The Only Maritime People in China: Why the Jing Ethnic Group Is 2026's Most Unexpected Travel Discovery

Introduction

Ask most travelers to name China's minority peoples and they will reel off the Zhuang, the Miao, the Tibetan, the Uyghur, maybe the Bai of Dali. Almost nobody mentions the Jing. Yet tucked into the southwestern corner of Guangxi, on three small islands that almost touch Vietnam across the Beibu Gulf, lives the only ethnic group in China whose entire culture was built around the open sea. They are the Jing (京族), sometimes called the Gin, roughly 30,000 strong, and their story is one of the strangest and most beautiful travel discoveries China still has to offer. For five centuries the Jing have fished the shallow coastal waters of Dongxing with inventions found nowhere else on the planet: they once waded into the surf on wooden stilts to cast shrimp nets, they bait the night sea with glowing shrimp lanterns that turn the water into a floating city of light, and they play a musical instrument with a single string that somehow produces a hundred sounds. Their greatest festival, the Ha Festival, is a national intangible cultural heritage. Their food, a crossbreed of Chinese and Vietnamese cooking, is unlike anything you will eat elsewhere in the country. This guide is built as a ranking of the seven experiences that make the Jing ethnic group worth crossing half of China for, ordered by how deeply each one stays with you. If you love the kind of travel that slows you down, that lets a place teach you on its own terms rather than checking boxes, then the Jing Islands belong on your shortlist right now.

7. Stand on Wanwei Golden Beach at Sunset and Understand Why the Jing Never Left

Every story of the Jing ethnic group begins and ends with the sea, and the clearest way to feel that is on Wanwei Golden Beach (万尾金滩), a fifteen-kilometer sweep of fine golden sand on the southern edge of Wanwei Island. The beach faces Vietnam's Van Don islands directly across the gulf, and when the sun drops low the whole tidal flat turns to polished gold, which is exactly how the beach earned its name. This is not a resort beach in the Cancun sense; there are no high-rise hotels marching along the sand. It is a working shoreline where fishing boats are dragged up each evening, where families rake shellfish at low tide, and where the horizon belongs as much to the fishermen as to the tourists. The reason the Jing stayed here for five hundred years becomes obvious the moment you watch the tide go out. The shallow waters between the islands and the mainland are staggeringly rich. Tiny shrimp, crabs and fish swarm the intertidal zone, and the Jing learned to harvest them with remarkable efficiency. The beach is the centerpiece of the Jing Island Scenic Area, a 4A-rated destination, and it is genuinely free to enjoy. Walking it at sunset, past the fishing nets drying on bamboo racks and the children splashing in the shallows, you understand that the Jing are not a people who merely live near the ocean. They live from it, with it, and in a sense inside it. It is worth arriving early to watch the morning tide of small boats return, and again at dusk for the light show, because a single visit at noon tells you almost nothing about what makes this coast extraordinary.

If you are the sort of traveler who prefers places with a pulse rather than a postcard, Wanwei Golden Beach rewards a slow afternoon and a sunset in a way that fast itineraries simply cannot capture.

6. Eat Your Way Through Jing Cuisine, the Missing Link Between China and Vietnam

The Jing ethnic group sits right on the border between two culinary worlds, and their table shows it. Jing food is essentially Vietnamese technique crossed with southern Chinese ingredients, and it is one of the most underrated regional cuisines in the entire country. The signature dish is Jing fried vermicelli (京族粉丝), made from rice flour that is steamed, cooled, cut into fine strands and sun-dried, then stir-fried with scallions, shrimp or shredded crab meat. It is light, savory and impossibly fragrant, and it ranks among the best things you will eat in Guangxi. Then there is the legendary wind-blown cake, or fengchui bing (风吹饼), a paper-thin rice cracker so light that the story goes it could be carried away by a breeze. Locals roast it over a flame until it puffs and crisps, then fold it with sesame and sugar. Do not miss qu-tou dan (屈头蛋), a true daredevil dish: a duck egg incubated for about eighteen days, boiled, peeled and dressed with fresh lemon, fried shallots, ginger, mint and chili. It sounds confronting and it is, but it is also creamy, tangy and genuinely delicious once you get past the idea. The market stalls of Jiangping town, the main Jing settlement, are packed with these treats alongside rice dumplings, jian dui, sugar-water desserts and bowls of Vietnamese chicken noodle soup that taste like they were carried across the border that morning.

