The Dong folks in China are an Indigenous ethnic workforce who’re identified to have lived within the mountainous areas of southwestern China for roughly 600 years. They don’t have a written language – as a substitute their cultural wisdom is shared by way of phrase of mouth. Which means the out of doors global doesn’t know a lot about them.
However an formidable university-led analysis undertaking to report the Dong folks’s unique structure is revealing a super deal about this marginalised Indigenous workforce’s way of living.
There are an estimated 3 million Dong folks dwelling within the provinces of Guizhou, Hunan and Guangxi. They’re famend for his or her polyphonic choral making a song, which has been inscribed by way of Unesco since 2009 for instance of world-class intangible cultural heritage. Their structure, panorama and subtle agricultural terracing also are unique, however much less widely known and not digitally recorded.
Dong structures and settlements are most often hidden in fir forests with direct get right of entry to to waterways on the backside of valleys or midway up hills. A Dong agreement most often has round 200 families of 4 to 5 folks – even though some higher villages could have as many as 500 families.
Those villages generally tend to have a gatehouse marking their boundary, defining their territory on the subject of neighbouring settlements. Many characteristic a particular “wind-and-rain bridge” – a mixture of village gate and lined bridge – used for communal gatherings and blocking off ceremonies. Ponds, wells, and granaries are scattered all the way through the panorama.
On the middle of maximum villages, surrounded by way of picket properties of 2 or 3 storeys, there’s a “drum tower” and a “Sa-Sui shrine”. The previous represents the relationship of the folks’s sacred trust of extended family kinship and fir timber, whilst the latter represents the centre of the Dong’s worship of the “Sa” or grandmother. They’re an important structures in a village – for safety, social and religious causes.
Exterior view of the drum tower of Zeng Chong village.
Xiang Ren, Writer equipped (no reuse)
Tradition in danger
In this day and age, the Dong’s constructed and cultural heritage are an increasing number of in danger. That is because of a mix of local weather alternate, herbal screw ups, city infrastructure construction and the growth of rural tourism.
A warming local weather is an increasing number of triggering wild fires and inflicting mountain flooding. We also are seeing the encroachment of urbanism into the Dong’s rural settings. Whilst bringing enhancements within the high quality of lifestyles, this ceaselessly items home hearth hazards because of poor-quality electric infrastructure. And in recent times, the expansion of tourism and the encroachment of roads, railways and bridges is in peril of turning those villages into adorned stage-sets. This may increasingly usher in cash, however threatens the Dong folks’s distinctive structure and panorama.
It’s a urgent problem for this Indigenous folks and for the ones folks devoted to retaining their historical setting, their tradition and their extremely ritualised way of living.
Tragically, the shortage of assets signifies that schemes for restore, recovery and regeneration works, in addition to inadequate conservation insurance policies and frameworks, had been sluggish to assist maintain those treasured villages. The a long way far flung mountainous setting does no longer assist. Each the native communities and executive government have extraordinarily restricted assets to control virtually any alternate to their historical setting.
Regardless of the far flung location of many of those villages, they’re now being encroached upon by way of trendy construction. We’re seeing the expansion of modern housing trends the usage of trendy buildings and fabrics. It’s a part of the fast urbanisation of China during the last few a long time – however, like in different places, it’s irreversibly converting the picture and id of the Dong settlements and their structure.
Trendy infrastructure is irreversibly converting the context and historical cloth surrounding the drum tower of Ju Dong village.
XIan Ren, Writer equipped (no reuse)
The issue of contemporary vacationer construction can also be observed in the way in which traditional-style drum towers are being constructed as theme park points of interest. On the Danzhai Wanda Village, a newly evolved theme park close to Kaili in Guizhou, the closest town to the Dong’s Indigenous spaces, there are 5 newly constructed drum towers, billed as “iconic”, which might be introduced as standalone monuments with out a sense in their dating with the encircling properties and forests.
The Dong drum tower as a particular construction kind could also be in danger to be evolved totally as a tourism object and commodity.
XIang Ren, Writer equipped (no reuse)
Deciphering Dong constructed heritage
The wish to report and offer protection to unique Indigenous Dong tradition is what has pushed the Deciphering Dong undertaking.
This used to be introduced in 2023 and finished in 2025 and set to digitally report Dong bodily and cultural heritage.
This interdisciplinary undertaking attracts on humanities and social science disciplines starting from structure, anthropology, heritage sciences, sociology and virtual humanities.
It put in combination a chain of leading edge and complementary analysis strategies. This has concerned 3-D LiDAR scanning, aerial and terrestrial photogrammetry (the science of making use of arithmetic to pictures to extract correct 3-D measurements), 3-D truth seize modelling, measured drawing, documentary movie making and mapping. This has been complemented with oral histories from equipped by way of Dong folks.
The undertaking has finished a first-of-its-kind virtual documentation of the Dong architectural heritage, construction virtual and audio-visual documentaries of round 100 historical structures throughout a dozen far flung Dong villages.
Exported and justified cross-sectional axonometric drawing appearing picket tectonics of the Zeng Ying drum tower.
Xiang Ren, Writer equipped (no reuse)
A key a part of the analysis procedure used to be to discuss with key stakeholders, together with extended family leaders, aged villagers and provincial policymakers anyplace imaginable.
Indigenous Dong heritage continues to be underneath danger, because of the shortage of assets confronted by way of each the native authority and the communities themselves.
However this undertaking represents a step alternate. By means of construction a mutually advisable retailer of data, supported by way of state of the art virtual applied sciences, we are hoping to attract extra consideration to this unique folks with out threatening what it’s that makes them distinctive.
