Three Days in Zhaoxing: Notes from a Dong Village
The high-speed train from Guiyang to Congjiang takes an hour and forty minutes. Someone behind me watched a Douyin video at full volume the entire way. The man next to me ate three hard-boiled eggs in succession, peeling them with surgical precision and dropping the shells into a plastic bag balanced on his knee. Nobody looked out the window except me. The mountains were green and endless, and occasionally the train shot through a tunnel so long my ears popped twice.
At Congjiang station, a man in a polo shirt held up a piece of cardboard with my name written in marker. I had booked a homestay through Trip.com and added my WeChat ID in the notes field. The owner — I’ll call him Mr. Wu — had messaged me the night before: I will pick you up at 4. Look for a white car. The white car was a silver BYD. Close enough.
The road to Zhaoxing winds through hills that look like they were crumpled by a giant hand. Concrete farmhouses gave way to wooden stilt houses. Rice paddies appeared in the valleys, narrow as bathtubs, climbing the slopes in steps. Mr. Wu drove with one hand on the wheel and the other holding his phone, which rang every few minutes. He answered every call. None of them seemed urgent.
The village
Zhaoxing sits in a valley with a river running through it. Five drum towers anchor the village, each belonging to a different clan, each named after a Confucian virtue: benevolence, righteousness, courtesy, wisdom, trust. The towers are wooden, multi-tiered, built without nails. They look like enormous dark pinecones rising above the rooftops. Under each one, old men play Chinese chess on stone tables. Children run barefoot. A woman with a wooden carrying pole walks past, two baskets of vegetables swaying at her sides.
The main street is paved and lined with shops selling batik scarves, silver jewelry, and bottles of homemade rice wine. It is touristy in the way all old villages are touristy now. But walk thirty seconds down any side alley and the souvenir shops vanish. Instead: a woman washing greens in a plastic basin. A man splitting firewood with an axe. A pig in a wooden pen, staring at you with the resigned expression of someone who has seen this movie before.
My room was on the second floor of Mr. Wu’s guesthouse, a wooden building with a tile roof and a balcony overlooking a small rice paddy. The room had a bed with a mosquito net, a bathroom with hot water that took four minutes to arrive, and walls so thin I could hear the couple next door discussing what to eat for dinner. The window had no screen. At 5 a.m. the next morning, a rooster directly beneath it announced the dawn with the confidence of a creature that has never once been wrong.
The sound of the village
Chinese villages are not quiet. This is the first thing nobody tells you. The roosters start before sunrise and keep going until mid-morning. Then come the construction sounds — someone is always fixing a roof or building a new guesthouse, and power tools have replaced hand saws. Motorbikes buzz through the alleys. A woman calls her child from across the river, her voice carrying in the thin mountain air. In the afternoon, the drum tower beneath the biggest tree fills with the sound of a lusheng — a reed pipe made of bamboo pipes stuck into a wooden wind chamber, producing a sound somewhere between a harmonica and a bagpipe.
And then, around four in the afternoon, the singing starts.
The Dong Grand Song is a polyphonic choral tradition. No conductor, no instruments, no sheet music. A group sits in a circle and one person starts, and then the others join, their voices weaving around each other like separate streams finding the same river. UNESCO added it to the Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2009. The singers in the drum tower were not performers. They were neighbors. A woman in her sixties with a face like a walnut. A teenage girl in a hoodie holding a baby. A man who had clearly just finished a cigarette and stubbed it out on the stone floor before opening his mouth to sing.
I sat on a wooden bench at the edge of the drum tower and listened for half an hour. Nobody acknowledged me. This was not a show. I was just someone who happened to be sitting there.
The old woman and the rice paddy
On the second morning, I decided to walk to Tang’an, a smaller village four kilometers up the mountain along an ancient stone path. The trail begins behind the last drum tower and climbs through terraced rice paddies, the kind that have been cultivated by the same families for six hundred years.
Halfway up, I stopped to catch my breath. An old woman was working in a paddy below the path, bent at the waist, her hands moving through the water with the rhythm of someone who has done this ten thousand times. She looked up and saw me. I waved. She did not wave back. She straightened, walked to the edge of the paddy, and held up five fingers.
I thought she was telling me the price of something. I was wrong. She was telling me to wait five minutes. Then she disappeared into a shed and came back with a plastic bottle filled with water, which she handed to me without a word. I drank. She nodded once and went back to work.
I stood there for a while, the stone path beneath my feet worn smooth by centuries of feet, the terraces descending below me in green layers, and realized I had no idea what just happened. She had nothing to gain from me. I was not a customer. I was just a person who looked thirsty.
Tang’an itself was smaller than I expected. Forty or fifty wooden houses perched on a ridge, a single drum tower, a few guesthouses with names like “Cloud View” and “Rice Field Inn.” The viewing platform at the top of the village looks out over the terraces, and at sunset the water in the paddies turns the color of honey. Three Chinese tourists were taking photos with a drone. I sat on a stone wall and watched the shadows lengthen across the valley until a dog came and lay down at my feet, as if I had been there for years.
Sour soup and other negotiations
That evening, Mr. Wu’s wife made sour soup fish. The broth is the color of rust, fermented from tomatoes and wild peppers, and it arrives at the table still boiling. The fish is river carp, cut into chunks and poached in the broth at the table. You eat it with rice, dipping the fish in a small dish of chopped chilies and scallions. The sourness hits the back of your jaw first, and then the heat comes, and then you take another bite before the first one is finished because stopping feels wrong.
There were five of us at the table: me, Mr. Wu, his wife, their daughter, and a man from the next village who had come to discuss something about a delivery truck. The conversation was in a mix of Mandarin and Dong language, which I do not speak, but the meaning was clear enough — the truck was broken, the parts were expensive, the man who could fix it was in Guiyang. Mr. Wu’s wife kept putting food in my bowl. Every time I finished a piece of fish, another one appeared. The daughter, who was maybe eight, stared at me throughout the meal with the unblinking curiosity of someone who has seen foreigners on television but never in the chair next to her.
After dinner, Mr. Wu brought out a bottle of rice wine. It was the color of pale tea and tasted like fire and fruit. He poured a small cup and pushed it toward me. I drank it. He poured another. This is the rhythm of hospitality in rural China: you do not refuse the second cup, and by the third cup everyone is family.
What gets lost
On the last morning, I walked through the village before sunrise. The streetlights were still on. A man swept the flagstones in front of his shop with a broom made of twigs. The river gurgled through the stone channel that runs alongside the main street, a sound so constant you forget it is there until you stop to notice.
I passed a construction site where a new guesthouse was going up. Concrete pillars, rebar sticking out of the top, a pile of red bricks. The sign on the scaffolding promised “Boutique Courtyard Inn — Opening 2026.” Next to it, a wooden house with a tile roof sagged slightly to the left, its walls dark with age, a clothesline strung across the balcony where a man’s white undershirt hung motionless in the still air.
This is the thing about Zhaoxing, and about rural China in general. The village is changing faster than anyone can track. The grandmothers who sing in the drum tower are still here. The young people who would carry the songs forward are in Shenzhen, in Guangzhou, in Shanghai, sending money home and coming back once a year for Spring Festival. The new guesthouses are nice. The old wooden houses are not, if you are the one living in them. It is easy to romanticize a place you are leaving. It is harder to ask the people who stay what they actually want.
The bus to Congjiang station left at ten. Mr. Wu drove me to the bus stop in the same silver BYD. He shook my hand and said, “Come back in spring. The terraces are full of water then.” I said I would. I meant it. Whether I will actually return is a question I am still holding, like a stone picked up from a path, worn smooth and not yet ready to be put down.
