We’ve been trying to go to Dimen for a long time. We wanted to go to Dimen for a long time. Why? Thing is – China has an abundance of amazing areas and destinations, but there is also an abundance of tourists. Fascinating place = huge crowds, tour groups with matching hats and tour leaders with flags and megaphones, souvenir stands and loud music. Dimen is different. Well, apart from the music. Let’s get to that later. First the important stuff: Dimen is a minority village in China's Guizhou province where the Dong people live their traditional lives. Since a few years there is also an eco museum and study center for visitors. As it’s normally not open for regular tourists, there’s a lack of everything that makes tourist destinations so distasteful. On the other hand, there’s all a visitor really needs – a room, food made from locally grown crops, and a glass of sweet rice wine for dinner every now and then. We lived like kings for three days. So how come we didn't make it to this place earlier? Problem is, it’s so far away – way too long of a journey for stressed big-city people. Having left our urban life behind, we finally had the time.

On our way to Dimen, we checked out some nomadic furniture at Guangzhou station. These little chairs are very small and flat once folded and are made to be used at Chinese train stations where seating is sparse and people hang around waiting for hours, even days. Too bad you need to be a really small and lightweight person to be able to use it. Yeah, on the pictures it might look as we’re actually using the chair but as a lot of things in Asia, it’s fake – we’re not really sitting down with our full weight.

Western China is the region where most non-Han ethnic Chinese live. Now as the area is opening up to the outer world with better communication (there’s a satellite dish outside almost every house in the village) and better transportation, the traditions and environment is threatened. Goal for the Dimen project: improving quality of life, but also preserving the lifestyle. The eco museum opened in 2005 and together with the culture research center it is a platform for researchers to study Dong culture. As we happen to know the founder, we were welcome to visit even though we are not researchers in that sense. Thanks for that; we had a great stay.

All around the village, there are massive wood casket-looking objects resting under the houses – could it be...? Yes, these are actually coffins for the villagers, but to our relief there’s nobody inside – yet. At the age of 50, the people here prepare their own coffins to store under their house, waiting for the owner to pass away so he/she can be buried up on the hillside. Interesting reminder of mortality. Speaking about storage – the village also has a nice way of protecting their food storage from rats and animals: build the house on poles, and keep water under it. Pretty clever – as long as the rats prefer being hungry rather than wet. Now, what about that loud music in Dimen? It comes from the speaker system – we assume it’s for waking people up in the morning. Or just for entertainment in the evening. There was some live singing as well from a group of school kids practicing – the Dong people have a long tradition of singing their stories.

We arrived in the midst of rice planting season. The beautiful mountainous landscape of this region is also what makes life here so tough: as the area is hilly, it takes an enormous effort to make it livable and to create flat fields for the crops. Up on the hillside, some rice field terraces have a 10 meter high wall down to the next level. Growing rice is an enormous effort in itself – a task that requires intense manpower and which can't be much improved with modern technology even if you have access to it. In Dimen, preparing the field is done with a traditional plow behind a buffalo or a horse. Villagers mostly work alone out on the fields, cleaning up and planting the crops. It seems to be the old people who do most of the work – many of the young adults are off to some city working and making money. After a day watching village life, we felt the urge to help in some way – but how? We didn’t want to mess up their precious rice fields, and we are not strong enough to do their heavy work. Being professionals designers with long education and work experience, we are pretty helpless when it comes to methods of basic countryside survival. Instead, we took a walk up the mountain and tried out carrying one of the stacks of crops that had been brought there by an old woman. Wow, it took us a real effort just to lift it. Impressed, again. 

Getting to Dimen is an adventure in itself – we did it the cheap way: subway, train and night train between Hong Kong and Kaili, then 8 hours in a pickup on bumpy roads. At one part the road was completely blocked by a landslide – we had to wait for an hour before the road was cleaned up enough to continue. No hard feelings – we had a swim in the river below the road. Refreshing after a night in a hard sleeper train. 31 hours after leaving Hong Kong we arrived in Dimen, greeted by a tasty dinner. Ahh, Chinese food is so good once you are far enough from Shanghai.

Leaving for Chengdu was a 24 hour mission and as interesting as getting to Dimen – we started off at 6am with the pickup and then bus from a nearby station. Checking the GPS: 260 km to Guizhou where we had to go for the 6pm train. After 5 hours bus ride on small mountain roads through absolutely stunning landscape we checked the GPS again – 290 km to destination. Ok, it had been a beautiful ride, but we were actually further away from our destination than we'd been at the start of the day. Sometimes the GPS causes more stress than it is helpful and we started having doubts we'd make it on time. In China, missing your train could mean having to wait 24 hours for the next available one. People around us in the bus had been throwing up all day – was it from the bumpy ride or the terrible meal we had for lunch? The guy behind us had his final blast, just a few minutes before the bus arrived at a wide flat new highway. Right on time, man. And a relief for us to finally get to a smooth and fast road. 260 km to destination, the driver made it in 2.5 hours. Arrived at train just in time. Then – a peaceful night at the train to Chengdu were we had our next event at the Sichuan University.

< back to all events & ideas