FEATURED · BUSINESS Race to record China’s vanishing Dong minority heritage
June 25, 2026 1 min read 2
BUSINESS

Race to record China’s vanishing Dong minority heritage

Source: Asia Times — China

PUBLISHED
June 25, 2026
CATEGORY
AS
Asia Times — China
eChina Team
1

Support us The drum tower of Ze Li village. Xiang Ren, Author provided (no reuse) via The Conversation 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.

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