‘Hey, you’re too tall. We need to fill you up! Don’t you like it?!” Amid the cacophony of jangling silver trinkets, traditional songs and the deep sonorous blasts of the lusheng, mouth organs fashioned from 6-meter-long bamboo pipes, this author crouches down and attempts to elegantly sip bowl after bowl of rice wine offered by a spirited women of the local Miao ethnic group. Spoiler alert: Graceful consumption wasn’t exactly the end result.
It was a crisp early January morning, and yours truly was about to do a deep dive into Miao ethnic culture while shooting for China Daily’s Potside Chats series. Our destination was Hongyang Village, a Miao town tucked snugly amid rolling hills and veiled in mist in Taijiang County of southwest China’s Guizhou Province.
Guizhou, known for its great peaks and being the only region in China without plains, is the beating heart of the Miao legacy, home to around 4 million members of the ethnic group. The Miao, tracing their lineage back over 5,000
