Photos

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The best vehicle in village


This photo has been shot in the Hani minority village named Qingkou (青口), 5 km South of Yuanyang. There is no public transportation, and this is the second so-called vehicle I found in the village, after the first one you saw last week without steering-wheel. Today, this little driver may not have access to a real vehicle. We never know if in the next 30 years he may be a captain of an airplane. Nothing is impossible in life.

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According to Xie Chen and Lin Xihe, the Mt. Ailao region has a subtropical climate with sufficient rainfall. The fertile soil and sufficient water resources provide favorable conditions for terraced fields on the southern slopes facing the sun. The terraced fields in Yuanyang are shrouded by fog most of the time; they look like ladders leading to the sky.

The majority of the terraced fields are above 2,500 meters. The dense, virgin forest on Mt. Ailao is home to the Hani people, whose ancestors relocated from the Tibet Plateau to southern Yunnan long ago. As soon as the ancestors of the Hani settled down, they were bothered by a big problem: they could hardly find anywhere to grow grain. So they built terraced fields with stone, irrigated with mountain springs, and planted their crops.

The technique of building rough hills into fertile farmland has since spread throughout China and Southeast Asia, and an emperor of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) granted the Hanis the title "Superb Conquerors of Mountains."

Terraced fields are the life of the Hani people. The 10,000-hectare terraced fields feed a population of 336,971, and the 63,958-hectare forest provides water for daily use and irrigation of the entire county. There are 4,653 ditches irrigating the terraced fields in Yuanyang.

The zigzagging terraced fields form a beautiful pattern of lines when seen from a distance. None of the terraced fields is straight. Instead, they resemble myriad shapes. The ditches wrap the mountains like silver belts, diverting brooks and mountain springs into the terraced fields. The water runs down into the ward valley, where it turns to mist, then rises to become clouds halfway up the mountains, when the mist meets the alpine current. Absorbed by the forest, the clouds condense into moisture, returning to the mountains as brooks and springs again.

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