China’s Dong minority: why we’re digitally recording and preserving their Indigenous architectural heritage

The Dong people in China are an Indigenous ethnic group who are known to have lived in the mountainous regions of southwestern China for about 600 years. They don’t have a written language – instead their cultural knowledge is shared by word of mouth. This means that the outside world doesn’t know much about them.

But an ambitious university-led research project to document the Dong people’s distinctive architecture is revealing a great deal about this marginalised Indigenous group’s way of life.

There are an estimated 3 million Dong people living in the provinces of Guizhou, Hunan and Guangxi. They are renowned for their polyphonic choral singing, which has been inscribed by Unesco since 2009 as an example of world-class intangible cultural heritage. Their architecture, landscape and refined agricultural terracing are also distinctive, but less well known and never digitally recorded.

Dong buildings and settlements are typically hidden in fir forests with direct access to waterways at the bottom of valleys or halfway up hills. A Dong settlement typically has around 200 households of four to five people – although some larger villages can have as many as 500 households.

These villages tend to have a gatehouse marking their boundary, defining their territory in relation to neighbouring settlements. Many feature a distinctive “wind-and-rain bridge” – a mix of village gate and covered bridge – used for communal gatherings and blocking ceremonies. Ponds, wells, and granaries are scattered throughout the landscape.

At the heart of most villages, surrounded by wooden houses of two or three storeys, there is a “drum tower” and a “Sa-Sui shrine”. The former represents the connection of the people’s sacred belief of clan kinship and fir trees, while the latter represents the centre of the Dong’s worship of the “Sa” or grandmother. They are the most important buildings in a village – for security, social and spiritual reasons.

Culture at risk

Nowadays, the Dong’s built and cultural heritage are increasingly at risk. This is due to a combination of climate change, natural disasters, urban infrastructure development and the expansion of rural tourism.

A warming climate is increasingly triggering wild fires and causing mountain flooding. We are also seeing the encroachment of urbanism into the Dong’s rural settings. While bringing improvements in the quality of life, this often presents domestic fire hazards due to poor-quality electrical infrastructure. And in recent years, the growth of tourism and the encroachment of roads, railways and bridges is in danger of turning these villages into decorated stage-sets. This may bring in money, but threatens the Dong people’s unique architecture and landscape.

It’s a pressing challenge for this Indigenous people and for those of us dedicated to preserving their historic environment, their culture and their highly ritualised way of life.

Tragically, the scarcity of resources means that schemes for repair, restoration and regeneration works, as well as insufficient conservation policies and frameworks, have been slow to help preserve these precious villages. The far remote mountainous environment does not help. Both the local communities and government authorities have extremely limited resources to manage almost any change to their historic environment.

Despite the remote location of many of these villages, they are now being encroached upon by modern development. We’re seeing the growth of contemporary housing developments using modern structures and materials. It’s part of the rapid urbanisation of China over the past few decades – but, like elsewhere, it’s irreversibly changing the image and identity of the Dong settlements and their architecture.

The problem of modern tourist development can be seen in the way traditional-style drum towers are being built as theme park attractions. At the Danzhai Wanda Village, a newly developed theme park near Kaili in Guizhou, the nearest city to the Dong’s Indigenous areas, there are five newly built drum towers, billed as “iconic”, which are presented as standalone monuments with no sense of their relationship with the surrounding houses and forests.

Decoding Dong built heritage

The need to document and protect authentic Indigenous Dong culture is what has driven the Decoding Dong project.

This was launched in 2023 and completed in 2025 and set to digitally document Dong physical and cultural heritage.

This interdisciplinary project draws on humanities and social science disciplines ranging from architecture, anthropology, heritage sciences, sociology and digital humanities.

It put together a series of innovative and complementary research methods. This has involved 3D LiDAR scanning, aerial and terrestrial photogrammetry (the science of applying mathematics to photographs to extract accurate 3D measurements), 3D reality capture modelling, measured drawing, documentary film making and mapping. This has been complemented with oral histories from provided by Dong people.

The project has completed a first-of-its-kind digital documentation of the Dong architectural heritage, building digital and audio-visual documentaries of around 100 historic buildings across a dozen remote Dong villages.

A key part of the research process was to consult with key stakeholders, including clan leaders, elderly villagers and provincial policymakers wherever possible.

Indigenous Dong heritage is still under threat, due to the scarcity of resources faced by both the local authority and the communities themselves.

But this project represents a step change. By building a mutually beneficial store of information, supported by cutting-edge digital technologies, we hope to draw more attention to this distinctive people without threatening what it is that makes them unique.