Longji Rice Terraces

Interesting facts

In 2018 the FAO listed the Longji terraces as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System, one of four southern Chinese rice-terrace systems so honoured.

The terraces rise in as many as 1,100 tiers, with a vertical drop of more than 860 metres from the lowest paddy to the highest.

The largest single paddy covers only about one mu, some 667 square metres, while the smallest are said to hold just three rice seedlings.

A local saying claims that a frog can leap across three fields in one jump, so narrow are many of the ledges.

Huangluo village holds a Guinness World Record for the largest group of people with the longest hair, with dozens of women whose hair passes a metre.

Red Yao women wash their hair in fermented rice water boiled with pomelo peel and tea-seed residue, a recipe they credit for its length and colour.

The hair a Red Yao woman cuts at around eighteen is kept and later woven back into her headdress, which changes shape once she marries and has children.

Why it is worth it

The Longji terraces — the name means "Dragon's Backbone" — wrap the mountains of Longsheng County in northern Guangxi in thousands of thin, curving ledges, climbing from valley floors at around 300 metres to ridges above 1,100 metres across some 66 square kilometres. Seen from a ridge-top platform, the slopes read less like farmland than like contour lines drawn on the land itself: each paddy follows the shape of the hill exactly, so whole mountainsides become ribbed, rippling surfaces that catch light differently at every hour.

Work on the terraces is generally dated to the Yuan dynasty in the 13th–14th centuries, and the carving continued into the early Qing period. They are still farmed, and that is what keeps them alive. Two peoples tend the two best-known areas: Zhuang families around Ping'an, and Yao communities around Dazhai and Jinkeng. The wooden stilt houses of their villages sit right among the paddies, and the paths between them are the same paths the farmers use. In nearby Huangluo, Yao women keep a tradition of growing their hair extraordinarily long, cutting it only once in a lifetime.

The landscape changes completely with the farming year. In spring the flooded terraces become a staircase of mirrors holding the sky; by summer they turn a dense, even green; at harvest in late September and October they go gold; in winter frost can outline every step. Around Ping'an the favourite viewpoints carry poetic names — "Nine Dragons and Five Tigers", and "Seven Stars Accompany the Moon", where a single crescent-shaped paddy is ringed by small piles of stone left by the builders. Above Jinkeng, three numbered viewpoints over 1,000 metres look across the most dramatic, tightly stacked slopes.

What makes Longji remarkable is the scale of patient, hand-made work: no machine could build or tend these ledges, and the whole system depends on water channelled from the forested summits down through paddy after paddy. Walking the trail between Ping'an and Dazhai, a few hours on foot, is the best way to understand it.

Getting there

The terraces lie about 55 km from Guilin in a straight line; by road the trip takes roughly 2.5–3 hours, either by direct shuttle bus in the main season or by coach to Longsheng town and a local bus up to the villages. The nearest airport is Guilin Liangjiang International Airport (KWL), about 60 km away. Ping'an and Dazhai are both reached by mountain road, and the villages themselves are explored on foot.

Longji Rice Terraces

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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