Mulao People of Luocheng: History, Festivals, Food and a 4-Day Human-Designed Journey

Introduction

The Mulao people are one of China's 56 officially recognised ethnic groups, numbering 277,233 at the 2020 national census. Around nine in ten Mulao live in Guangxi. The largest single community — 95,852 people — is in Luocheng Mulao Autonomous County, the only Mulao autonomous county in the country. The Mulao speak a Kam-Sui language, the Mulao cook over sunken coal stoves, and the Mulao keep a festival calendar almost no tour operator builds around.

Ask a room of well-travelled people to name the ethnic cultures of southern China and you will hear Dai, Zhuang, Miao, Yao and Dong. The Mulao almost never come up. That is not because Mulao culture is thin. It is because the two things that make the Mulao worth crossing a province for — the Mulao Yifan Festival and the improvisational antiphonal singing Mulao call Zoupo — are the two things a fixed-departure itinerary cannot guarantee. Yifan is organised by a Mulao clan, not by a box office. It runs from before dawn to after dawn. Its date is settled by lineage elders and the lunar calendar, sometimes only weeks ahead.

That is exactly the kind of journey we build by hand at Kiki Holidays. A human-designed trip is not a prettier brochure; it is the difference between driving past a 600-year-old village and being let into a Mulao courtyard where a coal stove has not gone out in three generations. This guide to the Mulao is written for travellers who have usually already done Yunnan — the Zhuang river valleys of Wenshan, the Shui community at Gugan in Fuyuan — and want the linguistic cousins nobody told them about.

Below: who the Mulao people are, where the Mulao live, the two Mulao festivals that define the culture, seven concrete experiences, a four-day Mulao itinerary, real transport and price data, and answers to the questions travellers actually ask about visiting the Mulao.

Who Are the Mulao People?

The Mulao are a hill people of the Lingnan south, and among the least written-about of China's recognised minorities. The 2020 census put the national Mulao population at 277,233, of whom 142,063 were men. For scale: the Mulao are more than twice as numerous as their Maonan neighbours at 124,092, and a little over half the size of the Shui at 495,928, but a fraction of the Dong at 3,495,993. The Mulao are small enough that almost no English-language travel writing reaches them; the Mulao are large enough to sustain a dense, self-confident culture with its own language, its own ritual specialists, a ceramics tradition, a textile tradition and a festival cycle.

Names matter here. Mulao people call themselves Ling or Jin. The Zhuang name for the Mulao is Bu Jin. Han chronicles wrote the Mulao down as Mu Lao, using different characters at different periods. The word behind the modern name means mother in the Mulao language. The Mulao only acquired the name 仫佬族 in 1956, during the ethnic identification work of the 1950s — before that, official records sorted these communities under a shifting set of labels.

On origins, most Chinese scholarship traces Mulao ancestry to the ancient Luo Yue and Xi Ou populations of Lingnan, and through them to the Zengpiyan and Liujiang fossil humans of Guangxi. Tang dynasty records describe the court governing Mulao territory through the loose-rein system, appointing local Mulao hereditary headmen and asking little else. The Song and Yuan are when the Mulao differentiated out of the broader Lao and Ling populations into a recognisably single people. Ming and Qing settlement gave the region the social architecture it still has: the Qing divided the county into li, each li into dong of roughly a dozen households under a dong head, each dong further split into fang. The dong began as a tax unit. Because villages were largely single-surname settlements, it hardened into a lineage unit — and it is still the dong, not the village committee, that organises the Yifan Festival.

The Mulao language belongs to the Kam-Sui branch of the Tai-Kadai family, which makes Mulao a close relative of Dong, Maonan and Shui, and a more distant cousin of Zhuang, Bouyei and Dai. There is no traditional Mulao script; Chinese characters are used for writing, and most Mulao people also speak Zhuang and Southwestern Mandarin. Curiously, Mulao folk songs are usually sung in Tuguaihua, a local Chinese dialect, rather than in the Mulao language itself.

For travellers arriving from Yunnan, that linguistic map is the fastest way into the region. If you have drunk rice wine with Zhuang families in Guangnan or Wenshan, or walked the Shui villages of Gugan township in Fuyuan — Yunnan's only Shui ethnic township — the Mulao are the branch of the same language family you have not met yet. The family resemblance shows up in the sour pickling, in the indigo, in the house plan and in the antiphonal singing. It does not show up in Mulao ritual, which is distinctly and specifically Mulao.

