Tianlong Tunpu (Anshun)

A Ming Tunpu Garrison Village Founded After The 1381 Hongwu Campaign In Guizhou; Home Of Dixi Masked Ground Opera, A Nationally Listed Intangible Cultural Heritage · Anshun, Guizhou

In 1381 the Hongwu emperor sent an army into Guizhou to break the last Mongol holdout in the south-west, and then did something that shaped the province for six hundred years: he ordered the soldiers to stay, brought their families down from Jiangnan, and settled them in fortified garrison villages called tunpu. Their descendants are still there. Tianlong is the most visited of them, a village of grey stone houses with loopholed walls and narrow defensive lanes in the hills outside Anshun, where the older women still wear a long blue robe and a distinctive head wrap that is Ming Jiangnan dress preserved in a place too remote to have changed it, and where people speak a dialect that linguists find closer to fourteenth-century Nanjing than to anything around it. What visitors come for is Dixi - ground opera, performed masked and outdoors on an open patch of village ground rather than a stage, in a form descended from the garrison's own military rituals. It is the oldest surviving form of Chinese opera and the masks are terrifying.

Tianlong Tunpu, Pingba District, Anshun, Anshun, Guizhou, China

Village open daily, generally 8:00-17:30. THE DIXI GROUND OPERA RUNS TO SET TIMES, typically a few performances a day, is usually included in the ticket, and CAN BE CANCELLED for low visitor numbers - confirm the schedule before travelling, because it is the reason to come. Performances are OUTDOORS and go ahead in light rain. Chinese New Year brings the village's own Dixi cycle, which runs to its own schedule entirely.

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