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Xingyi has been called Xingyi since 1797. Before that it was Nanlong. The name changed because of a rebellion, and the rebellion was by the ancestors of the people who still farm the valley you came to photograph.
The Qing set up a prefecture here in 1727 and called it Nanlong (南笼). That date is not incidental. It sits in the middle of the great administrative violence of the early eighteenth century known as gaitu guiliu (改土归流) — the replacement of hereditary local chieftains with centrally appointed officials. What had been governed through indigenous rulers was being converted into ordinary imperial territory, county by county.
The people this happened to, in this corner of Guizhou, were then called Zhongjia (仔家). They are the ancestors of the people classified since the 1950s as Bouyei (布依族) — the group named in the full title of the prefecture you are standing in: the Qianxinan Bouyei and Miao Autonomous Prefecture.
What turned administrative change into rebellion was land, and the process was almost bureaucratic. Han settlers arriving in the wake of the new administration bought Zhongjia land — and then rented it back to the families who had farmed it. Over a generation this converted landholders into tenants on ground their own ancestors had cleared.
This is the account given by the historian Jodi Weinstein, whose book on exactly this region is described in our sources page. Her study is open access — you can read the relevant chapters yourself without paying anything, and we would rather you did that than take our word for it.
In the first month of the second year of the Jiaqing reign, the Zhongjia rose. The rising is known as the Nanlong Uprising, and it began at Puping, near Nanlong — the town that is today Anlong County, about seventy kilometres from where you are likely reading this.
Two names survive as its leaders. Wei Chaoyuan (韦朝元), and Wang Nangxian (王囊仙) — a woman, and the figure around whom most of the later memory of the revolt gathered. Insurgents besieged towns across central and southwestern Guizhou. The Qing sent an army under Le Bao. By the eleventh month of the same year it was over. Wang Nangxian was executed by lingchi, the slow slicing reserved for the gravest offences against the state.
Then came the part that is still on every road sign. The Draft History of the Qing records the sequence with imperial brevity:
In the twenty-fifth year of Kangxi, Nanlong sub-prefecture was established… In the fifth year of Yongzheng it was raised to a prefecture. In the second year of Jiaqing, it was changed to Xingyi.
《清史稿》 juan 75, Geography 22, Guizhou. Free full text on Chinese Wikisource; linked from our sources page.
Chinese scholarship on the naming gives the reasoning: the emperor was gratified that the gentry and townspeople had held the endangered city and deeply understood righteousness — and the two characters he awarded, 兴义, mean the raising up or promotion of that righteousness.
The name did not begin where it now sits. The prefecture renamed in 1797 had its seat at Anlong, not at the modern city of Xingyi; the great local gazetteer compiled in the 1850s, the Xingyi Prefecture Gazetteer, was a product of that Anlong-centred prefecture. The name later settled onto this city, which had been a subordinate county.
We flag this because tourist copy tends to collapse the two, and because it changes what the name means: it travelled. If you want the ground where the events happened, it is Anlong, and Anlong is an easy day from here.
Visitors often ask where the Bouyei villages are, expecting dress and festival. The honest answer is that in and around Xingyi you will mostly not be able to tell who is Bouyei by looking, and we have said so elsewhere on this site.
The material we have found suggests one part of why. The districts where distinctive Bouyei dress persisted longest — Zhenning, Guanling, Puding, Shuicheng — are not in this prefecture. Here, women exchanged skirts for trousers, keeping the old dress for ceremony and burial, and men adopted Han-style jackets earlier still. Language has gone the same way: of the roughly 2.87 million people classified as Bouyei nationwide, a national survey put the proportion still speaking the language at around 45%.
We mark this section as weaker than the rest. The dress material comes from a national intangible-heritage listing rather than a peer-reviewed study, and we could not find a single scholarly work in English or Chinese specifically on Bouyei assimilation — the closest is Weinstein's book, which addresses the eighteenth century rather than the twentieth. When we find better sources we will say so here.
Nothing here argues that you should feel bad walking through Wanfenglin. The valley is beautiful, the people farming it are getting on with their lives, and the history is two hundred years old.
But there is a version of this place sold to visitors in which nothing has ever happened — peaks, paddies, ethnic colour, no events. That version is not more pleasant, it is just emptier. The fields you photograph were fought over. The name on your train ticket records who won.
On the sourcing of this page. The administrative dates come from the Draft History of the Qing. The account of land tenure and the character of the revolt follows Weinstein's book, which is open access. The uprising also has its own modest Chinese scholarly literature — at least six journal articles between 1979 and 1998, and a 2023 master's thesis — which we have listed. What we could not find, in either language, is a full modern monograph devoted to this prefecture. For a place whose name commemorates a rebellion, that is a striking gap.