Mulao singing is unusually specific. There are three genres: gutiao ge, narrative songs with fixed, long texts; suikou da, improvised Mulao question-and-answer songs covering anything from planting to courtship; and koufeng ge, competitive songs in which two sides trade verbal blows until one runs out of wit. The only traditional performance form is an unaccompanied two-part duet between one man and one woman. There is no Mulao solo, and there is no Mulao chorus. If you are shown a staged Mulao choir, it is a staged invention.

Mulao religious life is polytheist and animist at root, with a strong historical Taoist overlay: ancestor veneration, a birth goddess known as Huapo or Powang, a territorial god known as Shewang, and a professional class of Mulao ritual masters, the shigong, who preside over the big ceremonies. Most Mulao households keep an altar niche on the central wall of the main room. That niche, and the Mulao coal stove beside it, are the two features you will find in every old Mulao house.

Where the Mulao Live: Luocheng, the Only Mulao Autonomous County in China

If you want to meet the Mulao people, you go to one county. Luocheng Mulao Autonomous County sits in the north of Guangxi, administratively part of Hechi City, covering 2,650.99 square kilometres of karst — the landscape that has shaped Mulao farming, Mulao building and Mulao cooking for centuries. The county seat is Dongmen Town. Below that, eleven township-level divisions: the towns of Dongmen, Long'an, Huangjin, Xiaochang'an, Siba, Tianhe and Huaiqun, plus the townships of Baotan, Qiaoshan, Naweng and Jian'ai. Mulao families are concentrated in the first six.

The 2020 census recorded 272,672 permanent residents in Luocheng. Of those, 206,808 — 75.84 per cent — belonged to ethnic minorities. The Mulao numbered 95,852, or 35.15 per cent of the county. The Zhuang are slightly more numerous at 102,145, or 37.46 per cent. Both figures are worth pausing on. The Mulao population in Luocheng fell 5.17 per cent against the 2010 count, part of a broader pattern of working-age outmigration from a county where 21.33 per cent of residents are now over 60 — the highest share in Hechi. A Mulao community can look statistically stable and still be quietly hollowing out at the edges. That is part of why visitor spending that reaches village households matters more here than in destinations with a dozen revenue streams.

Within the county, the core Mulao settlements cluster in Dongmen, Siba, Huangjin, Long'an, Tianhe and Xiaochang'an. Outside Luocheng, Mulao communities are scattered through Xincheng, Liucheng, Du'an, Huanjiang and Hechi counties in Guangxi, with smaller Mulao populations over the border in southeastern Guizhou. The Mulao live intermingled with Zhuang, Han, Yao, Miao, Dong, Maonan and Shui neighbours, and Mulao families have intermarried with Zhuang and Han for centuries.

The landscape does half the cultural work in the region. This is peak-forest karst: sinkholes, cave systems, underground rivers, and a subtropical climate that grows rice, corn and sweet potato on thin soils between the limestone. The Mianhua Tiankeng resort area alone reports 71.44 per cent forest cover. Underneath it sits anthracite, the smokeless coal that made the Mulao sunken ground stove — the dilu — possible, and which the Ming writer Tian Rucheng had already noted in his sixteenth-century Yanjiao Jiwen.

Luocheng Mulao Autonomous County at a glance (2020 national census and county government data)

Fact	Figure	Source / date
Total Mulao population, China	277,233	Seventh National Population Census, 2020
Mulao population in Luocheng	95,852 (35.15% of county)	Luocheng census bulletin, 2020
Zhuang population in Luocheng	102,145 (37.46% of county)	Luocheng census bulletin, 2020
County permanent residents	272,672	Luocheng census bulletin, 2020
Ethnic minority share of county	75.84%	Luocheng census bulletin, 2020
county area	2,650.99 sq km	County government data
Township-level divisions	7 towns + 4 townships	County government data
National-level Mulao ICH items	2 (Yifan Festival, Mulao ancient songs)	National ICH list, first batch 2006
Mulao ICH items, county level and above	97	Luocheng culture bureau, 2024
Mulao ICH project leads identified	1,015 across 10 categories	Luocheng culture bureau survey

One practical note for planning a trip. Hechi contains two of China's unique single-ethnicity autonomous counties, and they are neighbours: Luocheng for the Mulao, Huanjiang for the Maonan. Huanjiang station sits on the high-speed line. Pairing the two counties gives you a genuinely rare comparison — two small Kam-Sui-speaking peoples, two very different material cultures, one road apart.

