Hole is where the heart is for ‘last cave-dwelling’ villagers in China
Print Edition
HIGH in the misty hills of southwestern China, an hour’s hike from any road, the lowing of livestock echoes through Zhongdong Village, where a group of 18 families live inside an enormous natural cave.
The final holdouts of the country’s “last cave-dwelling” village have had modern conveniences, like electricity, for years.
But their only access to the outside world is a footpath winding through Guizhou Province’s rugged mountain terrain.
Now a local tourism development company has built a 15 million yuan (US$2.2 million) cable car that residents will be allowed to use for free.
The funicular will make their daily lives easier and furnish new business opportunities, it says. It will go into operation on May 1.
Currently, villagers must haul in all food and products that they can’t make or grow themselves — even large items like furniture — from the nearest town, a three-hour commute each way.
The name Zhongdong translates to “middle cave,” a reference to its position between two smaller but uninhabited caverns.
Beneath the high ceiling, thatch-walled homes, piles of firewood, and domestic bric-a-brac like washing machines and bamboo posts hung with clean laundry surround a central square, fashioned into a dirt-floored basketball court.
There is no consensus as to when people first moved into the cave.
But some families say they have lived there for generations. Most are of the Miao ethnic minority.
Wang Hongqing said his family moved into the cave when he was just a baby, not long after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The cave was previously occupied by bandits. But when the People’s Liberation Army drove them out, Wang’s family seized the opportunity to make it their home. Twenty years ago, he became the first in Zhongdong to convert a portion of his home into a small guesthouse and now makes 18,000 yuan a year housing tourists.
New visitors brought by the cable car will make it “easier to make money” but there are downsides.
For almost a decade, the government asked villagers to move out, but Wang refused, afraid of losing such an important supplement to his income from growing corn and raising free-range chickens.
Wang’s neighbor Wei Xiaohong hopes the improvements will bring young people back from the cities.
Hundreds of millions of rural migrants have moved to urban areas since China began economic reforms in the late 1970s, hollowing out large swathes of the countryside. The cave once housed a vibrant school with more than 200 students from the broader region — roofless, like a number of other structures inside with no need of protection from rain.
But it was shuttered by authorities some time ago, and now Wei’s 12-year-old son must walk two hours to class.
The development company manager, surnamed Luo, said the project would revitalise the village, gutted by the rural-to-urban migration.
Zhongdong’s houses would be repaired, the primary school restored, and “the mess of dirty things inside” the cave cleared.
“In five years, we will have reproduced some of the original buildings and recreated the primitive life of the men out farming and the women at home doing housework for the tourists to visit,” he added.
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