Southwest China In Depth #1: Village of the Drum Tower

Guizhou Province, China

I rode a horse cart to Zengchong, a Dong minority village deep in the mountains of southwest China’s Guizhou province. My captain was a cheerful farmer in his late 50s who wore a handmade dark purple dress. That misty morning, he made an early five-kilometer trip to buy fertilizer in a one-street town, Wangdong, where I spent the night before.

Our bumpy ride followed a windy river upstream. On either side, layers of rice paddies, some as narrow as just a foot wide, climbed up steep hills at some of the most unbelievable locations. Harvest time was over, leaving only dots of neatly packed haystacks.

Guizhou is famous for its mountains. It is often described as having no flat roads over three feet long. Getting to Zengchong takes time. After more than an eight-hour of bus ride from the provincial capital, Guiyang, with a good portion being on spiral curves carved on the side of mountain passes, my options of transportation came down to going by foot, horse cart, back seat of a motorcycle, or mini tractor often time loaded with livestock.

The Dong ethnic group, numbered around 2.5 million, resides mostly in southwest China’s Guizhou, Hunan and Guangxi provinces. With no written language of their own until the Chinese government installed a Latin-based one in the late 1950s, the Dongs, nevertheless, hold a rich heritage in poetry, music and architecture.

Our squeaky horse cart veered off the main road and came down a narrow track lined with banyan trees. The surrounding hills turned mellow. Among bigger patches of harvested rice fields were green vegetables and next season’s crop soaked in reddish water. Villagers walked the thin bank on the edge of the fields, carrying two bamboo baskets balanced by a wooden pole over their shoulders.

Veiled in fog and nestled at the tree-covered foothill, at first sight, Zengchong is almost mystical. Houses with blackish roof tiles form an inseparable cluster. The village is embraced by a river from all but one side. The farmer dropped me off at the entrance. From there, paths covered with blue granite extend deep into the village.

Hundreds of years ago, Zengchong was the most prominent Dong village in the area. And little of its appearance seems to have changed since then.A woman with her hair neatly coiled was washing clothes by the stream. Her silver necklace was pulled back and rested on her back. Once she noticed I was around, she looked up, smiled, and returned to the rhythm of cleaning her clothes with a pestle. Large vats containing indigo liquid with leafy plants floating on the surface sat outside almost every house. A group of woman passed me by. They wore indigo colored dresses with beautifully embroidered hems.

I followed the granite path to the village center where a 25-meter drum tower stands. It is what attracted me to Zengchong. Built almost four hundred years ago, the 13-story wooden structure is held together without any nails. Though nearly every Dong village has a drum tower, Zengchong’s drum tower is the oldest in Guizhou province and one of the best preserved.

Paintings on the side of the tower have already faded, but it is still easy to make out birds, flowers, bamboo leaves and mythical figures. Moss grew on the roof and spider webs occupied many of the pointed eaves. This is exactly how I prefer an old building to look. Inside the hollow bottom of the tower, a group of villagers sat on the benches around a huge fire pit. Dogs, pigs, ducks and roosters wondered around. Here, history mixes with present day in a lively way. A large leather drum is stored on the top floor. Villagers gather around the drum tower for meetings – to sing, to dance and to celebrate festivals.

I sat on a stone stair by the pond and watched the daily life of Zengchongs unfold. A deeply hunched old lady walked past the pond with a stick. A herd of ducks followed a young woman down to the stream. And sitting by the drum tower, a man was selling pork – a whole pig, its head set right by his feet.

I wandered around through the maze-like narrow paths to the back of the village. By a covered bridge, just when I snapped a picture of some newly dyed clothes drying on a bamboo pole, I heard a voice.

“What did you take a picture of?” A little boy about seven years old asked me.

“Your village,” I said. “Do you go to school?”

“Yes. It’s noon, rest time. We’ll have school again at two. Do you like our village?”

“Of course. It’s very pretty.”

“Hmmm, maybe you take a picture of me?” asked the boy.

“Of course. Come this way.”

I stepped back and framed him in the background of the village. After I was done, he asked to look at the picture. To my surprise, a digital camera didn’t seem very foreign to him.

“In the summer time, many people come here,” the boy said. “They gave us pencils to have our picture taken. Do you have pencils?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Then how about notebooks? Do you have notebooks?”

“No, I don’t. I didn’t bring any.”

I didn’t know what to think. Perhaps the appearance of the village hadn’t changed much for hundreds of years, but it was not hard to notice the satellites perched on the moss-covered rooftops and televisions playing inside most houses. The friendly boy didn’t show any signs of disappointment. He led me through houses of his relatives. From his uncle’s house, he grabbed a full handful of sticky rice, roasted and pressed – a tasty treat. From his grandmother’s, he took out a rooster and asked me to take a picture of it. Satisfied after looking at my camera’s LCD screen, he ran away with his friend.

The lunch crowd had thinned out by now. People returned to work, putting axes, sickles back into a bamboo holders tied to their waists, basket on their shoulders. I followed a group of women to the outside of the village and stood on a covered bridge overlooking Zengchong, its drum tower rising high among the black roofed houses.

A middle-aged man walked across the bridge with his donkey. He stopped and greeted me. We soon got into a conversation. As much as I thought Zengchong was so far away from the modern world, out of the forty plus families living here, nearly one hundred men were out doing labor work in big cities – some went as far as Beijing. That could explain why I saw a lot more women than men in the village.

“Before,” he said, “we could only grow crops to feed ourselves, but we had no money. Now, we can make money working in cities. Almost every family has a television. We can watch Super Soprano (a popular singing contest). I like it very much.”

On the hills at the edge of the village, new houses were built on stilts. Power lines crossed the terraced fields on which villagers were tilling the soil with plows strapped behind farm cattle. Along with the sound of the stream flowing under the bridge, I could hear songs in traditional Dong melody playing from a loud speaker. The audio quality was poor, but the multi-parts chorus free of any accompaniment was nothing short of touching.

“Come again for the spring festival,” said the farmer, “we will sing and dance for three days, day and night.”

How could I resist!

When I started my travel to southwest China, I was hoping to find places that somehow escaped the influence of modernization. Perhaps such places do exist. Change will never change. It is impossible to stop a culture, an ethnic group, a village from evolving, whether I like it or not. So long as people living there are happy, I should feel happy for them.