Hi there,
I pop into the forum once in a while when I have something to ask, or I've been somewhere worth talking about. I've just spent a few days up in the mountains of northern Guangdong province, and thought I would share a little about it. The last two years I did trips to Guizhou province and posted about them. It's pretty amazing there in terms of how isolated and undeveloped it is, and therefore how much 'bushcraft' is still being done as part of people's everday lives.
This time I decided to rent a car and drive myself and my dog somewhere as similar as possible, but not 12hrs drive away, and settled on the area around Liannan (a town near the city of Qingyuan, north of Guangzhou). The village I went to was reputed to be the biggest and most authentic remaining Yao minority village in the province. Having my dog with me put a bit of a handbrake on my speed of movement, but I still got to explore. In Chinese it's called 'qiannian yaozhai', which just says that it's a thousand year old Yao village.
Many people there still wear traditional coloured, embroidered clothes. People gather firewood on the mountains, which are all forested. I saw people collecting 6 inch diameter tree trunks, debarked, for building. These seemed to be used along with concrete and red brick, but many buildings remained from earlier times that included a lot of cut stone.
I didn't find a blacksmith store this time, unfortunately. People in the village didn't carry knives, but those I saw out by the fields carrying the typical kind of Chinese billhook in wooden sheaths that let the blade stick out of the bottom. The dogs there were proper guard dogs roaming free, and I should've kept my dog further away from them. She had two close calls with big, aggressive ones. People can find out more info and see pictures of the Yao people on google. I don't like to stick my camera in people's face.
I wrote a blog post about it, and put a few (illustrative, but low quality) photos on facebook.
https://rooftopkungfu.wordpress.com...n-guangdong-with-a-puppy-and-a-broken-satnav/
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10153732792611351.1073741845.578081350&type=1&l=98c5e490bd
I pop into the forum once in a while when I have something to ask, or I've been somewhere worth talking about. I've just spent a few days up in the mountains of northern Guangdong province, and thought I would share a little about it. The last two years I did trips to Guizhou province and posted about them. It's pretty amazing there in terms of how isolated and undeveloped it is, and therefore how much 'bushcraft' is still being done as part of people's everday lives.
This time I decided to rent a car and drive myself and my dog somewhere as similar as possible, but not 12hrs drive away, and settled on the area around Liannan (a town near the city of Qingyuan, north of Guangzhou). The village I went to was reputed to be the biggest and most authentic remaining Yao minority village in the province. Having my dog with me put a bit of a handbrake on my speed of movement, but I still got to explore. In Chinese it's called 'qiannian yaozhai', which just says that it's a thousand year old Yao village.
Many people there still wear traditional coloured, embroidered clothes. People gather firewood on the mountains, which are all forested. I saw people collecting 6 inch diameter tree trunks, debarked, for building. These seemed to be used along with concrete and red brick, but many buildings remained from earlier times that included a lot of cut stone.
I didn't find a blacksmith store this time, unfortunately. People in the village didn't carry knives, but those I saw out by the fields carrying the typical kind of Chinese billhook in wooden sheaths that let the blade stick out of the bottom. The dogs there were proper guard dogs roaming free, and I should've kept my dog further away from them. She had two close calls with big, aggressive ones. People can find out more info and see pictures of the Yao people on google. I don't like to stick my camera in people's face.
I wrote a blog post about it, and put a few (illustrative, but low quality) photos on facebook.
https://rooftopkungfu.wordpress.com...n-guangdong-with-a-puppy-and-a-broken-satnav/
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10153732792611351.1073741845.578081350&type=1&l=98c5e490bd
