Cizhong Catholic Church stands in a Tibetan village south of Deqin along the Mekong, an improbable Franco-Gothic building in the middle of a Tibetan Buddhist landscape. The original church was built by French missionaries of the Paris Foreign Missions in the late nineteenth century and destroyed in anti-Christian violence in 1905. It was rebuilt in 1911, and the restored building — with its Chinese-style pavilion tower added atop the belfry — has survived intact ever since. A small Tibetan Catholic community still uses it.
The church itself is worth the drive for the sight of a church steeple rising above Tibetan stone houses with Meili Snow Mountain visible in the background. The interior is simple: whitewashed walls, wooden pews, and religious paintings that mix Catholic iconography with Tibetan artistic conventions. The village around the church grows grapes and vegetables on terraced slopes above the river, and the combination of French religious architecture, Tibetan houses, and subtropical valley agriculture makes Cizhong one of the more genuinely strange places in Yunnan.