Yifan and Zoupo: The Two Festivals That Define Mulao Culture

Luocheng holds two Mulao items on China's national intangible cultural heritage list: the Yifan Festival and the Mulao ancient songs. Both are the property of a Mulao people numbering under 300,000. That ratio tells you something about the density of Mulao culture.

Yifan: the Mulao gratitude festival

Yifan — 依饭节 — is the Mulao festival. In the Mulao language it is called xile yuan, the joyful vow. You will also hear Mulao people call it doing Yifan, honouring the Yifan lord, or repaying the ancestors' vow. Yifan was inscribed on the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage in 2006. It is not primarily a Mulao harvest festival, though grain is central to it; at heart it is a collective Mulao act of thanks and a request for protection — for good weather, for full granaries, for healthy livestock, for the lineage to continue.

The timing is where most travellers come unstuck, and where a guide who can pick up the phone earns their fee. County records describe Yifan as falling around the winter solstice in chen, chou and wei years, on a rotating Mulao cycle in which a full grand observance alternates with smaller annual ones. Other accounts tie Yifan to the day of Lidong, the Start of Winter, in intercalary years, or to a three-to-five year gap after Lidong. The sources genuinely differ. What they agree on is the part that matters for planning a trip: Yifan is not an annual fixed-date event. It is held by a dong — a lineage sub-group — at that lineage's ancestral hall, funded by rotating contributions from households, and the date is set by elders. You plan around the Mulao clan, not around a calendar app. On the traditional Mulao cycle, 2027 is a wei year, which makes it worth watching; the county has separately staged its own Yifan Cultural Tourism Festival, with three editions reported as of the most recent county write-up. Confirm both before you book anything non-refundable.

The Mulao ceremony itself runs from before dawn on one day to after dawn on the next, presided over by a shigong ritual master, with the whole village participating. It unfolds in six movements: inviting the saints, presenting the offering, urging the saints to partake, singing the gods, assembling the spirit army, and sending the saints off. Within that Mulao frame come the Mulao bowl dance and the Mulao incense dance, the straw dragon that villagers weave and then walk through the settlement, and masked dancing that links the practice to the wider nuo tradition of southwest China. Guests eat yifan baxian zhou, the Eight Immortals congee of the Yifan table.

The founding Mulao legend is worth knowing before you go, because it explains the props. The Mulao version everyone in Luocheng tells is the White Horse Maiden. A divine lion was ravaging Mulao country — killing livestock, destroying crops. A girl arrived on a white horse, shot the lion dead, recovered the grain seed from its mouth and gave it back to the Mulao, shaped oxen out of taro and sweet potato so the Mulao could plough, and taught young men the martial arts they needed to finish off the beasts. After that the rains came on time. Other versions credit two jailers named Liang and Wu who freed an imprisoned ancestor, or two Song-dynasty heroes of the same names who died resisting an invasion and were enshrined by imperial decree. The Mulao have kept all of them.

Zoupo: Mulao singing as a way of meeting people

If Yifan is the solemn half of Mulao culture, Zoupo is the other half. Zoupo — 走坡, walking the slopes — happens on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, at Mid-Autumn, and again in early spring. Young men and women put on their best clothes and go to market in same-sex groups, as Mulao have done for generations. When a pair of Mulao groups finds each other agreeable, they move off to a Mulao hillside or a stretch of grass and start singing: question and answer, verse for verse, improvised. Songs are the Mulao matchmaker. If two Mulao people get along, they exchange tokens; if it goes further, a go-between is sent to the families and the marriage is negotiated in the ordinary way. Zoupo is on Guangxi's autonomous-region-level heritage list, and the day also brings Mulao pole-climbing and bird contests.

For a visitor, Zoupo is the more accessible of the two traditions precisely because it is social rather than liturgical. Public Zoupo singing now takes place at the zigzag bridge in Chenglong Lake Park in the county seat, and the repertoire you will hear is the Mulao ancient song — the county's second national-level heritage item, transmitted orally or through hand-copied songbooks, and notoriously easy to lose. You will not be expected to sing. You will be expected to stay and listen.

