Over 60 "mushroom cottages" with thatched roofs and brick walls are surrounded by cascading rice terraces in Yuanyang County of Honghe Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefecture, southwest China's Yunnan Province. Regarded by experts as the best-preserved cluster of ethnic Hani architecture, the small village is named Azheke, meaning "a place where bamboo forests flourish" in the Hani language. The terraced fields in Yuanyang, as part of the Honghe Hani Rice Terraces, were listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2013.
Although living around a UNESCO site, villagers had little income in the past and most young people chose to work in cities. The old houses were crumbling, posing a threat to the Hani traditions and culture. In January 2018, a team led by Bao Jigang, a professor with Sun Yat-sen University in the southern province of Guangdong, came to investigate the traditional housing at the invitation of Yuanyang.
The team proposed an "Azheke Plan" that motivated villagers to protect their traditional houses and culture via a dividend system, which is to transform the entire village into a tourism project by founding a tourism company. According to the plan, the villagers hold a 70 percent stake and the government holds the remaining 30 percent to cover development costs. Cafes, homestays and restaurants opened.
Visitors from all over the world come to the village to experience the original Hani culture and to taste the fish and red rice harvested from the terraced fields. Since th.