Lang De performs a traditional welcome ceremony for visitor groups — a reception at the village gate where musicians play lusheng bamboo pipes and community members offer rice wine in ox-horn cups to arriving guests. The ceremony is a real Miao custom, not invented for tourism: the welcoming ritual and the wine offering are traditional forms of hospitality that predate the village's appearance on travel itineraries.
The lusheng — a bundle of bamboo pipes of different lengths bound together and played by blowing into a mouthpiece — is the defining instrument of Miao culture in this region. The sound is a reedy polyphonic chord, simultaneously produced from multiple pipes, and the musicians perform it while dancing in slow circles. Lang De has a core group of performers who do this regularly, and the quality of the playing is noticeably better than in more commercialised village settings where the performers are paid employees rather than community members keeping a tradition.
The ceremony takes perhaps 20 minutes. It happens when tour groups arrive and is not staged at fixed times; if you arrive independently, the reception may be simpler or absent. Either way, the village is worth seeing regardless of the ceremony.