Beyond those two, the Mulao calendar is crowded: the Mulao She festival in the second and eighth lunar months, when Mulao pork is divided and shared; the Mulao Huapo or Powang festival on the third day of the third month, dedicated to the Mulao birth goddess; the Mulao ox god festival on the fourth day of the fourth month; Dragon Boat; Mid-Autumn. County sources describe a Mulao festival in almost every month of the year.

Seven Mulao Experiences Worth Building a Trip Around

Ranked by how much Mulao culture each one actually delivers, and how hard it is to arrange. The ordering is deliberate: the top two experiences are genuinely difficult to time, and that difficulty is the whole reason to plan a trip months ahead rather than book a hotel and hope.

1. Time your trip to a Yifan Festival in Dongmen or Siba

Nothing else on this list comes close. A Yifan observance is the single event at which Mulao religion, Mulao music, Mulao dance, Mulao kinship and Mulao food all appear at once, performed by the people it belongs to rather than for an audience. The core Yifan territory is Dongmen and Siba towns. The catch is described above: the Yifan date follows the lineage and the lunar calendar, not the tourist season. If you want this, you start the conversation with a Luocheng contact at least three months out, and you hold your travel dates loose until the elders have spoken. Reward: you will be one of a handful of outsiders at a Yifan, and probably the only one who is not a researcher.

2. Hear antiphonal Zoupo singing at Chenglong Lake Park

The accessible counterpart to Yifan. On Mid-Autumn and in spring, singers gather at the zigzag bridge in Chenglong Lake Park in the county seat and do what Zoupo has always been: trade improvised verses, unaccompanied, in two parts. It is free, it is public, and the repertoire is a national-level heritage item. Arrive early, stand at the back, and do not film a close-up of anyone's face without asking first. The park is also where you will find the Luocheng Mulao Museum directly across the road, which is the single best hour of Mulao preparation available anywhere.

3. Sit down to a sour table

Mulao cooking runs sour and hot, and Mulao food is far more specific than Guangxi food in general. The Mulao signature is the luocheng lajiao bo, a pepper pot pounded in a mortar at the table. Around it: sour soup fish, tofu rounds, Mulao pickled shallots, Mulao pickled cowpea, Mulao pickled taro stem, Mulao pickled sword beans, Mulao pickled garlic heads — households keep a row of Mulao pickling jars as a matter of course. Add Mulao white rice cake, the Mulao vegetable parcels, the Mulao jiufan spread, and Mulao yifan baxian zhou. One detail worth knowing: Mulao cooks traditionally take food off the heat at around eight-tenths done, and find fully softened food unappealing. If your greens come out with more bite than you expect, that is the cuisine, not an error.

4. Warm yourself at a Mulao dilu, the Mulao sunken coal stove

The Mulao dilu is the most Mulao object there is. A pit is dug in the floor of the main room beside the door, a stove is bricked into it, and a large water jar is set alongside; everything except the stove mouth and the jar mouth is filled back in with earth. The Mulao fire never goes out. There is always hot water, always a surface to cook on, and always a warm room. Luocheng sits on smokeless anthracite, which is why this Mulao technology works here and not elsewhere, and why Tian Rucheng was already writing about Mulao ground stoves in the sixteenth century. The best place to meet a Mulao dilu is Shiwei Old Village in Zhongshi village, Dongmen township: a settlement of more than 600 years, named by the National Ethnic Affairs Commission to the first batch of China Minority Characteristic Villages in 2014. The houses are Qing and Republican brick-and-timber, with gate towers carved with phoenix-through-peony and magpie-on-plum motifs, murals under the eaves, and a defensive stone wall over 70 metres long with gun ports and a watch position. Inside each Mulao house: the ancestor niche above, the Mulao coal stove below. Admission is free.

