My Life: Ping'an

The 600 year old Zhuang village of Ping'an is on the main ridge of the Dragon's Backbone and has become a small travellers centre and base camp for exploring the rice terraces. I headed here for a day of climbing up hundreds of stairs to reach the top of some 800m peaks to see the rice terraces in all their splendor.

More on the terraces itself in my next post.

Ping'an Zhuang village is the most famous village in Longji scenic area. It is a typical village of the Zhuang ethnic village with around 100 households, all of whom are Zhuang ethnic people. Villagers make a living by cultivating rice-terraced fields and planting rice. After generations huge groups of rice terraces are formed.

The village still retains the features of costumes and life style of the ethnic Zhuang. Men wear short gowns made of hand-loomed cloth, while women wear head gears and white clothes adorned with flower patterns. Almost every household makes a kind of sweet rice wine of low alcohol degrees. The wine is brewed in a very primitive way. Villagers put fermented glutinous rice in the wooden bucket, and put it on the open fire. The wine will stream down from the bamboo pipe stuck in the middle of the bucket.

Animal fur drying in the mid day sun... Used for leather goods and coats.

Chillies being dried out.

local dinner - still alive

Interesting menu in the restaurant I had lunch. I could have wild mouse, frogs etc.

How funny in a village with no roads or cars they advertise a taxi service. They must be referring to the sedan chairs here :)

Now this should have made me excited as it looks exactly like "Biltong", but seeing that I do not know what it is made from and they have rat and dog on their menu's, I figured I'd give it a miss...

The guide told me an interesting story. You will notice that every single building in this village as well as in Long Shen have three storeys. This is not merely a architectural design to have the whole village look the same. In ancient times the Zhuang, the Yao and the Miao people always built their residences with three storeys.

They believed that the bottom floor was for the pigs (most of them either farmed with pigs or just kept them as food, as it wasn't easy to get to other villages which meant extreme long walks etc). The second floor was for the family and the third floor was for the rats.

Today they still built their homes with three stories, but the reasons have changed slightly in the modern world.

The first floor is for the restaurant or business, the second floor is for the family and the third floor is tourist accommodation. So now we eat where they used to keep the pigs and sleep where they used to keep the rats. GREAT!!!!