Longji Terraces, Ping'an Village

The last two days have been fantastic. I am so happy to be where I am right now, in Ping'an, a Zhuang minority village high up in the mountains surrounded by beautiful terraced rice paddies. The village is only accessible by foot but my guest house was excellent and provided everything I needed. The young woman who runs it speaks excellent English, and you can get pizza or hamburgers at the cafe (don't worry...I ate local food). And yes, there's internet access, too.

I came here at the suggestion of Let's Go, but even the positive write-up didn't prepare me for what I've found here. It started with a two hour bus ride from Guilin to Longsheng through some extraordinary scenery. The first hour traversed mostly flat farmland until we started climbing into the mountains. The highway was of admirable quality, and world’s better than the average road I experienced in India. Every medium- or long-distance bus here has two employees on board - the driver (usually male), and a "stewardess" of sorts (usually female) who takes tickets, hands out free bottled water, and looks after passengers' needs. This bus also had a TV which blasted MTV China. The Chinese businessman in the seat behind me had a tendency to sing along.

I noticed that the vehicles on the highway were, in order form most to least prevalent, trucks, buses, motorcycles, bicycles, and, finally, personal automobiles.

In Longsheng a girl dressed in a Zhuang costume met me as I stepped off my bus and led me directly to the bus to Ping'an village. One hour later and after climbing very high up the precipice of a mountain on narrow switchback roads, the road came to an end and we had to hike the rest of the way into the village, one or two km. Zhuang women in bright pink outfits met the bus with baskets on their backs and wanted to carry my bag for me. I know they could probably use the money, and I just seemed cheap, but there was no way I was going to let an old woman schlep my heavy backpack for me up the hill when I am perfectly able to do so myself. My guesthouse was like a bed and breakfast and very friendly. The buildings in the village are all two story and made of out wood. I am told this is the traditional Zhuang style, but to me they looked similar to Swiss mountain chalets. Everything smells of wood. The village is perched on the slope of the mountain, and is home to maybe a few hundred people. Stone paths and staircases twist in between of buildings and up and down the hillside. Water flows everywhere in streams, rivulets, waterfalls, and channeled in bamboo pipes. The weather up here is delightful. We are only a few hundred km from the coast, but it is so much more pleasant. At night it is actually chilly enough to put on long sleeves. It’s fun to just hang around the village, watching the villagers in their daily tasks - washing vegetables, tending animals, carving wood, building houses, or blowtorching shanks of meat (yes, I did see this). It seems like every other village building has converted itself into a guesthouse and cafe. That makes it sound really touristy. But I didn’t get that impression. There were a dozen other foreigners here besides me. The Chinese tourists just come for the day and don't spend the night. It’s a very friendly vibe. No one tries to force anything upon the tourists. They always return a "Ni hao" or a smile. Just being here I get a real sense for the pace of village life. Kids play up and down the paths, or in the basketball court. Ducks, chickens, dogs, cats, and even horses (the first horses I've seen in China) wander around and are friendly as well. The one bar in the village plays techno music. It’s not very popular with the tourists, but for the village youth. They also play Beatles covers in Chinese.

And then there is the scenery! This area is world famous for its terraced paddies. They are over 700 years old and require tremendous work and dedication. The topography is very steep and there is little flat land, so the villagers have been resourceful and made use out of what land they have—the hillslopes—and carved them into right-angled terraces. From a distance, they appear as contour lines on a topographic map, snaking around the ridgelines and valleys of the mountains. Sometimes they form concentric rings that completely envelop small hillocks. In these cases, there is no gravity-fed source of water at the top of the hillock, so water is fed across the gap in elevated bamboo pipes. As I am an official guest here (having paid my 50Y entrance fee) I am free to wander the same paths that the farmers and villagers use to access the paddies. I can see them plowing the paddies with water buffalo and cows. Or hoeing. Or planting rice seedlings. At this time of year, the rice is young, and the paddies are flooded. As runoff flows down the mountain, it is diverted and channeled into an ingenious gravity-based network of pipes fashioned from halved bamboo stalks. Sometimes this system resembles a Rube Goldberg apparatus.