5. Watch the straw dragon, and try Mulao qiang zhuqiu

Mulao straw-dragon dancing — Mulao wu caolong — is on Guangxi's autonomous-region heritage list and has its own Mulao training institute in the county. The dragon is woven from rice straw and walked through the village, and the Mulao logic is agricultural: one circuit of the Mulao dragon, one year of growth. Alongside it, look for Mulao qiang zhuqiu, a traditional Mulao ball game that is also a heritage item and is now played in county school sports days. Luocheng's heritage inventory runs to 97 items at county level and above, and the county has deliberately pushed several Mulao items — the straw dragon, Mulao paper-cutting, the Mulao bamboo-clapper dance — into local schools, so you will encounter heritage being practised rather than performed.

6. Turn a Mulao coal-sand pot, and learn Mulao embroidery

The Mulao coal-sand pot — the Mulao mei sha guan — is the most distinctive craft object in the county: a grey-black Mulao cooking vessel thrown from local white clay mixed with coal gangue. Mulao pottery went into regional heritage listing in 2012, at which point potting was close to lost; electric cookers had taken the market. The county built a kiln and asked a Mulao potter from Siba named Wu Changshu, then in his late sixties and a Mulao potter since boyhood, to take it up again and take apprentices. His case for the Mulao pot is practical rather than nostalgic: it breathes, so rice cooked in it in June heat will not turn by the next morning. The Mulao embroidery tradition has had a parallel revival. Xie Xiurong of Zhongzhai hamlet in Siba was recognised as a regional-level inheritor in May 2011, having learned Mulao embroidery from her grandmother and mother from the age of thirteen; since 2019 she has run 31 embroidery training classes with 1,745 participants. A third tradition, indigo-dyed Mulao homespun cloth, is carried by the inheritor Liang Jinyan, who is redesigning the cloth into things people will actually wear. The Siba Shuangzhai Mulao training base, built in 2011 for Yifan and Mulao embroidery, is where these sit.

7. Sleep on the rim of Mulao Mianhua Tiankeng

This is the one entry on the Mulao list that is pure landscape, and it earns its place because the landscape explains Mulao culture. The Mianhua Tiankeng resort, in Shendong hamlet of Mianhua village, Siba township, is a national 4A scenic area built around a karst collapse sinkhole in the region, with the Changsheng Cave system and the village of Shendong inside the same gates. It is 15 km from the county seat, with 71.44 per cent forest cover, cliff-side hotel rooms, a cliff railway, and a theatre built into the sinkhole itself — billed as China's first tiankeng grand theatre — where Mulao performances are staged. It is the least demanding way to bring children or less mobile travellers into the region, and it has been run on a company-plus-village-collective-plus-household model that has paid dividends to seven administrative villages and roughly 7,000 Mulao people.

Two hours away in Huaiqun township there is more Mulao-country landscape if you want it: Tianmen Mountain, with its hundred-metre natural arch, and the Jianjiang scenic area, where a bamboo raft runs a green river through a karst gorge. Both cost far less than the Mulao sinkhole and see a fraction of the visitors.

A Human-Designed 4-Day Mulao Journey in Luocheng

This is the shape of the trip we would actually build. It assumes a private car and driver, which is not a luxury in the region — the sites are spread across the county, public buses run to a village timetable, and the difference between a good trip and a frustrating one is almost entirely a question of whether someone can call ahead. Four days is the honest minimum for the region; three works if you drop the Huaiqun day.

Day 1 — Arrive in the region, and learn what you are looking at

Come in on the high-speed line to Hechi West or Huanjiang, or by road from Liuzhou or Guilin. Drive to the county seat and start at Chenglong Lake Park and the Luocheng Mulao Museum directly opposite. The Mulao museum is free, open Tuesday to Sunday, 9:00–12:00 and 14:30–17:30, closed Mondays. It is laid out as Mulao scenes rather than cases — Mulao farming, Mulao craft, Mulao domestic life — and it holds a Ming dynasty bronze seal of the Hundred-Household Office of the Zhongqianhu Guard of Qingyuan Commandery, pulled out of a pond in October 1998, which is a surprisingly direct link to the Ming administration described in the county histories. Do this first; every Mulao site after it reads better. In the afternoon, go to Shiwei Old Village for the Mulao architecture and the Mulao ground stoves. Evening: a Mulao long-table banquet in the village, with the pepper pot and the sour table.

