Every evening in Wujiang Village, a drone show with fireworks is presented. (Photo/Xudong Yang)

Guizhou - The Golden Week of National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival is about reunion and travel. This year, by surprise, I found myself in Wujiang Village, a success story of rural tourism, a stage for reality TV, and a photoshoot scene with historical allure. 

My cousin, a native of Zunyi, Guizhou, proposed an after-dinner tour to see the drone shows and fireworks in an ancient town nearby. After driving through an empty logistics and plunging into steep green hills flanking a winding road, we were queuing among a stream of plates from all parts of China. 

At the grand entrance hall, whose architectural style was ethnically ambiguous to my amateur eye, I paid 120 yuan (about $16.90) full price, half for Guizhou residents, for free if you had a hotel booking. 

This west entrance opened to a sloping colonnade projecting above the river below. It was a pleasant descent, and I was struck by the genius of the location. The English term "village" failed to capture the sense of "Zhai," more properly translated as a stockaded village. Here, a confluence of waters was shielded by hills, with ample access to fresh water, wood, and gentle slopes for rice paddies.

The crowd was not too overwhelming yet, so I slowed down to appreciate the colonnade's joinery and the flagged path that seemed to ooze history. Wujiang Village has long been inhabited by mixed groups of residents and quite closely administered by the Zunyi Fu (prefecture) since the Ming dynasty. Its current organic complexity and scale hinted at a prosperity that I could not revisit. Listed among China's traditional villages since 2016, it only reopened as a tourist destination in 2022.

The rooms and pavilion, more adjacent to the entrance, remained empty, but the quietude soon gave way to the rhythm of the crowd once we stepped into a main street. Vendors shouted to attract passersby, from tourists lugging heavy bags to hotel guests in slippers.

The stores of food, drinks, and souvenirs bore double identities, one by menus consisting of "authentic" options, one from the shopfront design reckoning with an inaccessible history. Low-hanging dried goods decorated the roofs: corns, peppers, garlic, and even smoked meat (plastic). Some signs were much older, written in traditional Chinese for selling salt, sugar, and scribe service. 

Warm yellow LED strips sketched the outlines of columns, and soft light from cafés and restaurants spilled through occasional French windows, not a single empty seat. The town livened up as the night darkened.

There is no escape from the holiday flux. Young and old were calling out to locate each other and then murmured hushed greetings and apologies to make way for everyone else. In the low hums, a small acoustic substrate of metallic flickers came from all around. 

Women, and a few men, adorned themselves in silver, emulating Miao attire: the village’s unofficial dress. Most girls in costumes held up their phones and DJI cameras for each other. Many were accompanied by professional cameramen who coached the opening up of palms, wider smiles, the tilted heads. Costume rentals and photo studios dominated the retail spaces, a booming economy of visual play. 

Wujiang Village has also appeared in Chinese reality shows such as Go Fighting! and Star Chaser, gaining traction online and then lending the streets an added sense of déjà vu. At an altar, tourists were posing for selfies with two giant cartoonish owl statues, the local patronus deities, although not of the Miao but the Gelao people.

Wujiang Village is a huge economic engine, with employees from the surrounding 11 villages. To compete with other "ancient towns" of Guizhou, it chose to offer a consortium of Northern Guizhou folk cultures, which means dishes from different parts of the region, and hosting intangible heritage not necessarily originating from this very settlement, but all packaged as experiences for tourists. 

The instructors and hospitality staff are then paid monthly salaries. Here, there were woven baskets, handcrafted lanterns, traditional dyes, and on-sale masks for exorcising opera common to Han, Miao, Gelao, and Buyi ethnicities, who all once had cultural footprints here. 

A white pagoda towers over Wujiang Village. (Photo/Xudong Yang)

I enjoyed the cobbled walks that led to alleys with fewer crowds. Occasionally, the stairways led me to a courtyard or gate, albeit closed and unlit. 

In more recent history, Wujiang Village was agriculture-heavy: its small population grew a mix of subsistence and cash crops, such as corn and tobacco. The younger generation left for the big cities. Its much older connection to the Tea Horse Road, a trade route in southwestern China, and its multiethnic cultural history became far less pronounced in the last century.

The new one-stop cultural destination rebrand was a tactical move in the development after 2021. Between 2016 and 2021, the village saw laggard progress in its tourism transition, so much so that it was listed as one of the "idle and inefficient tourism projects" of the province. Dingdu Corporation got involved in late 2021; the same company is behind Zhejiang Province’s Wuzhen, a curated old town now considered a successful case of industrialized tourism. 

When Wujiang Village first reopened in 2022, in only six days, 56,000 visitors surged into the resort, bringing in 5.11 million yuan in revenue. During the labor holiday this year, it refreshed its daily reception record with 35454 guests a day. 

Holidaymakers were also spending more. In the first month of its trial opening two years ago, 62 percent of total spending came from secondary consumption inside the scenic area—well above the 30 percent average at most tourist sites.

Night tickets cost 40 yuan more to cover the evening light shows. My family and I headed toward the village center, passing beer, whiskey, and hookah bars before reaching an open plaza overlooking the east bank. Below, drones were lined up while crowds browsed nearby stalls. During the holiday, organizers moved the drone and fireworks displays to the start of the show for better crowd control. With 15 minutes left before takeoff, I decided to grab a drink.

The bars buzzed with families and friends over pints of beer and juice. The menu mixed Guizhou’s famous spirits with international labels—Corona, Kronenbourg, Heineken, Jack Daniel’s, Lagavulin, Ballantine’s—the kind you’d find in Amsterdam or New York. 

Diners ordered barbecue meat and vegetables, simple but suited to local tastes. I placed my order in Chongqing dialect, familiar to the locals, though the young waitress replied in weary standard Mandarin. A citrus-flavored Kronenbourg 1664 cost 35 yuan—slightly marked up, but fair for the setting.

I heard wows and snippets of amazement in dialects from the Northeast to Cantonese. Wujiang Village ranks among Guizhou’s top tourist spots, attracted more than a million visitors in 2024, over 70 percent from outside the province. In the first half of the year, it received 4,098 foreign tourists, four times last year’s figure. Its success has inspired other ancient towns in Guizhou, such as Fenglin Buyi in Xinyi, to follow its example.

At the end of the evening, visitors released sky lanterns written with their wishes and hopes. (Photo/Xudong Yang)

The drones shifted formations in midair as larger ones rose, releasing fireworks while LED lights and fountains burst upward.  "The drones are impressive, aren't they, honey?" a man shouted to his partner in a northern dialect. 

There was so much happening at once that, like everyone else, I simply pulled out my phone to capture the scene for social media. Soon came the molten-iron and flyboard shows—fire and water, the latter clearly less traditional. Bathed in dazzling colors over the rice paddies, my thoughts drifted to the drone shows in Chongqing and other cities, and to how molten-iron casting had, in recent years, turned into a “traditional” spectacle I had never seen growing up.

My legs gave out before my attention did, so we regrouped ahead of the finale, only to be caught again in a slow-moving crowd. Thinking about the rest of the holiday and a possible trip to Guiyang, the provincial capital, and to Kaili in southeastern Guizhou, I turned to ask my cousin.

"There's another bigger ancient village in Kaili, the Thousand Household Miao Village," he offered to reach out to one of his friends who ran a travel agency there. Then, he paused and laughed: “But if you have seen one, you really have seen them all."