Hidden in the mountains of Southwest China's Guizhou Province, the villages of the Bouyeis, Dongs and Miaos have almost naturally closed their doors to overwhelming globalization.

As kitchens in most apartment buildings in Chinese cities are twins of their counterparts in the West, those in the wooden, stone or brick houses in the mountain villages have largely retained the looks of centuries ago.

In the latter there is a kitchen range built of hammered soil or bricks, piles of dried tree branches and leaves which are to be burnt in the chamber of the range, bunches of dried herbal leaves that are used as spices, and a giant cooking pot embedded at the top of the stove.

Above the stove on straw strings are meat loaves and sausages.

"The meat and sausages are smoked as we cook. It's our only way to preserve these foods," said Ban Yinggui, 31, a farmer at the Zhenshan Village of the Bouyeis in suburban Guiyang, capital of Guizhou.

A sausage gets fully smoked after two months above the stove and can thus be preserved for about a year at home where the temperature sometimes rockets to more than 35 C in the summer, said Ban.

To the surprise of visitors the sausages hung in kitchens in the mountain villages are not filled with meat but with blood.

When a pig is killed villagers collect the blood, mix it with water, salt and minced herbal leaves that are used with spices, and fill the mix into pig intestines.

The intestines are hung in the kitchen until they become smoked sausages. They are usually sliced and steamed on the top of rice, or fried with hot peppers. "They are extremely delicious as we mix them with steamed rice at meals," said Ban.

Ban said the villagers inherited the recipe of blood sausages from their Bouyei ancestors.

Blood sausages made of roughly the same recipe are also daily delicacies of Miaos and Dongs in the mountains of Guizhou.

About 2,000 kilometres away from the province, people in the plains of Northeast China are also known for their blood sausages.

But unlike those in the mountains, they boil the intestines as soon as filling them with blood mixture and thus the sausages are half made. They boil blood sausages with sliced meat and pickled cabbage for meals.

Source: China Daily