“Decoding Dong: Documentation of Dong Minority Villages’ Drum Tower and Wooden Heritage” is a two year project from November 2023 to October 2025, which is funded by Arcadia, a UK charity to preserve endangered culture and nature, via its Endangered Wooden Architecture Programme Large Grant.

 

The Dong people are a marginalised ethnic minority group who have lived in peripheral southwestern mountains of China for around 600 years. Unusually with no written language until the 1950s, they have carried on distinctive orally-based culture. To date, the wooden architecture and lifeworld of Dong have been very little documented, though they are under increasing pressure by the natural disaster, modern infrastructure and rural tourism.

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Our project launches a first ever digital documentation of the Dong minority’s wooden architectural heritage at risk with a focus on its most important public building – the drum tower – together with its immediate historic environment, across a dozen of Dong remote villages.

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Our documentation adopts the latest 3D reality capture technologies, mapping and drawing on extensive oral histories from the memories and stories of Dong people and their world.