she was determined to defend us from all things Chinese (or at least Dong). We obviously had some work to do with Liu
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| A bowl of oil tea |
Ping'an and its Remarkable Rice Terraces
We were happy to leave Chenyang, and an hour’s drive took us into Guilin Prefecture and the 'Longsheng Various Nationalities Autonomous County'. Longsheng town itself is an unremarkable place, but it is the gateway to the ‘Longsheng Scenic Area’. A brief stop was necessary in the huge car while Liu visited the ticket office. Then we drove through the barrier and up the mountain road towards Ping’an, the village where we would spend the night.
The road does not quite make it to Ping’an, but ends in a car park a steep forty-minute walk below the village. As we stepped from the car we were besieged by porters, all anxious to carry our case up to the hotel. Although I am used to carrying my own bags, I was happy to give employment to someone who needed it, but I found it embarrassing that all the porters were women - some of them by no means young. We let Liu pick from the scrum, and we were soon handing over our case to a stocky middle-aged woman. It was too big to fit in her basket, so she strapped it to the top with an octopus clip and bounced off up the path leaving us trailing in her wake. It was a stiff climb and we were grateful to be walking unencumbered, particularly near the top, where we had to negotiate uneven steps in gathering darkness. We arrived short of breath to find our porter sitting calmly on the hotel steps. She then insisted on carrying the case up to our fourth floor room as the creaky wooden building had no lift.
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| Ping'an |
The other guests were a French tour group. We ate our chicken and peanuts that night surrounded by European faces, as though we had somehow stepped into a Chinese restaurant in France.
07-Nov-2010
In the morning we asked for a local breakfast of spicy noodle soup with a fried egg and smugly watched the French party picking at the sweet flaccid bread and scrape of yellow not-butter which they were encouraged to cover with a jam which was sweet but with no discernible fruit flavour. Such is a Chinese ‘western breakfast’. When we had eaten, we went out and climbed the rest of the way up the mountain.
The Longsheng rice terraces are striped across the hillside from the 900m ridge to the stream 500m below. Built some five hundred years ago and still very much in use they are a tribute to mankind’s indomitable determination to wring a living from an unhelpful countryside. We stood on Longji (the Dragon’s Spine) looking down upon thousands upon thousands of terraces covering the flanks of the dragon and reaching out along his legs.
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| Terraces reach out along the dragon's legs, Ping'an |
The terraces are, without doubt, a marvel. They look fabulous in spring when they are full of water, wonderful in the summer when the young rice is green, splendid in autumn when the mature rice is yellow and ready to cut, and magical in winter when covered with snow. Unfortunately, just after the harvest they just look brown and, with the hazy sunshine straight in our faces, very difficult to photograph.
When we returned we found our porter sitting on the hotel steps waiting for us. She had been there, we were told, since eight o’clock to be sure to get the job. I still felt guilty about letting her carry my case, but I realised how important the small quantity of cash was to her.
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| There goes our case |
Ping’an was once a Zhuang village but is now largely a collection of tourist hotels. With 18 million people, the Zhuang are China’s largest ethnic minority, though many of them, like Ping’an itself, have become assimilated into the Han mainstream. As we climbed down the mountain, we passed a range of stalls, mostly manned by Zhuang wearing their traditional costume for the tourists.
At puberty Zhuang women cut their hair for the only time in their lives. They cover their heads until marriage, after which they wear their increasingly long hair coiled and uncovered. Two thirds of the way down we paused at a stall run by a middle aged woman and her teenage daughter. For a small payment from Liu the older woman uncoiled her hair and combed it out, holding up the cut hair of her childhood which had been incorporated like a hair extension. We took the obligatory photographs but felt uncomfortable, at best we were watching a freak show, at worst it was a cultural violation. Liu treated the woman like an exhibit, and was keen to take a photograph of us with her. I declined rather more quickly and probably more rudely than I should, but it seemed so wrong. Smiling, the woman recoiled her hair and pinned it on her head, doubtless she would do the same act many more times during the day.
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| Our last brush with ethnic minorities |
This sad experience was our last brush with Chinese ethnic minorities – at least for this trip. We felt we had been privileged to travel through Guizhou and encounter the rural Miao and Dong cultures while they were strong, and while women still wore traditional clothes as a matter of course and not just for tourists. In the longer term, though, I suspect the cultures are doomed and it is not tourism that will kill them, but the riches and opportunities of the modern age. With the exception of electricity and a few agricultural machines, the rural lifestyle has changed little, but whenever we saw a village from above - and that was often in such a mountainous region - it was impossible not to notice the satellites dishes sprouting from almost every roof. Villagers see how their urban cousins live, or at least a version of it, and they want some of that, just as their urban cousins see a version of how we live and want their cars, dishwashers and pop-up toasters, too. The people will be assimilated into mainstream life and their culture, confined to shows like the one we saw in Xijiang, will be as relevant to everyday lives as Morris Dancing is to the English.
The end of a distinctive culture may be sad, but Miao life is no rural idyll. The people are small, the old people diminutive through a lifetime of inadequate nutrition and their tired, lined faces tell a story of hard toil. The traditional Chinese peasant’s dream of abundant food may have now been achieved, but we saw countless farm workers staggering along the roads, the baskets slung on their carry poles so heavy that their knees bent with the effort of carrying them. We saw people whose horizon would never be wider than the backside of the buffalo hauling their plough. We heard the echo of women whose whole waking life is spent hammering cloth. To return to a theme this blog has encountered before, I cannot expect people to live in picturesque poverty just to please me. If they aspire to some of the advantages fate has showered on me, then it would be hypocritical to criticise.
China's Far South West (2010)
Part 1: Kunming and The Stone Forest
Part 2: Shilin to Xingyi
Part 3: Xingyi and on to Huangguoshu
Part 4: Qingyan, Guiyang and on to Kaili
Part 5: Kaili, Xijiang and Rongjiang
Part 6: Rongjiang, Zhaoxing and on to Guangxi
Part 7: Chengyang Dong Villages and the Longsheng Rice Terraces
Part 8: Guilin and the Li River
Part 9: Hong Kong
Part 10: Macau
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