For the traveler, the joy of Jing food is that it is street food in the truest sense: cheap, communal and honest. You do not need a reservation or a dress code. You sit on a plastic stool, point at what looks good, and let a hundred years of border cooking do the rest. It is one of the rare cuisines where the phrase hidden gem actually applies, because almost nobody outside Guangxi has heard of it.

5. Catch the Shrimp-Lantern Sea, One of the Most Photogenic Spectacles in China

After dark, something magical happens in the waterways around the Jing Islands. Fishermen hang oil lamps beside the shrimp traps that line the shallows, and each tiny flame draws the shrimp toward the waiting net. The result, on still nights, is a stretch of water glittering with hundreds of points of light, the lamps reflected perfectly on the dark surface, the whole scene looking like a city of fire suspended over the sea. Local fishermen have been doing this for generations, and photographers have made it famous under the name of the shrimp-lamp sea (虾灯). It is easy to see why: the image is pure poetry, a constellation of warm lights floating on black water, punctuated by the silhouettes of small boats and the occasional flare of a lamp being adjusted. The best time to see it is on a clear, windless night between late spring and early autumn, ideally during the shrimp season, and the favored viewing spots are the tidal channels and ponds near the villages where the lamps are still actively used.

There is a deeper point hidden in the shrimp lanterns, and it is this: the Jing do not just fish, they stage-light their own work. The lamps were a practical invention, but the way they turn an ordinary evening of labor into something breathtaking reveals the Jing relationship with the sea, which is not merely economic but deeply emotional. Watching the shrimp-lamp sea is one of those travel moments that cannot be replicated in a photo or a video; you have to be there, standing at the water's edge, listening to the soft lapping of the tide while the little flames flicker across the dark. It is quietly, insistently unforgettable.

4. Watch the Ha Festival, the Jing's Grandest Celebration of the Sea

If you can time your visit, nothing comes close to the Ha Festival (哈节), also called the Singing Festival, the most important event in the Jing ethnic group's calendar and a national intangible cultural heritage in its own right. Held each summer in the villages of Wanwei, Wutou and Shanxin, the Ha Festival is the Jing's way of honoring the Sea God, thanking the ocean for a season of plenty and praying for a safe and bountiful year ahead. The ceremony opens at dawn on the beach, where the Jing elders walk to the water's edge in traditional dress to welcome the Sea God back to the village, escorting the deity to the Ha Pavilion, or ha ting, a beautifully carved wooden hall where the festival's rituals unfold. Over the following days the village comes alive with prayers, offerings, shared banquets, and most importantly song. Ha means song in the Jing language, and the singing is the heart of the whole affair. Girls in embroidered Jing costumes, called Ha sisters, take turns singing traditional verses, accompanied by the haunting tones of the one-string zither, while Ha brothers respond in call and response. In recent years the festival has grown into a genuinely spectacular open-air show, with a hundred musicians playing the one-string zither together on the beach, folk dances, and the famous heavenly-lantern dance performed after nightfall.

The Ha Festival is also where you see the Jing's cross-border soul most clearly. Vietnamese visitors cross the Beibu Gulf to attend, and in recent years organizers have staged China-Vietnam joint concerts of the one-string zither, turning a village festival into a living bridge between two nations. For the traveler it is a rare privilege to witness an entire community, not a staged performance for tourists but a real, centuries-old ritual of gratitude and hope, unfold in real time. The 2026 edition is scheduled to open in late July at Wanwei village, reachable by a roughly one-hour high-speed rail ride from Nanning. It is, without exaggeration, one of the most authentic cultural festivals in all of China.

3. Stand on Wooden Stilts in the Surf, the Jing's Most Famous and Strangest Fishing Trick

The image that made the Jing ethnic group famous, and the one that still appears in travel magazines decades later, is the sight of a fisherman balanced high on wooden stilts in the shallow surf, sweeping a net through the water below him. This is stilt fishing (高跷捕鱼), and it was born of pure necessity. In the old days, before the shallow coastal waters were fully exploited, the best shrimp and small fish stayed in water roughly chest-deep, far enough out that a standing fisherman could not reach them. The Jing solution was characteristically inventive: strap a pair of tall wooden stilts to your legs, wade out into the deeper water, and fish from a height that would make most people dizzy. Balancing on stilts in moving seawater, while holding a heavy net, is an extraordinary physical skill, and the older Jing fishermen who mastered it became local legends.

