Fuddland

Aside from the dominant Han Chinese nationality, there are 55 other officially-recognised minorities in modern China; the province of Sichuan is home to four of them, and the village of Taoping has been occupied by the Qiangzu people for around two thousand years.

The houses are all hand-built from rock, wood and mud, with running water provided by diverted streams coming down from the mountains. At least one of the still-habitable homes is claimed to have been built a thousand years ago, and they all display a large lump of quartz on their flat roofs—if I understood correctly, this is to ward of evil spirits, although I could be wrong and pehaps it’s because everyone used the same architect with a penchant for lump-of-quartz-topped roofs.

Still a largely agricultural region, the townspeople—or, thinking about, probably the local government—are slowly wising-up to the fact that this historic town could be a hot tourist attraction, but when I visited it was still relatively unspoilt, leaving me free to wander the streets and get a good feel for life in this small, peaceful, unpolluted village, where I didn’t feel harrassed or hurried despite being the one and only remotely foreign face there at the time.

[More photos tagged with Taoping form part of my Chengdu and Sichuan photoset.]