Baobei: The Dong

We came to Zhaoxing looking for the Dong traditions we had read about: indigo dyeing and cloth pounding, wooden architecture, music, dress. We found them. But not in the ways we expected.

Zhaoxing is one of the largest Dong villages in China, but it is also a popular tourist destination. Visitors walk its charming streets, performances are staged throughout the day, and shops sell handmade trinkets alongside snacks, souvenirs and everything else that comes with a place people travel to see. At night the village is buzzing with electric energy.

In some ways, daily life continues untouched. Older women walk through the village in traditional dress, their hair carefully wrapped and pinned. We saw them beat indigo-dyed cloth with mallets, unwrapping and folding it again and again. Traditional music drifted through the village. All around us were the wooden houses, bridges and drum towers that have defined Dong communities for generations.

But beside them were also scooters, smartphones, annoying techno music, and young people dressed much like young people anywhere else in China. That contrast became one of the things we kept noticing in Guizhou. 

It is easy to talk about traditional culture as if there are only two possibilities: either it remains unchanged, or it disappears. But culture doesn't work that way. People move around. Technology arrives. Economies change. Children want different lives from their parents. Traditions that were once part of everyday necessity may become something practiced for festivals, made for visitors, preserved as heritage... or just left behind.

And tourism complicates the story further. It can turn culture into performance. But it can also create an audience for skills that might otherwise have little economic reason to continue. A woman pounding cloth for visitors is still pounding cloth. A song performed on a stage is still being learned and sung. The context has changed. But by having people still willing to do it - in their ancestral land of doing - the past can continue in the present. 

At the same time, tradition needs people who value what is being carried. People who seek it out, ask questions, listen, learn ~ and create a reason for it to remain part of the present.

Shop what we collected along the way.

Creative Direction: Kelly Wang Shanahan (@theziran)
Photography + Videography: Jess Foley (@fauxly)
Video Editing: Jhonson Phielipus (@jjnnxx2250)

Shot in Guizhou, China. April 2024.