Kaili is an industrial city that nobody goes to for the city itself. It exists on the traveller's map as the gateway to the Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture — a region of river valleys and wooden villages where Miao and Dong minority culture has survived with more substance than almost anywhere else in China. The city is the practical base: it has the hotels, the transport connections, and the bus station where you pick up the routes into the surrounding countryside.
The Qiandongnan Prefecture Ethnological Museum, near the centre, is worth a few hours before heading out to the villages. The collection covers the material culture of the twenty-some minority groups in the prefecture — silver jewellery, indigo-dyed textiles, lusheng bamboo pipes, wooden architectural models — and puts what you're about to see in context. The museum is free, which in China remains a reliable quality signal. Kaili's Sunday market draws villagers from across the region and is a genuinely working market rather than a tourist event; the traditional clothing on display is worn, not performed.
From Kaili, the main village routes run southeast. Xijiang (see /asia/china/guizhou/xijiang), an hour south, is the largest Miao village in China and the most visited. Lang De, 20 kilometres south of Kaili along the Bala River valley, is smaller and quieter — stilt houses on a hillside, rice terraces below, and a community that hasn't yet had the village square paved over for a light show. Zhaoxing (see /asia/china/guizhou/zhaoxing), the great Dong village with five drum towers, is seven hours further south and requires an overnight; the bus from Kaili is infrequent but real. Taijiang (see /asia/china/guizhou/taijiang), to the east along the Qingshui River, is the centre of the Miao Sister Festival each spring — a courting ceremony involving the exchange of sticky rice in embroidered pouches that draws thousands of people in extraordinary costumes.
The food in Kaili and the surrounding villages is built on fermented flavours — sour fish soup made with the catch from the river valleys, sour beef soup, rice noodles in fermented broth that appear at every corner for breakfast. None of it tastes like the Guizhou restaurant food you might have encountered elsewhere.