Buyi Villages around Wanfenglin

The Buyi villages in the Wanfenglin area around Xingyi occupy the flat ground between the karst towers, their stone houses built from locally quarried limestone that blends visually with the geology around them. The villages are working agricultural communities — rice and rapeseed farming, with pigs and poultry in the yards — and they have a functioning quality that the more-visited minority villages elsewhere in the province have largely lost to tourism.

The village of Wanfenghu on the reservoir below the main Wanfenglin viewpoint area is the most accessible starting point for exploring the Buyi settlements. From here, paths and small roads connect a series of villages that can be walked between in a day. The Buyi communities have their own festival calendar, and the Buyi New Year celebrations in the spring involve music, dancing, and communal meals that visitors can attend; the timing varies by village.

things to do sight
A story
The Buyi (also written Buyei) are the second-largest ethnic minority in Guizhou after the Miao, and their communities around Xingyi have been less exposed to organised tourism than the Miao villages further east. The Buyi are closely related to the Zhuang of Guangxi and speak a Tai-Kadai language; their villages are distinguished by stone construction — houses built from the same limestone as the karst peaks around them — rather than the wooden stilt houses of the Miao. The stone houses, roofed with flat stone slabs, have a solidity and permanence that the wooden architecture of other minority groups lacks.