File:Zhaoxing 005.jpg

English: Place: Zhaoxing, Liping County, Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture, Guizhou Province

My next destination during my trip in southern China was in remote Guizhou province, traditionally one of the poorest provinces in China. I took the high-speed train to Congjiang station. In the train I met a Frenchman who worked for some nuclear plant company in France and had an internship for a few months somewhere in Guangdong Province. He happened to go to Zhaoxing village, so we left at the same station and took the bus. After arriving in the village, we found out that we stayed in the same hostel too.

Zhaoxing is the largest settlement of the Dong minority. The Dong (also known as Kam) people are one of 56 recognized ethnic groups of China. Most Dong people (in total around 3,000,000) live in eastern Guizhou, western Hunan and northern Guangxi in China. Sadly, due to urbanization and assimilation into mainstream Chinese society, their culture is slowly evaporating, a fate similar to many ethnic minorities. Dong villages can be recognized by drum towers (鼓楼), wooden stilt houses and wind-and-rain bridges (风雨桥).

Zhaoxing is a popular tourist destination, helped by the new high-speed train which connects Guangdong Province with Guangxi and Guizhou, and it quite shows. So how traditional is the charming village? We entered the village by paying an entrance fee at the gate (the local community obviously doesn't benefit from this), a couple of hundred metres from the village itself, where they created a huge complex in traditional Dong style. From there we were driven to the village itself via the newly created artificial pond and rice paddy fields and yet another impressive, but newly created gate. There were walked via the boulevard, a new broad paved road with many KTV bars, restaurants and hostels, to our hostel. All houses are constructed in traditional Dong style, but most have by now been replaced by concrete buildings with wooden facade, replacing the traditional fully wooden structures. That night we watched a performance of supposedly Dong minority people, showing their culture, but it didn't feel genuine. In fact, we were told that the local Dong people aren't even allowed to play their traditional music anymore. Their are quite some reasons to be critical of these developments, similar to the fate of many touristic places in China, but as more and more especially young people are leaving villages for cities in Guizhou, the future of Zhaoxing is at least secured. When you look past the main road, there are still plenty of signs of traditional Dong culture visible. In fact, even on the main road you can see Dong people running their own shops, mostly catering to local people, and continuing life, wearing traditional clothing, colouring clothes by the fermentation process of plants and farming their lands.

The hostel (Zhaoxing Ruyuan Family Inn) itself was run by very friendly people. He prepared a great, spicy local dish - typical for the kitchen of Guizhou and rather similar to the Sichuan kitchen, the neighbouring province north of Guizhou. He even gave us (me, the French guy and another Spanish girl) a beer and they didn't even allow us to pay for all this goodness (price for one night was less than 10 euros...).