Guizhou is one of China's poorest provinces and one of its most interesting. The combination is not coincidental: the mountains that made it hard to farm and hard to govern kept it remote, and the remoteness preserved minority cultures — Miao, Dong, Buyi, and many others — that were assimilated or diluted elsewhere. Coming to Guizhou is coming to a China that is genuinely different from the Han heartland.
The minority villages are the main draw. Miao villages in the southeast, particularly around Kaili, celebrate festivals with extraordinary costumes — layered silver headdresses that weigh several kilograms — and music played on the lusheng, a bundle of bamboo pipes. The Dong villages further south are known for their drum towers and wind-and-rain bridges, wooden structures built without a single nail. Zhaoxing is the largest Dong village and among the most striking in China: five drum towers rise above tiled rooftops in a narrow valley, and the drum tower fireplace is where village life actually happens.
The landscape is spectacular in its own right. Huangguoshu, China's largest waterfall, plunges 74 metres into a gorge you can walk behind through a naturally occurring cave. The Zhangjiang Scenic Area has rock formations on a scale that competes with Zhangjiajie next door in Hunan. Guiyang, the capital, is unremarkable but has excellent street food — sour, spicy, and very good.
Maotai, China's most famous and most expensive baijiu, is made here, distilled from sorghum in the town of the same name in the Chishui River valley. You will either find this interesting or not.
