by Xinhua writers Tian Zijun and Chen Yifan
NANNING, June 22 (Xinhua) -- I boarded a double-decker ferry at Balai Dock in Ningming County, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, shortly after 10:30 a.m.
Within 15 minutes, the ferry's engines thrummed low as the bends of the Mingjiang River closed in around us. On either bank, karst peaks rose abruptly, like the pages of a half-opened book, their bases mirrored in an earthy-yellow waterway.
On deck, passengers leaned on the railings, scanning the limestone crags and tracing the ochre figures etched into the rock faces.
Half an hour upstream, the river veered and the cliff seemed to block out the sky. Stretching 172 meters wide and towering 50 meters above the waterline, the Huashan rock art forms a sprawling open-air gallery. Some 2,000 years ago, the Luoyue people -- ancestors of the Zhuang and other ethnic groups in Guangxi -- painted nearly 2,000 red figures on the cliffs, freezing their spiritual world onto the stone. Warriors, drummers, lean dog-like creatures, and rows of ritual dancers are suspended mid-ceremony, arms raised and knees bent in what locals call the "frog pose," a posture reflecting the semi-divine status of frogs among the region's ethnic groups.
Accessible only by water, we drifted closer to the wall as the captain cut the engines. The valley's silence, as heavy as the heat, was broken only by camera shutters and the gentle lapping of water against the hull.
Eric Chang, a sales manager in his mid-30s from east China's Zhejiang Province, leaned against the guardrail, captivated by a cluster of red warrior figures several meters above his line of sight. The previous summer, he had followed the usual domestic tourist routes.
"Those tours seemed too packaged," he said when I asked how he felt about a scenic area free of large tour groups and megaphone-wielding guides. "This is probably why these ancient paintings have survived so well."
Yet on this humid summer morning, barely two dozen visitors were present at the dock. Official figures put annual visits at under a million in 2025 -- a modest number compared with Detian Waterfall's 2.6 million, let alone Guilin's karst juggernaut to the north. Behind the apparent quietude, however, Huashan is undergoing a subtle yet critical transformation.
In 2016, the Zuojiang Huashan Rock Art Cultural Landscape became China's first rock art site inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. In 2024, it was awarded China's highest scenic area rating, the 5A-level status. Long before these official honors, it had earned nationwide fame. During the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, a giant digital scroll unfurled across the stadium floor, carrying the crimson Huashan silhouettes to a global audience.
After we docked, I met Xu Zhina, a specialist with the local cultural relics preservation bureau. "We still don't know exactly if they were painted for a ceremony, or a god, or a river," she said. "This was done by those whose names we do not know, using tools we cannot fully replicate, at a height that still defies easy explanation."
What the site faces now is slower and harder to legislate against. "Weathering is the bane of its daily existence," said Xu, noting that the cycle of floods and droughts is accelerating limestone dissolution.
The question of how the ancient artists worked has puzzled researchers for decades. Zhu Qiuping, the site's veteran field expert, once tried to re-create a mock-up using bamboo scaffolding rigged over the river, and found that working beyond 20 meters proved almost impossibly precarious.
How the ancient painters mixed pigments, applied them to rocks at that height, and achieved such consistency across hundreds of meters of cliff remains astonishing, according to Zhu.
Nowadays, the challenge for local authorities is a taxing balancing act: how to turn the physical manifestation of a mysterious ancient culture into an economic engine for rural revitalization without eroding the very landscape that carries it.
In the nearby riverside villages, where the economy once rested on subsistence farming, the site's rising prominence has begun to reshape daily life. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Yaoda, the only natural village that sits directly along the path to the rock art. To protect the fragile cliffs, much of Yaoda Village has long remained roadless; villagers and visitors alike travel by boat.
Villagers here make the most of what they have. Ceramic teapots inked with dancers in the iconic frog pose stand beside blocks of handcrafted brown sugar simmered over wood fires using traditional methods. Many locals have volunteered as "Huashan guardians," patrolling the site to protect the ancient relics. Among them, Lyu Xusheng, a local resident, can talk for hours about the "little red people," whose stories have long been woven into local folklore.
At the county culture center, dancers rehearse new choreography inspired by the rock art patterns, while in the workshop downstairs, children's brushes send the "little red people" leaping from painted cliffs into the open air.
Along the town's main roads, the motifs have been woven into everyday infrastructure -- streetlights, bridge railings, factory chimneys and building façades. "The figures are everywhere, at every scale, which can feel like celebration or warning, depending on your view," said Su Yangyang, a local tourism manager I met at the tourist center.
Since special protection regulations took effect in 2018, she added, quarrying, logging, and construction have been banned within the site's core protection zone. All 38 protected panels along the river have been elevated to national-level protection, Xu noted. The number of boats allowed each day is strictly capped, and any physical contact with the main rock face is forbidden.
Our return ferry departed in the late afternoon, when the light reflected off the water had turned the cliff face a darker shade of red, as if the painted figures were lit from inside the mountain. Chang stood at the stern, watching the wall recede. I asked if he would come back. He was quiet for a moment. "It doesn't shout," he said. "That's what stays with you. I think I will come back."
Ultimately, the paintings have endured thanks to a mix of chemical, geographical, and institutional factors. The hematite pigment, mixed with animal glue or possibly even blood, blended into the porous limestone over centuries in a process that has proven remarkably durable. But while the physical overhang of the cliff deflects the rains and the zone's remoteness has kept commercial crowds at bay, the future of Huashan will depend on a different kind of protection.
As the new 5A infrastructure is set to bring the world to this quiet stretch of the river, the future of the Luoyue people's frozen dance will rely less on the mysterious chemicals on the rock and more on whether those living nearby can balance the desire for economic development with the quiet preservation of the past. ■
