The Yelang Valley, about 25 kilometres southwest of Guiyang, is a sprawling open-air sculpture garden created over twenty years by artist Song Peilun as a tribute to the ancient Yelang kingdom that once occupied this area. The site covers several hillsides with thousands of carved stone and clay figures depicting the warrior culture, mythology, and daily life of the pre-Han Yelang people.
The scale is overwhelming in the way that outsider art at massive scale always is: one person's obsessive vision rendered in stone across a landscape. The figures include warriors, musicians, fertility figures, and shamanic characters drawn from the oral traditions of the Buyi and Miao minorities who are believed to be the Yelang's cultural descendants. Whether the history is accurate matters less than the sincerity of the project. The site is 45 minutes by taxi from central Guiyang and takes two to three hours to walk through properly.