Xijiang Qianhu Miao Village, Guizhou

The DiDi from Kaili to Xijiang had been quoted at 70 yuan and then stopped at a toll gate, which after Zhenyuan I was expecting. This time the driver took a different route, avoiding the toll. This turned out good since the ride was very scenic and I was in no rush.

To get into the Miao village you have to pay an entrance fee. The 110 yuan ticket is good for 4 days and includes all the bus rides inside the village.

The village sits on one side of the valley and the hotels and the observation deck on the other. I had booked a hotel right next to the observation deck, so from the window I was looking straight at the thing I had come to see. Over two days that turned out to matter more than anything else about the place.

There was some light left when I arrived, so before going out for dinner I stopped at the observation platform, together with several hundred chinese, to take some photos. I then went down to the river, walked the long commercial street along the river end to end and back, and had dinner. Silver, embroidery, rice wine, drums, women in full dress charging by the photograph, grilled food on sticks.

A thousand households

The name means a thousand households. The count now is about fourteen hundred, holding a little over five thousand people, and it is the largest Miao village anywhere.

They are all on the one hillside. The houses are diaojiaolou, stilt houses: a stone footing cut into the slope, then a wooden frame stepping out over the drop on posts, so the downhill half of the building stands on legs. Fir, mortise and tenon, no nails in the frame. Ground floor for storage and animals, middle floor for living, and a long curved rail along the balcony where the women used to sit to do embroidery.

On a slope that steep the roof of one house is at about the floor level of the next. From across the valley it is one continuous mass of dark timber with no gaps in it.

I photographed it the first evening as the lights came on. That is the standard shot, and there is a reason everybody takes it.

Six in the morning

What I wanted was the same hillside with mist in the valley underneath it.

I set an alarm for six. The window was the viewpoint, so I did not have to go anywhere, which was just as well. The sky was flat grey with no edge in it. No mist, no direction to the light, the whole hillside one even tone. There is nothing to be done with that.

I waited an hour in case it broke. It did not. Failing at a window costs you the alarm and nothing else.

Up among the houses

Mid-morning I crossed over to the other side of the valley and went up, into the houses rather than along the street.

The shops give out after a few hundred metres of climbing. Above that the lanes narrow to about the width of a person carrying something, they are stone, and they run between the houses rather than in front of them. It is steep the whole way.

What I noticed up there was the maintenance. New fir planks let into old walls. Roof tiles stacked and waiting. Timber drying against a gable. It was going on in a lot of places at once, on a lot of houses, in a village where every one of them is lived in.

I had lunch back down in the village and thought about that.

Miao, Hmong, and why the words are not interchangeable

If you have met Hmong people in Minnesota or in northern Laos, you have met relatives of the people at Xijiang, and you have also met a different group.

Miao is an official Chinese category, one of the fifty-six ethnic groups recognised by the state. It is a large umbrella. The languages underneath it are related, belonging to the Hmongic family, but they are often mutually unintelligible, and the groups it covers have distinct dress, custom and history. The 2020 census counted around 11.07 million Miao in China. Guizhou holds 48.1 per cent of them, Hunan another 21.5 per cent.

There are four main branches. Hmu, in southeast Guizhou, which is Xijiang. A-Hmao, in western Guizhou and northeastern Yunnan. Xong, in western Hunan. And Hmong, in southern and eastern Yunnan, southern Sichuan and western Guizhou. Roughly a third of the Miao in China are Hmong.

From the eighteenth century onward, groups moved south out of China into what is now Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar, and it was overwhelmingly Hmong who went. After the communist victory in Laos in 1975, large numbers of Hmong refugees resettled in the United States, France and Australia. That is why Hmong is the name the West knows and Miao is the name China uses.

So the relationship is containment, not equivalence. Every Hmong person is Miao under the Chinese classification. Most Miao are not Hmong. The people whose houses I was walking between are Hmu, and would not understand a conversation in Hmong.

There is a further wrinkle in the word itself. Miao picked up derogatory associations in the Ming period, closer to barbarian than to a neutral name, and some Hmong abroad avoid it for that reason. Inside China it is standard usage and is not generally taken as an insult. The umbrella was not simply imposed either. When the classification was being done in the early 1950s, Miao intellectuals argued for the single large category, on the grounds that one recognised group of millions carried more weight than a dozen small ones.

Who pays for the roofs

Xijiang had 75,000 visitors in 2006. In 2008 the province held its tourism development conference here and put over 300 million yuan into the place, in roads, water and power. By 2018 the annual figure was 8.54 million.

