Honghe Hani Rice Terraces

On the southern flank of the Ailao Mountains, above the Red River in southern Yunnan, whole mountainsides have been reshaped into staircases of rice paddies. In places more than three thousand terraces step down a single slope between the edge of the forest and the floor of the valley, each one a thin ribbon of water held back by an earth wall that follows the contour of the hill. Seen from above, the lines curl around spurs and into ravines like the grain of an enormous piece of wood, and no two valleys look alike.

The terraces are the work of the Hani people, who have farmed these slopes for well over a thousand years, and their real achievement is a system rather than a view. The forested summits above about 2,000 metres catch the clouds and feed springs; villages of a few dozen households sit in the middle band, below the woods; and the paddies spill downhill beneath them, fed by a web of channels that carries water from field to field all the way to the bottom. UNESCO inscribed the cultural landscape in 2013, with a core area of more than 16,000 hectares around Yuanyang County, and the wider terraced country continues into neighbouring Honghe, Jinping and Lüchun counties.

The time to come is winter, roughly December to March, when the fields lie flooded between harvests. Then the terraces become a mosaic of mirrors, holding the colour of the sky, and on many mornings a sea of cloud fills the valleys below. Each of the classic viewpoints has its hour: Duoyishu is the place for sunrise, when mist swirls up out of the gorge; Bada faces west and turns orange and violet at sunset; Laohuzui, the Tiger's Mouth, looks down into a steep ravine where the terraces curve like claws. Between them lie Hani villages, among them Qingkou with its thatched "mushroom houses", and weekly markets such as the one at Shengcun draw people down from the hills.

Getting there

The terraces lie in Yuanyang County, Honghe Prefecture, Yunnan; the nearest sizeable city is Gejiu, about 50 km away. The practical air gateway is Kunming Changshui International Airport (KMG), about 220 km away. Long-distance buses run from Kunming to the town of Xinjie either directly or via Gejiu or Jianshui; from Xinjie, minibuses and hired vans reach Duoyishu, Bada and Laohuzui, each roughly an hour's drive, and early starts are needed for sunrise.