Take a stroll through downtown Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing or even old Canton (now Guangzhou), and if you’re from New York, London or Rome, you may feel quite at home: Dior, Prada, Banana Republic boutiques are warmly lit through the evening hours while McDonalds, KFC and Hard Rock Cafes entice you to dinner.   

It’s great for the millions of tourists who are drawn each year to experience the history and grandeur of the world’s oldest civilization in a comfortable, familiar environment. Not so great if your tastes run to the exotic. Even upwardly­ mobile Chinese yearn for an escape from their uninspired suburbias.  So what do they do? They pile in the SUV and head west or southwest, to the region they call the Frontier. 

Visitors wanting to avoid China’s puzzling vehicle code can take a faster route and fly from Beijing, Hong Kong or Shanghai. The Frontier begins in the high country beyond Chengdu in Sichuan and extends into Inner Mongolia and Tibet, encompassing tropical Guangxi Province in the south and its mountainous neighbors, Yunnan and Guizhou Provinces.  

The character of these provinces differ primarily in their landscapes: Guangxi’s most famous destination, Guilin, has been celebrated in paintings and poetry for centuries in depictions of eerie karst limestone hills erupting from a tranquil river valley as if arranged in a classical Chinese garden. The fact that an airport was carved out of the “dragon’s back” mountains surrounding Guizhou’s capitol of Guiyang is almost as impressive as the careful development of tourist resources around its bamboo forests and waterfalls. 

Situated at the other end of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, Yunnan’s capital of Kunming is renowned in China as the City of Eternal Spring – for most of the year the hillsides are a riot of color as camelias, azaleas and rhododendrons bloom.  

And in the farthest reaches of China’s Frontier, the summer months are the time to celebrate the bright blue skies and endless grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau and Mongolia, or the desert’s stark openness in Xinjiang. The commonality in the Frontier provinces is the predominance of China’s ethnic minorities and their unique cultures. 

Unspoiled Guizhou

Huangguoshu is one of the leading falls in China in terms of height and volume. The major fall is over 20 meters wide and 60 meters high. The falls drain into the Pearl River.

For adventures in nature, culture, home arts or history, Guizhou Province is worth considering for even a short vacation in Southwest China. Long considered an impoverished backwater, Guizhou is now celebrated for its unspoiled natural areas and ethnic villages rich in traditional handicrafts.  

The silver handiwork of the Miao and Dong is stunning, whether on display or on the intricately embroidered garments of the women. Here, on any given day, people in Lahu, Yi, Bulang or a dozen other “ethnic minority” dress can be seen making their way to market, to the bank, to the schools.  This is not costume, but rather everyday dress, and Guizhou, like Sichuan, Guangxi and Yunnan provinces, proudly embraces its minority heritage.  As host to more than half of China’s 50 minority groups, there is a lot of cultural diversity at work in this Frontier. 

If you’re interested in festivals, the Southwest is for you! Festival days are typically work and school holidays honoring the Buddha, the goddess Guanyin, an historical event, or more recently, a martyr of China’s Revolution, or even a commercial achievement such as the Maotai Festival or the more prosaic Pomegranate Festival.  

First, try to spend some time in Guizhou. With almost 400 festivals happening each year in the province, there’s a good chance you’ll stumble across a celebration, somewhere. But be warned: Admission to a village festival may very well demand participation in an 80-proof welcoming ceremony, drinking rice wine from a bamboo cup with each member of the welcoming committee!  

In Yunnan Province, festivals are also common: the Dai water splashing festival originally celebrated the departure of demons, but now mostly cools down revelers in Xishuangbanna’s four-day festival. The Tanpa Festival falls in February, when young boys are initiated as novice monks; then comes Tan Jing, when the Buddhist scriptures are honored. The Closed-Door Festival comes with the planting season, imposing a moratorium on distractions, especially marriages and other celebrations.  

After the growing season, the harvest is celebrated with the Open Door Festival. Near Kunming, the Yi people celebrate the fiery demise of a demon king with a torch festival. The most boisterous celebration, the dragon boat festival, is played out all over the world in June, but had its humble beginnings in a poet’s protest of corruption in government. High on the Tibetan plateau, horses thunder in China’s border regions near Tibet and Mongolia, and in Xinjinag there’s always the Yogurt Banquet Festival or the Grape Festival to break a long fast. 

Near the Burma border 

Taking a trip from Yunnan’s southern border northwards, you’ll cross a patchwork quilt of autonomous prefectures, largely adhering to traditional lifestyles and economies. Near the border with Burma, turbaned Jingpo men have wicked-looking machetes swinging from their belts, a reminder of not-so-long ago days when their grandfathers took war trophies in human ears during China’s war with Japan. These knives are not an accessory you’ll find on the streets of Beijing!  

