Yuanyang County (元阳县) is located in Honghe Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefecture in southeastern Yunnan, China along the Red River. It is well known for its picturesque rice paddy terraces. In 2013, part of the county became the Honghe Hani Rice Terraces World Heritage Site, China 's 45th World Heritage Site.
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| Yuanyang County China |
I want to tell you about a place in the world little known to the general public, but spectacular. I'm talking about Yuanyang County, which is located in the southeast of Yunnan province, in China, along the Red River. Yuanyang is 7 hours south of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan. Its terraced rice fields are spectacular.
It is a World Heritage Site in China. Yunnan has always been a remote place, a border territory with Laos, Burma, Vietnam and Tibet, where more than 25 ethnic groups and a good number of religions coexist in a territory so mountainous and so broken that the central power of Beijing has always felt very far.
The largest area of rice terraces in the world is concentrated in this Honghe River of Yuanyang, in this province of Yunnan.
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| Yuanyang County China |
In the region on the south bank of the river there is a compact community where the Hani ethnic group lives (arrived more than 1,300 years ago in the Ailao mountains of southern Yunnan).
The Yuanyang Rice Terraces are the most typical example of what looks like a work of art on earth created by the Yuanyang people, in their transformation of nature, with its more than 11,000 hectares of winding and irregular terraces, made all by hand, which today cover the slopes of the Ailao.
If you go to China, you should go to this place, possibly the most atypical and multi-ethnic province in the country, and one of the most recommendable, beyond the typical Beijing-Sanghai-Xian triangle.