On my first day I climbed up to the designated overlook and took in the sight of the village surrounded by terraced fields. This is as far as most of the Chinese day tourists get. Some don't even walk here their own. Instead, they pay to be carried up in an old-fashioned palanquin chair by local laborers. Local women carry the Chinese tourists' large cameras and tripods in big baskets on their backs.   On my second day I went for a nearly 20 km hike through the mountains. On the way I stopped in the village of Zhuangliu, a Yao minority village. Zhuangliu is only accessible by foot - it's 10 km from the nearest road. Here there is much less tourism presence, but the villagers were very friendly when I arrived. The cute kids played around me and took pictures with my camera. While the adults wear the traditional clothing of the Yao people, the kids wear blue jeans (one girl’s jeans have flowers imprinted on them), and t-shirts featuring pop culture icons such as Minnie Mouse. There's no real "restaurant" in Zhuangliu, but the family that operates the one and only “store” fixed me a delicious homemade meal of rice, leafy greens stir-fried with egg, and fried tofu. Back on the trail, I ran into a middle-aged couple from Holland. The husband is an airport designer and is currently working on Beijing's new airport terminal, scheduled to open in time for the 2008 Olympics (his firm also built Amsterdam's airport).

Speaking of the Olympics, Olympic fever has already hit China big time. Souvenir shops everywhere sell Olympic gear, and there are whole shops run by the Chinese Olympic committee. There are five "mascots" who often appear in stuffed animal form - each representing one of the five Olympic rings.

The final village - Da Zai, was not quite as picturesque. It seems to be in the middle of a construction boom - I saw dozens of kids and teenagers carrying heavy pails of gravel and rock from the quarry to the construction site. I also saw a school full of cute little kids doing an elaborate choreographed dance-cum-patriotic salute/march.

I don’t fully understand the relationship between the Han Chinese and the various minority groups in China. The Han account for 92% of the population, but since there are over a billion people in China, there are still millions and millions of minorities. They belong to about 100 different minority groups, and most of them are located in the poorest, most rural regions of China - the southwest, central west, and northwest. In some respects, the relationship seems to have parallels to the historical relationship between white American and various groups of Americans who, at various times in history, have suffered from racism, oppression, and distribution of wealth and resources. Perhaps the most apt parallel, historically-geographically, is in the saga of America’s Native peoples.  Is the historical encroachment by white settlers upon Native American lands similar to the current phenomenon of Han resettlement in formerly minority-dominated areas such as Yunnan, Sichuan, Tibet, and Xinjiang? These areas are being opened up to easier access to the rest of China by new communication linkages, new rail lines and airports, and a rash of new construction, making the migration of Han Chinese to these new "frontiers" much easier.

But on second thought, the parallels aren’t that strong. In America, the encroachers were newcomers from Europe. But the Chinese have always been in China. China, after all, is the world's oldest continuously surviving civilization. And while these various minority groups have also lived where they are for eons, they have always lived in close, or relative, proximity to the Han Chinese, at various points in history being part of one dynasty or empire or another, but always being in the same sphere of influence and part of the world. A further distinction is that Han may differ from the recognized minority groups of China along ethnic, religious, and linguistic (or dialect) lines, but that they are still part of the same overall racial group. What exactly the difference between race and ethnicity? I don’t really want to attempt to answer such a complicated question. Suffice it to say, there is probably a range of opinion out there…

In the evening, back at the guest house, shared a bottle of "Great Wall" wine (made in France specifically for the Chinese market) with a French couple at my guesthouse, and joined the young woman who runs the guesthouse in some local Longji sweet rice wine (which was very sweet indeed; the French thought it tasted more like lemonade).

Funny sign of the day: "Supernatural Peach Hotel"