Can China’s Dong Minority Keep Their Unique Cultural Heritage?

An ambitious university-led research project to document the Dong people’s distinctive architecture is revealing a great deal about this marginalized Indigenous group’s way of life.

A New Year feast at a Dong village in Guizhou Province, China, 2009.

The Dong people in China are an Indigenous ethnic group who are known to have lived in the mountainous regions of southwestern China for about 600 years. They don’t have a written language – instead their cultural knowledge is shared by word of mouth. This means that the outside world doesn’t know much about them.

But an ambitious university-led research project to document the Dong people’s distinctive architecture is revealing a great deal about this marginalized Indigenous group’s way of life.

There are an estimated 3 million Dong people living in the provinces of Guizhou, Hunan, and Guangxi. They are renowned for their polyphonic choral singing, which has been inscribed by UNESCO since 2009 as an example of world-class intangible cultural heritage. Their architecture, landscape, and refined agricultural terracing are also distinctive, but less well known and never digitally recorded.

Dong buildings and settlements are typically hidden in fir forests with direct access to waterways at the bottom of valleys or halfway up hills. A Dong settlement typically has around 200 households of four to five people – although some larger villages can have as many as 500 households.

These villages tend to have a gatehouse marking their boundary, defining their territory in relation to neighboring settlements. Many feature a distinctive “wind-and-rain bridge” – a mix of village gate and covered bridge – used for communal gatherings and blocking ceremonies. Ponds, wells, and granaries are scattered throughout the landscape.

At the heart of most villages, surrounded by wooden houses of two or three storeys, there is a “drum tower” and a “Sa-Sui shrine.” The former represents the connection of the people’s sacred belief of clan kinship and fir trees, while the latter represents the center of the Dong’s worship of the “Sa” or grandmother. They are the most important buildings in a village – for security, social and spiritual reasons.

External view of the drum tower of Zeng Chong village. Photo by Xiang Ren.

Nowadays, the Dong’s built and cultural heritage are increasingly at risk. This is due to a combination of climate change, natural disasters, urban infrastructure development and the expansion of rural tourism.

A warming climate is increasingly triggering wild fires and causing mountain flooding. We are also seeing the encroachment of urbanism into the Dong’s rural settings. While bringing improvements in the quality of life, this often presents domestic fire hazards due to poor-quality electrical infrastructure. And in recent years, the growth of tourism and the encroachment of roads, railways, and bridges is in danger of turning these villages into decorated stage-sets. This may bring in money, but threatens the Dong people’s unique architecture and landscape.

It’s a pressing challenge for this Indigenous people and for those of us dedicated to preserving their historic environment, their culture, and their highly ritualized way of life.

Tragically, the scarcity of resources means that schemes for repair, restoration and........

© The Diplomat