Dong of the Southern Valleys and Their Towers Built Without Nails

In the folded green valleys where Guizhou, Hunan, and Guangxi meet live the Dong, a people of southern China famous for the wooden drum towers and covered bridges they raise without a single nail, and for the great unaccompanied choirs whose harmonies have been honoured as a treasure of world culture. A settled people of the rice valleys, they made their villages into works of art and their voices into one of the wonders of Chinese music.

This account follows the Dong, who call themselves the Kam, from their origins among the ancient Yue peoples of the south, through their self-governing villages and their worship of the goddess Sa, into their language without a written music, their timber architecture, their sour rice-and-fish table, and their grand choirs. It ends with the Dong of today, keeping their song and their building alive among the many peoples of modern China.

The Builders of Towers in the Southern Valleys
Kam, Dong, and the Name of the People
The Kam Tongue and the Songs Without Words on Paper
The Valleys of Guizhou, Hunan, and Guangxi
The Villages, the Kuan, and the Old Order
The Clan, the Drum Tower, and the Bonds of the Village
The Sa, the Ancestors, and the Spirits of the Land
The Grand Choir, the Tower, and the Ways of the Dong
The Carpenters, the Weavers, and the Builders of Bridges
Rice, Fish, and the Sour Table of the Dong
The New Year, the Sama, and the Feasts of the Villages
From the Ancient South to the People of Modern China
The Dong in Modern China

The Builders of Towers in the Southern Valleys

In the folded green valleys where the provinces of Guizhou, Hunan, and Guangxi meet, in the mountainous heart of southern China, live the Dong, a people famous above all for the wooden towers and covered bridges they raise without a single nail. Numbering close to three million, they are one of the larger of China’s ethnic minorities, a settled people of the river valleys who have made their villages into works of art.

The Dong call themselves, in their own tongue, by a name usually rendered Kam, and they belong to the Kam-Sui branch of the great Tai-Kadai family of peoples, kin in the deep past to the Zhuang, the Sui, and, more distantly, to the Thai and the Lao. Their forebears are counted among the ancient Baiyue, the many Yue peoples who once spread across the whole of what is now southern China.

As the Han pushed south over the centuries, the ancestors of the Dong settled into the river valleys of the southern mountains, where they took up the intensive cultivation of wet rice and built the villages that remain their home. Unlike some of their mountain neighbours, who kept to the high slopes and to shifting cultivation, the Dong became a settled valley people, rooted to their terraced fields and their timber villages.

To speak of the Dong is to speak above all of their villages, for it is there that their genius shows itself. The drum tower rising at the heart of the settlement, the covered wind-and-rain bridge spanning the stream, and the great unaccompanied choirs that fill them with song are the marks of a people who turned the timber of their valleys into architecture and their voices into one of the wonders of Chinese music.

Kam, Dong, and the Name of the People

The name by which China and the world know this people is Dong, the Chinese rendering of their name, written with a character that also means east. It is the official label under which the state recognises them as one of its nationalities, and it is by Dong that they appear on maps, in books, and in the autonomous counties set aside for them in the southern provinces.

Among themselves, however, the people call their nation Kam, or a word close to it, and by this name they are known to scholars who group their language in the Kam-Sui family. The Kam are thus the same people as the Dong, the one name given from without and the other from within, and both are used, the first in official and common speech, the second in the study of their tongue and culture.

The Dong are usually divided into a northern and a southern group, distinguished by dialect, dress, and custom. The southern Dong, in the remoter valleys of Guizhou and Guangxi, kept more of the old ways, the grand choirs, the towers, and the distinctive dress, while the northern Dong, closer to the Han world, took on more of its neighbours’ customs. Both, however, share the one name and the one origin.

That the Chinese name should mean east is a mere accident of the character chosen to render the sound, and carries no meaning for the people themselves. What matters is the name Kam, the people’s own word for who they are, a name they share across the valleys of three provinces and carry with the pride of a nation famous for its song and its building.

The Kam Tongue and the Songs Without Words on Paper

The Dong speak Kam, a language of the Kam-Sui branch of the Tai-Kadai family, kin to the tongues of the Sui and, more distantly, to Zhuang and to Thai. Like these, it is a richly tonal language, distinguishing meaning by the pitch and contour of the voice to a degree that astonishes those whose own tongues do not, with many distinct tones carrying the weight of the words.

For most of their history the Dong had no writing of their own, and their vast store of song, law, and legend was carried in the memory and passed on by mouth and by the trained singers of the villages. This was no small feat, for the Dong preserved great bodies of verse, the rules of their society, and the tales of their past entirely through the spoken and the sung word.

