Longsheng

The valleys around Longsheng were settled by Zhuang, Yao, Miao and Dong communities who moved into the mountains of northern Guangxi over many centuries, pushed and drawn by migration from the plains. The terraces are the record of that settlement: begun in the Yuan and Ming periods by families with no flat land to farm, they were extended generation by generation until whole ridges were shaped into narrow steps, watered by channels carrying rain and spring water down from the forest above.

Imperial control of the area was loose and often resented. The mountains saw repeated uprisings by Yao and Miao communities against taxation and outside officials, and administration was frequently left to local headmen. After 1949 the district was reorganised as Longsheng Various Nationalities Autonomous County, a status that recognises the mix of peoples living in it and gives the county a measure of self-administration.

For most of the twentieth century this was a poor, remote place that lived on rice, timber, tea oil and herbs, with young people leaving for work in Guangdong. That changed from the 1990s, when photographs of the terraces spread and the county became one of Guangxi's best-known destinations. Roads were widened, a cable car was built above Dazhai, and farming families converted wooden houses into guesthouses. Tourism now supports many households and has kept terraces in cultivation that might otherwise have been abandoned.

Longsheng is an autonomous county precisely because no single group dominates it. At the 2010 census the Dong were the largest group at about a quarter of the population, ahead of the Zhuang, the Yao and the Miao, each concentrated in its own villages — the Zhuang, including Longji and Ping'an, in the west of the county, and Yao villages such as Dazhai in the east — and each with its own language, dress and building style. Houses are typically three-storey wooden structures on posts, with animals or storage below and living rooms above, built without nails by carpenters using mortise and tenon joints.

Textiles carry much of the local identity. Yao women embroider dense geometric patterns in red and black, and the Red Yao of Huangluo are known throughout China for their long hair, washed in fermented rice water and coiled in a style that signals a woman's age and marital status; by tradition it is cut only twice, at the ages of three and eighteen. Zhuang villages keep the antiphonal song tradition of Guangxi, in which two groups improvise verses back and forth, and the spring song festival of Sanyuesan remains the year's social high point.

Farming shapes the calendar more than anything else: flooding the terraces, transplanting seedlings, weeding, harvesting by sickle and drying sheaves on wooden racks. Guests are received with rice wine and oil tea, and visitors are expected to be easy company rather than formal. The strain of tourism is visible too, in ticket gates, performance shows and the difference in prosperity between villages on the main routes and those away from them.

The county had about 186,000 residents at the end of 2019, some two-thirds of them from ethnic minorities and the great majority counted as farming households; the county town holds only a small share of them, and most live in villages scattered up the valleys. Households combine rice farming on the terraces with vegetables, tea oil, bamboo, herbs and, increasingly, guesthouse work. Cultivating terraces is slow and largely manual — buffalo and hand tools do work that machines cannot on steps a few metres wide — and yields are modest, so income from visitors matters.

Longsheng town is the administrative and market centre, with the schools, hospital, bus station and government offices. Village life runs on a different rhythm, with early starts, midday rests and evenings around a stove; supplies reach the higher guesthouses on the backs of porters or on small cable hoists. Mobile signal and online payment reach almost everywhere, and deliveries now climb the same steps as the rice.

Out-migration remains a fact of life, with younger adults working in Guangdong's cities and sending money back, though the growth of tourism has brought some home to run family guesthouses. Current concerns are familiar ones in the Chinese uplands: crowding and building pressure in the two or three most visited villages, the cost of maintaining terrace walls and irrigation channels, and landslides after heavy summer rain.

Cooking here is mountain food, built on glutinous rice, cured meat and whatever the slopes provide. Longji glutinous rice is the local staple, and the best-known dish is bamboo-tube rice, zhutong fan, in which rice with chicken, pork or river fish is packed into a green bamboo section and roasted over embers until the tube chars and the grain takes on its scent. Smoked and salt-cured pork hangs above kitchen stoves through the winter and is stir-fried with garlic shoots, dried chillies or wild bamboo shoots.

The drink that marks the region is youcha, oil tea: tea leaves fried in oil, pounded in a wooden bowl, boiled and served salty and slightly bitter with puffed rice, peanuts, fried dough and sometimes spring onion. It is offered several bowls at a time to guests. Rice wine, brewed at home and often steeped with herbs, appears at any occasion, and Yao households also make medicinal herbal baths from the same hillside plants used in cooking.

Everyday eating draws on the wider province as well. Guilin-style rice noodles in broth are the standard breakfast in the county town, chillies and pickles sharpen most dishes, and free-range chicken, river snails, wild greens, ferns and tofu made in the village fill the table. Sweet things are simple: steamed rice cakes, coloured glutinous rice dyed with plant juices at festival time, and fruit from the valley orchards.