Today, sadly, stilt fishing has largely disappeared as a working trade, pushed out by modern nets and the pressures on inshore fisheries. The skill survives mainly as a festival performance, and only a handful of elderly practitioners still know how to do it properly, which is exactly why it matters to see it while you can. When a stilt fisherman does take to the water, at a festival or a cultural show, the crowd falls silent, because there is something almost impossible about it: a man standing impossibly tall above the waves, moving with a steadiness that seems to defy the laws of balance. It is a piece of living, endangered cultural history, and it belongs on any serious China itinerary precisely because it may not be there in another decade. See it, photograph it, and understand that you are watching the last chapter of one of the most ingenious fishing techniques ever invented.

2. Hear the One-String Zither, a Single String That Produces a Hundred Sounds

Of all the treasures of the Jing ethnic group, the one-string zither (独弦琴) is the crown jewel, and it may be the most extraordinary musical instrument in China. As the name suggests, it has exactly one string. Yet in the hands of a skilled player it produces a remarkable range of tones, enough to play folk songs, pop music and even jazz. The secret lies in the instrument's design. A flexible rod, called the rocking bar, runs beneath the string, and by gently bending it with the left hand while the right hand plucks, the player bends the pitch in ways a fixed string could never achieve. The result is a sound that is simultaneously airy, tender and oceanic, a kind of singing whisper that the Jing themselves describe as the voice of the sea. The one-string zither has accompanied the Jing for more than four hundred years, and in 2011 the art of playing it was inscribed on China's list of national intangible cultural heritage.

The best place to hear it properly is the Jing Ethnic Museum in Wanwei, where the music is often demonstrated, and above all during the Ha Festival, when a hundred players sometimes perform together on the beach, a wall of sound rolling out across the waves. In recent years younger Jing musicians have pushed the instrument in exciting new directions, using the one-string zither to play Western pop and jazz and winning a whole new audience, including curious travelers who had never heard of the instrument before. There is a lesson in the one-string zither that speaks to the kind of travel we tend to remember: the most striking things in the world are often built from the smallest materials. One string. One sea. One small people. And somehow, a hundred songs.

1. Walk the Border Culture of Dongxing and Step Between Two Countries in a Single Day

What finally makes the Jing ethnic group unforgettable is not any single attraction but the place itself. Dongxing, the border city that hosts the Jing Islands, sits at the very southwestern tip of China's coastline, and across the narrow Beilun River lies Vietnam's Mong Cai. You can stand on the China-Vietnam Friendship Bridge, plant one foot on each side of the red line, and genuinely be in two countries at the same moment. This border identity is woven into everything the Jing do. Their language, Jing, is closely related to Vietnamese and is mutually intelligible with it. Their ancestors migrated from the port of Do Son in northern Vietnam roughly five hundred years ago, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, following the fish and settling on these islands, and the kinship across the water has never faded. Dongxing's markets are full of Vietnamese goods and Vietnamese vendors, its restaurants serve Vietnamese coffee that drips slowly through metal filters, and the whole town hums with a cross-border energy you will not find anywhere else in China.

This is the deeper reason to come: the Jing are not an isolated relic but a living bridge. They are China's only maritime ethnic group, and they are also the Chinese face of a culture shared with an entire neighboring nation. To spend a day in Dongxing, hopping between the Jing Islands and the border market, eating Vietnamese spring rolls and Jing fried vermicelli, listening to the one-string zither while looking across at the lights of Mong Cai, is to experience something genuinely rare in modern travel: a place where two countries, two cuisines and two musical traditions simply coexist, without a hard line in the middle. For travelers who seek connection rather than collection, that is the whole point.

A practical closing note. Dongxing is now easy to reach, with high-speed rail from Nanning taking about an hour, and a growing number of travelers are pairing the Jing Islands with the ethnic-minority highlands further north. In Yunnan, for example, the same slow, human-paced style of travel rewards you with the Bai courtyards of Dali, the ancient towns of Lijiang and the mountain villages of the Naxi, experiences that share the Jing Islands' quiet philosophy: that the best journeys are not rushed, not checklist-driven, but designed around the people and places you meet. A thoughtfully built itinerary, one that lets a border town teach you its music and a highland village its rhythm, is exactly the kind of human-designed travel that turns a trip into a memory. Start in Guangxi on the coast, then follow the thread inland, and you will see China the way it is actually lived.