For a thousand years the lives of the Dong people have resounded with song.

The sun was already low and the air still hot when I arrived at the tall ceremonial gate that led into the village. From the top of the dirt road, my eyes took in a valley in mid-harvest: a patchwork of pale green fields brushed with gold, broken by dark waves of upswept roofs.

Without warning, two ten-year-old girls ran up and locked elbows with mine, singing their welcome in staccato rhythm as they escorted me over a flagstone path through a maze of three-storied homes made of wood. Turbaned grannies watched from their porches. Three grizzled men wearing old-style Mao caps looked up from their pipes. A huddle of children followed. The girls led me past grain sheds, which stood on stilts over pens of fleshy pigs and ponds of ducks.

I had arrived in Dimen, home to five clans and 528 households of the Dong minority, an enclave nestled in the luxuriant mountains of Guizhou.