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.