It is a striking thing that a people so famous for their music should have set none of it on paper, and the great choral songs of the Dong were composed, learned, and handed down entirely by ear, from master singer to pupil, across the generations. The song teachers of the villages held a place of honour, for on them rested the keeping of the people’s memory and art.

In the twentieth century a romanised script was devised for Kam, and efforts have been made to record the language and its songs in writing, while standard Chinese has spread through school and daily dealings with the state. Most Dong today are bilingual, using Chinese for the wider world and Kam for the intimate life of the village, where the mother tongue and its songs remain the heart of the people’s identity.

The Valleys of Guizhou, Hunan, and Guangxi

The homeland of the Dong is the mountainous country where Guizhou, Hunan, and Guangxi meet, a land of steep green hills cut by many rivers and streams. The greater number live in the southeast of Guizhou, in the autonomous prefecture that centres on their villages, with further communities in the neighbouring parts of Hunan and in the north of Guangxi, wherever the river valleys offered land for rice.

This is a well-watered country of considerable beauty, its hillsides terraced for rice, its valleys threaded by rivers, and its slopes still clothed in forest that gave the timber for the famous towers and bridges. The Dong settled the valley floors and the lower slopes, where the streams could be led into flooded paddies, and there they built their villages close by the water.

The Dong village is a thing of art, its wooden houses raised on posts and roofed with tile or bark clustered along the stream, and at its heart the drum tower, a tall many-tiered structure of dark timber that serves as the meeting place and symbol of the community. Where a stream must be crossed, the Dong throw across it a covered wind-and-rain bridge, roofed and railed, a shelter and a gathering place as much as a crossing.

Famous among these is the great Chengyang bridge in the north of Guangxi and the ancient village of Zhaoxing in Guizhou, with its several drum towers, but the beauty is not in one place alone, for the Dong country is dotted with hundreds of such villages. Rooted to their valleys and their rice, the Dong made of their homeland a landscape shaped by water, timber, and song.

The Villages, the Kuan, and the Old Order

In the days before the reach of the modern state, the Dong governed themselves through their villages and through a body of custom carried in memory and song. They built no kingdom and knew no king, but each village or cluster of villages managed its own affairs through respected elders and through the assemblies held at the drum tower, where matters of the community were debated and settled.

Binding the villages together was an old institution of self-government, a compact among neighbouring settlements often known as the kuan, which drew the villages of a district into a league for common defence and the keeping of order. The laws of the kuan, recited and sung at great gatherings, governed conduct, punished wrongdoing, and settled the disputes that arose between villages and between kin.

These laws were not written but sung and spoken, a body of custom preserved by the elders and the singers and proclaimed at the assemblies. Stone pillars were sometimes raised to mark the making of a compact, but the law itself lived in the memory of the people, a remarkable feat of oral government that ordered Dong society for centuries without the pen of a scribe.

Life turned on the household, the clan, and the village, and on the round of the rice year. Wealth was reckoned in land, in the herd of buffalo that drew the plough, and in the fine timber houses and towers that a prosperous village could raise. Free of kings and of a native nobility, the Dong lived as a settled people of farmers and builders, governed by custom, by elders, and by the compacts of the kuan.

The museum of the Dong people at Sanjiang

The Clan, the Drum Tower, and the Bonds of the Village

The foundation of Dong society is the village, and at the village’s heart stands the drum tower, the emblem and the meeting place of the community. Tall and many-tiered, built wholly of fitted timber without nails, the tower holds the great drum that once summoned the people to assembly or to arms, and beneath it the villagers gather to talk, to rest, to sing, and to decide the affairs of the community.

Each village, or each quarter of a large village, belongs to a clan or a group of related families descended in the male line from a common ancestor, and it is often the clan that raises and keeps its own drum tower. The clan binds households together, honours its shared forebears, and orders the ties of marriage, which must be made outside the clan, joining families across the village and the district.

Leadership rested not on inherited rank but on the respect owed to elders, to the song teachers who kept the people’s lore, and to those skilled in the law and the custom of the kuan. Decisions were reached at the drum tower through discussion among the men of the village, and the authority of custom and of the assembled community weighed more than any single chief.

Women held an honoured place, above all as the weavers and embroiderers whose cloth clothed the people and as singers in the great choirs that included both men and women. The Sa, a revered ancestral goddess honoured in many Dong villages, gave to the feminine a place in the very heart of the people’s faith, and the courtship customs of the young, carried on in song, gave the women a voice in the choosing of a match.