Day 2 — Siba township: Mulao sinkhole, cave and village

Siba is fifteen minutes from the county seat and holds more concentrated heritage than anywhere else in the region. Start at the Mianhua Tiankeng resort: the sinkhole, Changsheng Cave, the cliff railway, and the village of Shendong inside the same gates. Stay for a Mulao performance in the sinkhole theatre rather than treating it as a photo stop. Overnight in the cliff hotel if the group wants the spectacle, or back in the county seat if they would rather eat well.

Day 3 — Siba township: the workshops

The second Siba day is the Mulao day that needs arranging in advance and the Mulao day people remember. Mornings at the Siba Shuangzhai heritage training base: Mulao embroidery with a recognised inheritor, or the Mulao coal-sand pottery workshop, or indigo the cloth dyeing. These are working Mulao practitioners, not demonstrators on a payroll, so the schedule is theirs and the conversation is real. Afternoons, drive to Huaiqun for Tianmen Mountain or the Jianjiang river, which gives you Mulao karst without the infrastructure.

Day 4 — Mulao market, Mulao river, departure

Market mornings are the best unstaged thing in the region. Go early, eat a bowl of Luocheng filter-pressed rice noodles for breakfast — six yuan at a local shop — and buy Mulao pickles, dried rice noodles, locally made wild grape wine and Tianlongquan liquor to take home. Then the Wuyang river for a boat trip through the region, and the road out.

Extensions beyond the region

Two directions make sense. East and north, Huanjiang Maonan Autonomous County is the natural comparison to the Mulao: a second unique autonomous county, a different Kam-Sui people from the Mulao, and a station on the high-speed line. West, Guizhou's Libo county and the Xiaoqikong karst are the next valley over from the region. And for travellers whose trip began in Yunnan, the whole Mulao loop closes neatly: high-speed rail from Kunming to Nanning, then north on the Guiyang–Nanning line to Huanjiang or Hechi West, then west again. Guangxi is not a detour from a Yunnan itinerary. It is the other half of the same linguistic and cultural map, and the Mulao are the piece of it that almost nobody reaches.

When to Go to Mulao Country, How to Get There, and What It Costs

Season. Two Mulao windows. Spring, roughly March to April, brings the Mulao She festival, the third-day-of-the-third-month Mulao Huapo festival, and the spring Zoupo gatherings. Autumn — September into October — brings the Mid-Autumn Zoupo, the biggest and most public Mulao gathering of the year, and the most comfortable weather. If Yifan is the objective, you are planning for late November into the winter solstice instead, and you are planning around elders rather than the weather. Summer is green and hot and humid; low elevation means the region is not a heat refuge the way Yunnan's plateau is. Winter is mild but damp, and it is the Mulao season that makes the Mulao ground stove make sense.

Getting there. The Guiyang–Nanning high-speed railway opened in full on 31 August 2023: 482 kilometres, 350 km/h design speed, thirteen stations, and a 90 per cent bridge-and-tunnel ratio through some of the most difficult terrain on the network. It cut Nanning East to Guiyang East to a fastest time of 2 hours 53 minutes. Two of its stations serve the region: Huanjiang and Hechi West. From Hechi West it is 94 km to the Mianhua Tiankeng resort in Siba; from Huanjiang, 109 km. By road, the Guilin–Hechi expressway plus national highways G242 and G357 put Luocheng 146 km from Guilin, 105 km from Liuzhou and 350 km from Nanning. Without a car: Liuzhou station to the Luocheng bus terminal is about 1 hour 50 minutes and 30 yuan; Yizhou bus station to Luocheng is about 49 km and 2 hours at 18 yuan. Once you are in the region, hire a car and driver. The Mulao sites are dispersed and this is the single decision that determines whether a trip works.

What a trip costs. Luocheng is genuinely cheap, and the Mulao public prices below are the ones in force at the time of writing.