Near the border with Vietnam and Laos, delicate Dai women sway under sun umbrellas behind water buffalos ambling (water buffalos are capable only of swimming or ambling) through the streets. And in the hill country, Hani, Yi and Miao farmers have sculpted remarkable landscapes with crop terraces that change with the seasons: blue pools in the summer; brilliant green in the fall; earthy brown in the winter; goldenrod in the spring. 

Continuing your trip northwards, you’ll ease into the pine-covered mountains of the Yunnan-Guizhou plateau. The land here is less fertile and more mountainous, and villages are often isolated.  Long after other states unified to form modern China, the Nanzhou Kingdom held its own, at times as far afield as Burma, Thailand and Sichuan Province.  It’s capital at Dali fell to Kublai Khan in 1250 A.D., helping the Mongols spread their rule and influence across China by controlling the trade routes into India and Southeast Asia.  

Dali is still a walled town, its old area ideal for strolling. On Foreigner’s Street you can buy snacks from street vendors, many of whom are of the Bai or Hui ethnic minorities. The Bai people of Dali have a local celebrity: He Liyi, whose book, Mr. China’s Son, chronicles his rather remarkable life over the past 60 years of chaos and change in China.  He now runs a modest café and cultural exchange in Dali and is always willing to share a cup of tea and chat with customers, many of whom are backpackers making their way across China on a shoestring. 

Intriguing matriarchies 

Possibly the most engaging cultures in Yunnan are the matriarchal minorities. In the area around Lijiang, the Naxi dominate. Post-revolution China has had some impact on the structure of traditional cultures, but the Naxi held onto their matriarchal traditions well into the late 20th century. Lineage was traced through the maternal line, and children lived with the mother, who was the head of the family. Property was passed to the children through the mother, or to the nephews through the mother's brothers. Women comprised the main labor force, respected at home and in outside society. It was a tantalizing culture for the Austrian-American botanist Joseph Rock to discover.  Already well established in his field, Rock paused for 27 years in Lijiang, and for that time all of his published writings were ethnographies of the Naxi.   

Beyond the matriarchal structure, the Naxi culture has another unique feature: a living pictographic language. "Dongba" script and a syllabic writing known as the "Geba" script were used more than 1,000 years ago, recording religious text, poetry, legends and folklore. The Naxi didn’t use alphabetic script until the 1950s. Another survivor of ancient times is Naxi traditional music, composed in the Tang and Song Dynasties and performed nightly by a cadre of musicians determined to hang onto their traditions. 

Another matriarchal society, the Mosuo, has held onto its customs even more strongly, due in part to the notoriety of a tell-all book by Yang Erche Namu called Leaving the Kingdom of Daughters.  Yang Namu left her village at 13 and began an odyssey of social and sexual freedom unheard of in China, Her story, detailed in the book, made for an instant bestseller.   

Being of the Mosuo minority, Yang Namu’s experiences weren’t so unusual. The Mosuo practice “walking marriage,” which is not marriage at all, but rather an arrangement of nighttime trysts, after which the man returns home to his mother, and children resulting from the unions are raised in the woman’s household.   

Since the publication of Leaving the Kingdom of Daughters, tourists curious (or hopeful) about the Mosuo’s walking marriage have been steadily flocking to the remote Lugu Lake area bordering Yunnan and Sichuan provinces. But rather than degrading the traditional culture, as is so often the case in the sudden merger of cultures in a commercial environment, the influx of what is for now mostly Chinese tourists has had the effect of affirming the Mosuo’s pride in their own culture.  Seeking to preserve the tranquility of the “Kingdom of Girls” on the Tibetan Plateau, the Mosuo have banned powerboats on serene Lugu Lake, and many tribal members run guesthouses as an alternative to the hotels that have begun to appear in the area. 

From Lugu Lake in the foothills of the Himalayas, travel options could take you to Tibet, Inner Mongolia or back onto the fertile plains of Sichuan Province, China’s breadbasket. Going back to the lower elevations, you’ll likely encounter Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu and the Muslim Hui people. If you follow the old Silk Road immortalized by Marco Polo, you’ll find as he did Uyger, Kazak, Kirgiz and Tajik people.  

China’s ethnic minorities occupy a unique place in an otherwise homogeneous society, underscoring the complexities of addressing so many diverse cultures, languages and practices under a single constitution. Perhaps for this reason the minority cultures are especially curious and welcoming of Western visitors. If your travels take you off China’s tourist track to the Frontier, be prepared for an enriching and enlightening exchange of ideas with these indigenous peoples.