Honghe Hani Research Articles

Hani Rice Terraces of Honghe - The Harmonious Landscape of Nature and Humans

The Honghe Hani Rice Terraces, set in the mountainous slopes that flow to the valleys of the Hong River in the southern Yunnan Province, is a cultural product of rice farming. The rice terraces were created by a particular ethnic group that utilised the water and vegetation resources of their unique geography and climate. Today, after hundreds of years of cumulative effort, the terraces constitute a breathtaking cultural landscape. The rice production technology interwoven with the local people’s cultural spirituality and governance is a unique way of living that has been developing over a thousand years, creating and maintaining a spectacular landscape. The Hani Rice Terraces in the Honghe region of China’s Yunnan province was inscribed as a cultural landscape on the World Heritage List in 2013 for bearing a unique testimony to a cultural tradition and as an outstanding example of traditional human land-use. This study describes the unique property with its spatial structure of forest water and village terrace systems and discusses the physical factors that sustain this landscape. Indivisible from the landscape is the culture of the local Hani people, their land-use and management, along with their traditional practices and spiritual values that sustain the landscape. In recent years, this extraordinary, expansive region has become a popular destination for photographers, anthropologists, folklorists, ethnologists and scholars studying traditional villages. The study also raises issues on how the landscape can be maintained in contemporary times with tourism and modern living aspirations.

Analyzing Environmental Stress Counter-Measures in Agricultural Heritage Sites in China

In recent years, with climate change, many agricultural systems are facing severe environmental stress, which are seriously threatening the food security and sustainable development of agricultural system. Although mainstream agro-system can effectively reduce the adverse agro-production effect rapidly by using modern technology, but many of them bring serious ecological crisis at the same time. For the sustainable development of agro-systems, the stress mitigation options must give full consideration to ecological protection. The Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) sites, relying on its unique land use, water conservancy facilities, traditional crops, etc., form unique production system creating a better match with local natural conditions. Based on disaster mitigation system theory and practice, this paper analyzes environmental stress counter-measures of several GIAHS sites in China. The water requirement of millet, a drought-tolerant crop in Aohan Dryland Farming System (recognized as a GIAHS pilot site in 2012), has a better match with local water conditions. By reducing vulnerability of crops, agriculture survived healthily in semi-arid regions. Honghe Hani Rice Terraces System (recognized as a GIAHS pilot site in 2010), relying on the unique land and water use patterns, has successfully reshape disaster inducing environment, and effectively reduce the risk/effects of droughts. Besides, due to the high price, rich crop diversity and variety of income channel, the Agricultural Heritage sites can ensure the economic income and agro-system health when facing environmental stress. Stress counter-measures of traditional agricultural systems make full use of the regulation and spontaneity ability of the natural system, which is an important way to achieve sustainable development of ecological agriculture.

Transient Heritage

Transient Heritage Jeanne M. Lambin (bio) One of the oldest, continuously cultivated terraced landscapes in the world, Honghe Rice Terraces in Yunnan, China, is a sight that inspires awe. It is an exquisitely wrought world made by hand which has endured for 1200 years. In June it was inscribed on the World Heritage list as a cultural landscape, marking the culmination of a ten-year process aimed at tapping the tourist potential of the region. In the lightning fast world of China, more change has probably occurred in this area in the past five years than in the past forty. It is hard to imagine how this living landscape will survive for another century, much less millennia. The challenge is not unique to the site, the region, or even China. Although there is much discussion about the benefits and challenges with World Heritage designation, arguably, the real problem is not with listing, but the increasingly perilous, ever-changing world in which heritage must exist. Click for larger view View full resolution Cultivated over the past 1,300 years, the Honghe Hani Rice Terraces in China, are one of the oldest continuously cultivated terraced landscapes in the world. PHOTO: JEANNE LAMBIN Change, as the saying goes, is inevitable. The pace of change however is variable. In 1970, Alvin Toffler's book, Future Shock, was published and became a best seller. In it, Toffler lamented the "death of permanence," describing change as "avalanching upon our heads and [that] most people are grotesquely unprepared to cope with it." The result? Future Shock: "a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society. [End Page 54] It arises from the superimposition of a new culture on an old one. It is culture shock in one's own society." While some of the predictions were off base (we do not live in underwater cities—yet), much of it, especially when dealing with the break with the past, transient populations, and a throwaway society (even extending to the built environment), was spot on. Toffler wrote, "the shift toward transience is even manifest in architecture—precisely that part of the physical environment that in the past contributed mostly heavily to man's sense of permanence... we raze landmarks. We tear down whole streets and cities and put new ones up at a mind-numbing rate." Transience was to the 20th century, what fire was to the 19th. Important parts of our collective past were being crumpled up and thrown away. Globally there was an emerging interest in heritage conservation. "Establishing an Effective System of Collective Protection" On November 16, 1972, "Noting that the cultural heritage and the natural heritage are increasingly threatened with destruction, not only by the traditional causes of decay, but also by changing social and economic conditions which aggravate the situation with even more formidable phenomenon of damage or destruction" and that the "deterioration or disappearance of any item of the cultural or natural heritage constitutes a harmful impoverishment of the heritage of all the nations of the world," the United Nations National Scientific and Education Committee Organization (UNESCO) adopted the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. What came to be known as "the Convention" recognized that "parts of the cultural or natural heritage are of outstanding interest and therefore need to be preserved as part of the world heritage of mankind as a whole." To that end the Convention was ratified in 1975, the Committee established in 1976, and the first sites inscribed in 1978. From that initial list of a dozen properties, the list has mushroomed to 981 properties with 190 States Parties (or signatories) adhering to the Convention. While there is much debate over its [End Page 55] effectiveness, if sheer numbers are a metric of "success," then the Convention has been a great one. Over the years, as the list expanded and evolved, so too has the understanding of heritage, management policies, stewardship, and local participation. Oddly, it could be argued that the success of the Convention in terms of the number of listings is as much a testament to the perniciousness of the threats that led to its initial creation...

Sex Work in the Sino-Vietnamese Borderlands

This report explores cross-border sex work in the borderlands of the sub- Mekong region between Vietnam and China. We focus particularly on the town of Hekou. Hekou is situated in the Yao Minority Autonomous County in the Honghe Hani and Yi Minority Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan, China, on one bank of the Red River, which forms an international border between Hekou and the Vietnamese city of Lao Cai, the capital of Lao Cai province.