Underneath that there is a smaller arrangement, and it is the one that explains the timber. Eighteen per cent of ticket revenue goes back to the villagers, not as wages and not as a lump sum to the village committee, but as an annual household payment called the ethnic culture protection reward. Households are graded for it. The grading rests on whether the house has been kept in traditional form, wood rather than concrete, the old roof, the old frame, and on whether the household keeps up the practices as well. For a typical family it comes to around 10,000 yuan a year.

So the hillside is wooden partly because wooden pays. Not only for that reason. People live in their grandparents’ houses in every country, and there is no reason to assume Xijiang would have concreted itself over otherwise. But the incentive here is written down, graded and paid annually, which is not the same thing as sentiment.

How China’s relationship with its minorities got to here

The shift from classifying people to paying them took about seventy years, and Xijiang is near the end of it rather than typical of it.

The fifty-six ethnic groups are not an ancient list. They come out of the classification project of the 1950s, when teams of linguists and ethnographers went into the field to work out who was who. Several hundred groups applied for recognition. Fifty-six came out the other side, and everything since has been organised around that list.

The structural answer was regional ethnic autonomy. Areas with concentrated minority populations were designated autonomous, at region, prefecture and county level, with the group named in the title. Xijiang sits inside Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture, and the naming is not decorative. It carries administrative arrangements and a requirement for local representation.

Alongside that came preferential policy. Bonus points on the gaokao, the university entrance examination. Exemption from the family planning limits that applied to the Han majority. Targeted development funding. For decades that was the visible shape of the relationship: recognition, representation, and a set of advantages attached to the classification.

The emphasis moved with the rest of the country. The reform era made economic development the organising goal, and the last two decades made rural poverty the specific target. Guizhou was one of the principal objects of that effort, having been among the poorest provinces in China, and the money went into roads, high-speed rail, water and power at a scale that is hard to overstate when you are looking at the result from a hillside.

Tourism is what the effort turned into in the southwest, because the southwest’s comparative advantage is scenery and cultural distinctiveness, and neither requires moving anybody to a factory. So the relationship in a place like Xijiang is now substantially a financial one. Minority culture is an asset with a revenue stream attached, preservation is funded out of the gate receipts, and a household that keeps its house in the old form is paid for doing so.

There are two honest readings of that and both are true. One is that it turns a living culture into a product, and that a village whose roofs are maintained to a grading standard is being curated. The other is that it works. The houses are standing, the population has not drained away to Guangdong, and a household in a remote Guizhou village has an income it did not have in 2006. Which of those matters more is not something a visitor of two nights gets to settle.

After dark

The evening light did what the morning had not. I was at the window before the sun went and out on the deck for the hour after, which is when it happens. The slope goes to silhouette, then the windows start lighting up, and within about fifteen minutes the whole hillside is lit from the inside and doubled in the river at the bottom.

Then down for dinner again, and the food was good both nights. There is a wide variety of eateries, from food stalls to fancy restaurants.

Two nights is right. One gives you a single attempt at the light, which on my numbers is a coin toss. Three and you have run out of things to do.

Xijiang, the practical stuff

Getting there — Kaili is the gateway. High-speed trains stop at Kaili South, the ordinary line stops at Kaili station in town, and Xijiang is about an hour on from either by bus or DiDi. My DiDi quoted 70 yuan and then stopped at a toll gate for the balance, the second time that happened to me in Guizhou. Treat the quote as a floor.
Ticket — 110 yuan at the gate, valid for four days and including all the shuttle bus rides inside the village. Published figures still say 100.
Get a room facing the valley — better advice than simply staying on the observation deck side. The village is photographed from the opposite hillside, and a window with the view already in it means you never commit to a walk to find out what the light is doing.
The shuttle to the viewing deck runs 07:00 to 01:00, the village itself is open around the clock.
Dusk is the shot, not dawn — the lights come up roughly fifteen minutes after the sun goes and the hillside is fully lit within half an hour. Dawn mist is the famous one and it is a gamble. Overcast gives you nothing at all.
Go uphill, past the shops — the commercial street at the bottom is the same street as everywhere. The lanes above it are why you came.
The lanes are stone and steep — nothing technical, but it is climbing, and the good part is the part that climbs.
Eat the sour fish soup — Guizhou’s one indispensable dish, and better here than anywhere you will eat it later.
Two nights — enough for two attempts at the light and one proper walk uphill. Three is one too many.

Xijiang, the village that is paid to look like itself