Indicative public prices and access in Luocheng (check before travel — prices move)

Item	Price / access	Note
Luocheng Mulao Museum	Free	Tue–Sun 09:00–12:00, 14:30–17:30; closed Mondays
Mulao Shiwei Old Village	Free	Living village; long-table banquet by arrangement
Jianjiang scenic area	Free	Bamboo raft ride paid locally
Chenglong Lake Park	Free	Public Zoupo singing on festival days
Tianmen Mountain, Huaiqun	60 yuan adult / 30 yuan concession	County-resident rates lower
Mianhua Tiankeng	From 80 yuan	4A scenic area, Siba township
Tiankeng + Changsheng Cave + cliff railway	98 yuan concession, 298 yuan family (2+1)	60 yuan student rate available
High-altitude ladder + zipline	60 yuan	Add-on at the Mulao sinkhole
Bowl of filter-pressed noodles	About 6 yuan	breakfast staple
Car and driver in the region	Quoted on request	Effectively mandatory given dispersal

Independent travellers report doing three days in Luocheng for around 800 yuan per person including budget accommodation, food and local transport. A privately arranged, human-designed Mulao version — car and driver, a guide who can interpret Mulao and who can phone the Mulao township, stays at the cliff hotel or a village guesthouse, workshop fees and the Mulao inheritors' time, most meals — sits in a different band entirely and is quoted per group according to size and season. The number that matters is not the total; it is the share that reaches a Mulao village. Mulao workshop fees paid directly to a named inheritor, meals eaten in Shiwei rather than in the resort, and nights spent in Shendong rather than the county seat are the three decisions that decide whether your money does anything in the region.

Two honest cautions about visiting the Mulao. First, the Mulao sites are not staffed for English; you need interpretation, and you need someone who can explain why you are there without turning a Mulao ritual into a show. Second, the Mulao Yifan is a religious act performed by a Mulao lineage for itself. Being invited to a Mulao Yifan is a privilege, not a purchasable product, and any operator who promises you a guaranteed Mulao Yifan date is selling you something else.

Mulao Travel FAQ

Where do the Mulao people live?

Around nine in ten Mulao live in Guangxi, and the largest community is in Luocheng Mulao Autonomous County in Hechi, northern Guangxi — 95,852 Mulao people, 35.15 per cent of the county, at the 2020 census. Luocheng is the only Mulao autonomous county in China. Within it, the core Mulao settlements are Dongmen, Siba, Huangjin, Long'an, Tianhe and Xiaochang'an. Smaller communities live in Xincheng, Liucheng, Du'an, Huanjiang and Hechi counties, and in southeastern Guizhou.

How many Mulao people are there?

277,233, according to the Seventh National Population Census of 2020. That makes the Mulao one of the smaller of China's 56 recognised ethnic groups — larger than the neighbours the Maonan at 124,092, smaller than the Mulao cousins the Shui at 495,928. In Luocheng county the Mulao population declined 5.17 per cent between 2010 and 2020, reflecting working-age Mulao outmigration.

Do the Mulao have their own language and script?

The Mulao have their own language but no traditional written script. Mulao belongs to the Kam-Sui branch of the Tai-Kadai family, which makes the Mulao language a close relative of Dong, Maonan and Shui. Chinese characters are used for writing, and most Mulao people also speak Zhuang and Southwestern Mandarin. Mulao folk songs are typically sung in Tuguaihua, a local Chinese dialect, and the only traditional performance form is an unaccompanied two-part duet between one Mulao man and one Mulao woman.

What is the Yifan Festival and when is it held?

Yifan is the most important Mulao festival and a national-level Mulao intangible cultural heritage item, inscribed in the first batch in 2006. It is a Mulao act of thanks and a request for protection, organised by a lineage sub-group called a dong at its ancestral hall and presided over by a shigong ritual master. It runs from before dawn to after dawn in six movements, and includes the bowl dance, the incense dance and the straw dragon. Sources differ on the Mulao cycle: county records place Yifan around the winter solstice in chen, chou and wei years; other accounts tie Yifan to Lidong in intercalary years or to a three-to-five year gap after Lidong. It is not an annual fixed-date public Mulao event, and Mulao dates should be confirmed locally before booking travel.

Is Luocheng worth visiting if I am not an ethnic-culture specialist?

Yes, with one caveat: the cultural sites are the reason to go, so a traveller who wants only scenery will do better at the classic Guangxi karst destinations. That said, the region has real landscape — the Mianhua karst sinkhole, the Changsheng caves, the Tianmen Mountain arch, the Jianjiang river gorge — at a fraction of the crowds and cost. Most visitors find the Mulao combination works: sinkholes in the morning, a Mulao embroidery workshop in the afternoon.

Can visitors join a Zoupo singing gathering?