The Sa, the Ancestors, and the Spirits of the Land

The religion of the Dong is rooted in the worship of a great ancestral goddess, known as Sama or Sasui, revered as the protecting mother of the people. In many villages a shrine to Sa, often a simple mound or enclosure planted with a tree, stands as the most sacred spot, and the goddess is honoured with offerings and with festivals as the guardian who watches over the community and its fortunes.

Alongside the cult of Sa the Dong honour their own ancestors, the forebears of the clan whose goodwill is sought and whose memory is kept, and a host of spirits believed to dwell in the mountains, the rivers, the trees, and the fields. Offerings and rites keep these spirits content, and specialists skilled in reading their will and in healing the sickness they send serve as the link between the people and the unseen world.

There was among the Dong no single organised church or priesthood of the kind found in the great world religions, but rather a body of custom and belief carried by the elders, the ritual specialists, and the singers. The great festivals, above all those in honour of Sa, gathered the community to renew its bond with the goddess and the ancestors and to pray for the welfare of the village.

In later centuries the Dong took in something of the Buddhism and Taoism of the Han, and elements of these faiths mingled with the older worship, while in modern times Christianity has reached a few communities. Yet for most Dong the heart of religion remains the honouring of Sa and the ancestors and the round of village festivals, an old faith of the valley people little changed by the wider world.

The Grand Choir, the Tower, and the Ways of the Dong

The greatest glory of the Dong is their music, and above all the grand choir, a form of unaccompanied choral singing in many parts that has been recognised as a treasure of world culture. In these great songs, sung without any instrument and without a conductor, the voices of the choir weave together high and low, some carrying the melody and others sustaining a droning bass, in harmonies of remarkable beauty and complexity.

These choral songs, learned by ear from master singers and handed down through the generations, imitate at times the sounds of nature, the song of the cicada, the call of birds, the running of water, and they are sung at festivals, at the welcoming of guests, and in the courtship of the young. That a people should have developed so rich a polyphony entirely by ear, without notation, is among the wonders of Chinese music.

The drum tower and the wind-and-rain bridge are the other great traditions of the Dong, the works of architecture that mark their villages. Raised of fitted timber without nails by master carpenters who carry the craft in memory, these structures are at once useful and beautiful, the tower a meeting place and the bridge a shelter, and the raising of them is a matter of pride for the whole community.

Courtship among the Dong is carried on in song, the young men and women singing back and forth in the evenings at the drum tower or the bridge, and the festivals of the year gather the villages for music, dance, and feasting. Through the grand choir, the tower, the bridge, and the courting songs, the Dong bind their daily life and their great occasions alike to music and to the timber art of their valleys.

The Carpenters, the Weavers, and the Builders of Bridges

The master craft of the Dong is carpentry, and it is in timber that their genius shows most plainly. Their carpenters raise the great drum towers and the covered bridges of their villages using fitted and pegged joints alone, without a single nail or drop of glue, working from a knowledge of proportion and structure carried in the memory rather than from written plans. These builders are honoured men, and their art is one of the marvels of Chinese folk architecture.

The women of the Dong are skilled weavers and dyers, and the cloth they make is famous across the region. They weave cotton on their looms, dye it a deep, lustrous blue-black with indigo, and beat and polish it until it shines, producing the distinctive glossy dark cloth from which the everyday dress of the Dong is cut. This shining cloth is a craft peculiarly their own.

Upon this cloth the women work fine embroidery, covering jackets, aprons, baby carriers, and shoes with intricate patterns in bright thread, and they adorn their festival dress with ornaments of silver, worked by skilled smiths into headdresses, collars, and jewellery. A woman’s embroidery and her silver were a measure of her family’s standing and of her own skill.

Beyond these the Dong practise the crafts of a settled valley people, the making of tools and household goods in wood and bamboo, the weaving of baskets and mats, and the forging of iron. Yet it is for the timber towers and bridges above all, and for the shining indigo cloth and its embroidery, that the crafts of the Dong are known and admired far beyond their mountain home.

Rice, Fish, and the Sour Table of the Dong

The food of the Dong is the food of a wet-rice people, built above all on glutinous sticky rice, which they steam and eat with the hands, rolling it into balls to dip into their dishes. Rice is the heart of every meal, grown in the terraced paddies of the valleys, and among the Dong the sticky varieties are especially prized, both for daily eating and for the festivals.

A famous feature of the Dong table is their love of sour flavours, and the preserving of food by souring. In the rice paddies they raise fish and ducks alongside the rice, in an ingenious system where the fish and fowl feed among the growing crop, and the fish so raised are preserved by salting and fermenting into the celebrated sour fish, a dish that can be kept for years and is brought out to honour guests.

