Anshun
"They came as soldiers in 1381 and decided to stay forever — the Ming dynasty never ended in these valleys."
What I did not expect to find near Anshun was time travel of a fairly precise kind. The Tunpu people — Han Chinese settlers sent here as garrison soldiers by the Hongwu Emperor of the Ming dynasty in 1381 — never assimilated into either Han modernity or the surrounding minority cultures. They stayed, built stone villages, maintained their distinct dialects and ceremonial dress, and continued performing a form of masked opera called Dixi that has not been performed anywhere else in China for three hundred years. Six centuries on, you can drive twenty minutes from Anshun and find women wearing the stone-blue robes and phoenix hairpins of the Ming court, because for them the Ming never ended.
The Tunpu villages cluster in the hills southeast of Anshun — Yunshan, Benmiao, Jiuzhou — and they are genuinely extraordinary, not as reconstructions or themed attractions but as living communities where the old forms have simply continued. The architecture is stone, entirely stone: stone walls, stone lanes, stone watch towers, all built from the local grey limestone in a style that mixes Han defensive architecture with local building techniques. Walking through Yunshan village feels like entering a fortress that has been domesticated over centuries — the lanes too narrow for anything but people and time.
The Dixi opera is the thing that makes the Tunpu genuinely unlike anything I have encountered. The masks — carved from alder wood, representing generals, demons, warriors, and spirits — are stored in shrine rooms between performances and treated with something between respect and affection, the way you would treat something both sacred and familiar. The performances are tied to agricultural festivals and often last several days, the stories drawn from battles and myths of the Ming and earlier eras. I caught a partial performance — two men in masks and elaborate robes moving through a formalized combat sequence to the beat of a drum — and found it both archaic and completely alive.
Anshun itself is a comfortable, working city of about a million people, with a Thursday market that has operated for centuries and draws Buyi, Miao, and Tunpu traders from the surrounding countryside. The market spills across several city blocks and deals in everything from live poultry to hand-embroidered fabrics to medicinal herbs whose names I could not identify. The food stalls along the market edges serve a version of Guizhou cuisine that leans more toward the Buyi tradition — spicier than the Miao belt, with an emphasis on grilled meats and a particular style of dipping sauce made from fermented black beans and fresh chili that I have not found replicated anywhere.
The wax-batik work produced around Anshun is among the finest in China. The process involves applying hot wax to cloth in intricate patterns using a small metal tool called a dajiao, then dyeing the fabric in indigo and removing the wax to reveal the reserved pattern. The work produced by Buyi and Miao artisans in the villages south of the city has a visual grammar entirely its own — geometric patterns derived from natural forms, interpreted through a technique that produces deliberate crackle effects where the wax cracks and lets the dye through.
Most visitors to Anshun stay one night on their way to or from Huangguoshu. That is enough time to see the waterfall but not enough to understand what the region around it actually contains.
When to go: October and November are optimal — mild, dry, and clear. The Tunpu festival season runs through spring (March to April) with Dixi performances coinciding with planting ceremonies; checking local calendars for specific village dates is worth the effort. The Thursday market operates year-round and is unaffected by season.