You can attend Zoupo, and visitors are welcome; participating is another matter. Public Zoupo singing takes place at the zigzag bridge in Chenglong Lake Park in the county seat, particularly at Mid-Autumn and in spring. Come to listen to the singers, ask before filming faces, and do not treat Zoupo as a performance put on for you. If you are travelling with a guide who speaks the local language, they can often arrange for singers to explain what the verses are doing, which is far more interesting than joining in.

What is a Mulao dilu and why does every Mulao house have one?

A Mulao dilu is a Mulao sunken coal stove. A pit is dug in the floor of the main room beside the door, a stove is bricked into it, a large water jar is set next to it, and everything except the stove mouth and the jar mouth is filled back in with earth so the whole Mulao stove is flush with the floor. It burns continuously, which means there is always hot water, always a Mulao cooking surface, and always a warm room. It works in Luocheng specifically because the county sits on smokeless anthracite. The Ming writer Tian Rucheng described Mulao ground stoves in the sixteenth century, so the practice is at least that old. You can still see Mulao dilu in use in Shiwei Old Village.

What should I eat in the region?

Start with the pepper pot, luocheng lajiao bo, pounded at the table. Then the sour table: Mulao pickled shallots, cowpea, taro stem, sword beans and garlic heads, plus sour soup fish and tofu rounds. Then the white rice cake, the vegetable parcels, the jiufan spread, and yifan baxian zhou. For breakfast, eat filter-pressed rice noodles — the local versions include shengzha, Long'an datou and Huangjin filter noodles. Wild grape wine and Tianlongquan liquor are the things to bring home, along with dried rice noodles.

How many days should I spend in the region?

Four days is the right answer for a first Mulao visit with cultural depth: one for the Mulao museum and Shiwei, one for the Mulao sinkhole and Siba, one for the workshops, one for markets and the river. Three works if you drop the Huaiqun day. Add a day if you are pairing Luocheng with Huanjiang for the Maonan comparison. Any less than three and you will spend most of your Mulao trip in transit.

Is it respectful to visit villages and Mulao rituals?

Yes, and village communities in Luocheng have actively built the infrastructure for visitors — Shiwei was designated a China Minority Characteristic Village in 2014 and runs public Mulao festival programmes. Some practical Mulao rules: ask before photographing Mulao people, especially at a Mulao ritual; do not walk into a Mulao ancestral hall uninvited; treat the Mulao coal stove and the Mulao ancestor niche as domestic, not as exhibits; pay inheritors directly for workshop time rather than expecting a demonstration; and accept that some Mulao things — a Yifan observance above all — are not available to you on a given day, whatever you are willing to pay. If an operator guarantees Mulao access, be sceptical.

Can I combine the region with a Yunnan itinerary?

Easily. Direct high-speed services link Kunming with Nanning, and the Guiyang–Nanning line, fully open since 31 August 2023, runs north from Nanning through Huanjiang and Hechi West into Mulao country. Culturally the connection is real rather than invented: Mulao, Zhuang, Bouyei, Shui and Dai all sit in the Tai-Kadai family, so a traveller who has spent time with Zhuang communities in Wenshan or Guangnan, or with the Shui community at Gugan in Fuyuan, will find the Mulao both familiar and clearly distinct.

The Bottom Line

The reason the Mulao are absent from most itineraries is not that the Mulao are remote, or difficult, or unwelcoming. It is that the two greatest traditions are organised by lineage and the lunar calendar, and the travel industry is built on fixed dates and guaranteed departures. That mismatch is a filter. It keeps the crowds out of the region, and it keeps the casually curious out of the region. If you are willing to work the other way round — to hold a window of dates open, to let someone in the county make a phone call, to build the trip around a village rather than a hotel — you will end up in a courtyard in Siba with a Mulao potter who was asked out of retirement to keep a craft alive. There is no booking engine for that. There is only a person who knows which Mulao household to call.

Sources and dates: Seventh National Population Census (2020); Luocheng Mulao Autonomous County census bulletin and government cultural-heritage releases; China national intangible cultural heritage list (first batch, 2006) and Guangxi autonomous-region list; National Railway Group releases on the Guiyang–Nanning high-speed railway (opened in full 31 August 2023); Luocheng Culture, Broadcasting, Sports and Tourism Bureau heritage survey figures. Public Mulao prices and opening hours were checked in August 2026 and should be confirmed before travel.