Travel to Yunnan’s Yuanyang county and you’ll see a human-made marvel carved by hand from the rugged mountain terrain. The Honghe Hani Rice Terraces cover an area of over 160 square kilometers: a visually spectacular agricultural system engineered by the Hani people, one of China’s 55 officially recognized ethnic minorities.
Over generations, the Honghe Hani Rice Terraces have not only sustained rice cultivation but have also supported diverse agricultural activities including timber, fruits, duck breeding, fish farming, and traditional medicine, making the terraces a year-round resource for the community.
Not that life has always been easy for the Hani. Until recently, the local villagers made little income from their rice farming, causing younger Hani to leave for the cities. Without young Hani to learn the culture, how could their way of life survive?
A community-based tourism project based in Azheke Village may hold the answer. The “Azheke Project,” spearheaded by Sun Yat-sen University Professor and UNWTO Ulysses Prize Laureate Bao Jigang, focuses on poverty alleviation through sustainable tourism.
Azheke Village is a Hani village nestled among the rice terraces, one among several promoted as tourism villages in the area. By encouraging the villagers to maintain their traditional homes and lifestyles, the Azheke Project set up a model where 70% of tourism profits is returned to the villagers, the remainder being reinvested into the community.
Image courtesy of inkelv1122 (CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED)
Tourists who visit Azheke Village must pay an entry fee of 30 RMB, which directly supports the Hani’s community efforts. Upon entry, they can walk to various viewpoints overlooking the surrounding Bada rice terraces; visit the thatched “mushroom” houses where Hani live, work and serve their guests; and engage in authentic local activities like paddy field fishing, though these require advance booking and meet minimum group requirements.
In terms of authenticity, Azheke Village is as real as you can get in Yuanyang – the village has no more than 60 households, and lacks a commercial street or manufactured cultural performances. But in a single one-hour visit, you can get a very real feeling of how the Hani have lived and thrived among their rice terraces for centuries.
Locals may welcome you into their mushroom houses, and feed you a local meal of red rice and beef fried with mint; afterward you may watch the sun set over the rice terraces, and wish you could stay here forever!
Image courtesy of the Yunnan Culture and Tourism Bureau
