Paradise Lost: Dive into the world's largest Miao village (4)

The Xijiang Miao Village is now a famous cultural tourism site in China. (People's Daily Online/Kou Jie)

Enclosed by its walls of plank and mud, the village is a self-contained kingdom of art and leisure. Its ancestral houses, mansions and hovels alike, are built of logs and bamboo. The wooden stilted houses, also known as Diao Jiao Lou in Chinese, are situated on the mountain slopes, while the unique decoration of their windows, rails and porches give them a strange beauty that is alien to the stolid masonry of modern cities in China.

At the centre of the village, on the crest of the hills around the edges of a torrential river, stand several magnificent ancient wooden stilted houses, which in both ancient and modern times could be considered the physical heart of the Miao village. The traditional wooden stilted houses are built without any nails or rivets. The buildings usually have three stories, with the first being used for storing tools and manure, as well as keeping livestock. The second is used as a living space, while the third is mainly used for storing grain and other daily necessities.