This rice-fish-duck farming gives the Dong table its character, the rice from the paddy, the fish and ducks raised in it, and the sour pickled dishes made from them. Sour fish, sour pork, and pickled vegetables are the pride of the Dong kitchen, tangy and long-kept, and they are shared at feasts and offered to guests as the finest the household can give.

Rice wine, brewed in every household, is the drink of hospitality and of ritual, poured for guests and shared at every festival, and oil tea, the hearty brew of fried tea poured over puffed grains, warms the people in the cool of the hills. From the sticky rice to the sour fish and the rice wine, the food of the Dong is rooted in the paddy and in the long art of preserving that a settled valley people made their own.

The rice-fish-duck terraces of the Congjiang Dong

The New Year, the Sama, and the Feasts of the Villages

The festivals of the Dong turn on the rice year and on the honouring of their goddess and ancestors, and they gather the villages for days of song, dance, and feasting. The greatest are the celebrations of the new year and the great festival in honour of Sa, the ancestral goddess, when the community renews its bond with its protector and prays for the welfare of the village in the season to come.

The Sama festival, held in honour of the goddess, draws the women above all to her shrine, where offerings are made and the rites performed, followed by dance and by the singing of the great choirs. It is an occasion of deep meaning, binding the community to the mother goddess who watches over it, and among the most cherished of the Dong year.

Many festivals centre on song and on the meeting of villages, when the people of one settlement visit another, are welcomed with the singing of the grand choir at the drum tower, and answer song with song in friendly contest. These gatherings, at which the young court in music and the singers display their art, weave together the villages of a district and keep alive the bonds of the old compacts.

The turning of the seasons brings the rites of planting and of harvest, and the passages of life, birth, marriage, and death, gather the kin for ceremony. At all of them the shining dark cloth and the silver of the festival dress, the sound of the reed-pipe, and above all the great unaccompanied choirs bring colour and music, so that the Dong meet the great moments of the year and of life alike with song.

From the Ancient South to the People of Modern China

The Dong are counted among the descendants of the ancient Baiyue, the many Yue peoples who once spread across the whole of southern China before the coming of the Han. As the Chinese empire pushed south over the centuries, the ancestors of the Dong settled into the river valleys of the southern mountains and took up the intensive wet-rice farming that would shape their way of life.

Through the long centuries of imperial rule the Dong lived on the margins of the Chinese state, in valleys remote enough to keep much of their own custom and self-government. The empire ruled them at times through native chieftains, drawn from among the people and confirmed by the throne, and at times sought to bring them under direct administration, a change the Dong and their neighbours often resisted.

Like other peoples of the southern mountains, the Dong knew periods of revolt against the taxes and the officials of the state, and they shared in the great risings that swept the region in the days of the later empire. Yet their remoteness and their strong village institutions let them preserve their language, their songs, and their distinctive architecture through all the turns of imperial history.

After the founding of the People’s Republic the Dong were recognised as one of the official nationalities of China, and autonomous counties and a prefecture were established in their homelands. The modern age has brought roads, schools, and the reach of the market to the Dong valleys, and their grand choirs have won fame far beyond China, even as the pressures of a changing world bear upon the old village life.

The Dong in Modern China

Today the Dong number close to three million, living still chiefly in the valleys where Guizhou, Hunan, and Guangxi meet, with an autonomous prefecture and several counties recognising their homeland. The old villages endure, their drum towers and wind-and-rain bridges standing as before, and places such as Zhaoxing and the Chengyang bridge have become known far beyond China for their beauty.

The grand choir of the Dong has carried the fame of the people around the world, honoured by the wider culture as a masterpiece of humanity and performed on stages far from the mountain valleys where it was born. This recognition has brought pride and a measure of protection to the tradition, and young singers are again being taught the old songs that were nearly lost in the rush of modern life.

Modern life has come to the Dong country in the shape of roads, schools, electricity, and a growing trade in tourism, for visitors are drawn to the towers, the bridges, and the choirs. Yet the same forces draw the young away to the factories and cities of the coast, and standard Chinese and modern schooling press upon the Kam tongue and the old village ways.

Through these changes the Dong hold to their heritage with pride. The grand choir and the courting songs, the nail-less towers and covered bridges, the shining indigo cloth, the sour fish, and the worship of the goddess Sa all endure as marks of who they are. A settled people of the southern valleys, the Dong carry their song and their timber art into the life of modern China.