Cave dwellers refuse to move
When armed bandits prowled this remote, mountainous stretch of the southwestern province of Guizhou in the chaotic years before the founding of modern China, the ethnic Miao villagers hid in the region’s enormous caves.
And there they have remained, even after China was united under communist rule, grinding out an existence of profound rural poverty and isolation.
The area is in one of the poorest provinces in China. The only link to the rest of the country, and the outside world, is over a mountain footpath — a brisk one-hour hike through a steep valley — that leads to a nearby road.
Over the past 20 years, though, the caves have become less secluded because of a steadily increasing trickle of tourists, who come to experience what local media have described as the last continuously inhabited cave in China.
A cottage industry has popped up. The cave dwellers earn extra money by renting out rooms in their homes, which over time have clustered within Zhong cave, a limestone cavern big enough to hold four American football fields. The hangarlike cave is so large that their wooden or bamboo-made residences form a small, subterranean village built along its undulating walls.
The county government wants the residents of Zhong cave to move to a nearby block of housing: low-slung, white-walled farmhouses that were completed nearly 10 years ago.
Officials say the residents have not taken care of the cave, leaving it unsuitable for habitation, and that the government should oversee the village, as it is listed as a protected community by the Getu River Tourism Administration, a local agency. They have offered each resident 60,000 renminbi (about $12,000) to leave.
Only five families have agreed to move. The remaining 18 families have held on stubbornly to their homes inside the cave.
They say the new homes are too small, that they fear losing access to their land, and that they alone, because of their historical connection to the cave, should have the right to independently control its small tourism economy.
“The residents of this cave should be the administrators of tourism here, regardless of whether or not we are paid,” said Wang Qiguo, head of the local village, who established the first hostel there.
As he spoke, his wife prepared a steaming array of dishes made from home-smoked pork and local vegetables grown in the valley.
After all, Wang noted, “The best thing about this cave is its inhabitants.”
Even residents who are considering moving out seem to agree that $12,000 per person is too little money, especially because many are elderly and speak little or no Mandarin, meaning they could feel isolated if they leave the cave community. They still rely on their nearby land to grow the millet and vegetables on which they subsist.