A house with a field behind it
Behind the visitor path at one of the three villages, a house faces a small field. A low wall separates the field from the lane, and a gate opens onto both. The visitor route is fixed; the household's route is not. The arrangement is domestic rather than monumental: house, yard, field, path, in that order. Visitors pass on the fixed route close by, and the household keeps working. The scene is ordinary, and that is what makes it worth describing. The village is not an exhibit arranged for the park. It is a place where the day still begins with chores, and the tourist route is only the most recent path through it.
Nine names, three villages
The name Jiuzhaigou means nine villages. The park repeats the count, and the count is now larger than the place: only three villages remain inside the scenic area. The name keeps a number that the present map does not. This is not a small detail. A name built from a count turns a landscape into a record of settlement, and the record is incomplete. The park uses the count as a name, not as an inventory. The three that remain are the households inside the boundary, and their fields and roofs are part of the valley the park protects, not an accessory to the lakes. The name and the map disagree, and the valley lives with both.
The limits
Life inside a national park is bounded. Building is restricted, farming is restricted, and the visitor route is fixed. The households that remain have accepted a set of rules that would be unfamiliar in an ordinary village: where a wall may be raised, where a field may be extended, which path a guest may take. The park says tourism is now the valley's main economy, and the rules are part of that arrangement. The trade is not only money. It is also the daily negotiation between a private yard and a public route, between a field that needs work and a bus that needs a schedule. The village survives inside that negotiation, not outside it.
A village, not a diorama
The difference between a village and a diorama is not the buildings. It is whether the work is real. A diorama has no mud on the path, no tools left out, no one who has to finish before dark. In the villages the work is real, but it is also on show, and the two conditions interfere. A household may repair a roof because it leaks and because the roof is seen. The park's six wonders include Tibetan culture, a phrase that turns a way of life into a feature of the landscape. The phrase is not false. It is simply too smooth. The better question is whether the fields are still planted and the houses still repaired for use.
