The Dong people in China are an Indigenous ethnic group who are known to have lived in the mountainous regions of southwestern China for about 600 years. They don’t have a written language – instead their cultural knowledge is shared by word of mouth. This means that the outside world doesn’t know much about them.
But an ambitious university-led research project to document the Dong people’s distinctive architecture is revealing a great deal about this marginalized Indigenous group’s way of life.
There are an estimated 3 million Dong people living in the provinces of Guizhou, Hunan, and Guangxi. They are renowned for their polyphonic choral singing, which has been inscribed by UNESCO since 2009 as an example of world-class intangible cultural heritage. Their architecture, landscape, and refined agricultural terracing are also distinctive, but less well known and never digitally recorded.
Dong buildings and settlements are typically hidden in fir forests with direct access to waterways at the bottom of valleys or halfway up hills. A Dong settlement typically has around 200 households of four to five people – although some larger villages can have as many as 500 households.
These villages tend to have a gatehouse marking their boundary, defining their territory in relation to neighboring settlements. Many feature a distinctive “wind-and-rain bridge” – a mix of village gate and covered bridge – used for communal gatherings and blocking ceremonies. Ponds, wells, and granaries are scattered throughout the landscape.
At the heart of most villages, surrounded by wooden houses of two or three storeys, there is a “drum tower” and a “Sa-Sui shrine.” The former represents the connection of the people’s sacred belief of clan kinship and fir trees, while the latter represents the center of the Dong’s worship of the “Sa” or grandmother. They are the most important buildings in a village – for security, social and spiritual reasons.
External view of the drum tower of Zeng Chong village. Photo by Xiang Ren.
