Datang Miao Village

Datang Miao Village is a typical village of Miao nationality, and it is located in Xinqiao Miao Village, Datang Township, and 15 km from Leishan County east of Guiyang. It is famous for its clothing “mini-skirt” and featured barn.

Featured clothing

There is an ancient and modish Miao nationality, and it is famous for its special clothing. It was said they had been wearing the “mini-skirt” for five hundred years, especially girls and women. As these previous featured clothing, they are called as “Mini-skirt Miao”.

The Mini-skirt Miao wear the skirt only ten centimeters long, and it is made of folded indigo weaving cloth of about 8 meters. There is a colored ribbon with 16 centimeters wide and 20-25 centimeters long tied round the waist, and their feet are cloth wrapped, which have a distinctive style. Their clothing is mostly with butterfly pattern. They wear one or two skirts usually, but three or four skirts in grand festivals.

History of “mini-skirt”

It was said that hundreds years ago, women wore long clothing, and it was inconvenient to work. One day, there was a woman back to home with soilage in her dress, and soon after she died from lightning strike. The Miao people thought that the dress with soilage had tarnished the ancestors, which made the God angry. So after negotiation, several elders decided to change the long clothing to short.

Featured barn

Apart from the clothing, there is unusual architecture, and that is barn built on the water. Now there are 40 barns standing in order in the pool with six wooden pillars supported and grey tile or fir bark as their roofs. The barn is built without a nail or a riveting. It is 1.5 meters above the ground and 3.5-4 meters above the water surface. The barns interlinked are so spectacular. This kind of design can make the grain in the barn to avoid rat, damp and being moldy. Each family has a barn at least. It is said that this style of architecture has a history of 600 years.

Traditional festivals

The main festivals in Datang Miao Village are “Grade Climbing Festival” in March in lunar calendar, “Chixin Festival” in October, “Miao Year” in December (but they still celebrate traditional Chinese Spring Festival), and “Guzang Festival” held once in thirteen years.

Each festival has its traditional significance. For example, “Guzang Festival” is a grand ancestor-worship celebration, in this day, the locals kill decades of cows, and make their soul to consecrate the ancestors. In “Grade Climbing Festival”, the young boys and girls sing in antiphonal style to find their true love, and other performances are wrestling, horse racing and cock fighting and so on. “Chixin Festival” is a traditional farming festival, when farmers are not so busy after the harvest, they hold kinds of amusement activities (like traditional reed-pope wind instrument dance) to celebrate bumper harvest and wish a nice year next.

Featured cake

There is a featured cake that made of a kind of edible grass and sticky rice with minced meat or sweetened bean paste, and almost every family can make it.