Hani Villages in the Terrace Landscape

UNESCO includes traditional villages within the Honghe Hani terrace cultural landscape, alongside forests, water and cultivation. A village is therefore not a decorative stop between viewpoints but a living settlement within the system that gathers water above and cultivates fields below.

UNESCO’s heritage description identifies 82 villages between the mountaintop forests and the terraces. It describes traditional walls of rammed earth, adobe, or earth and stone, beneath tall hipped roofs thatched with straw. Those roofs give the houses their familiar “mushroom” outline, while the wall materials reveal a varied building tradition beneath the shared silhouette.

Homes occupy the same mountain environment shaped by water and agriculture. Looking from a roofline toward forested slopes, channels and cultivated land reveals the village’s place within the wider heritage landscape: settlement and terraces belong together.

The settlement’s position gives the roofline a larger meaning. Houses occupy a band between water-gathering woodland and cultivated slopes, so the built village sits within the productive landscape. Seen at the scale of a house, the record is about walls and thatch; at the scale of a hillside, it is about how living places, water and fields are connected.