Basha, the last gunman tribe in China

（People's Daily Online）  08:04, June 19, 2013  

In the deep mountains of southwest China's Guizhou province, lives a unique and ancient tribe of the Miao ethnic group, named "Basha."

Some 2,000 men and women of this tribe still live in wooden houses, practice centuries-old customs, and hold unique beliefs. The Basha people are the only group in China that is permitted to carry guns.

Legend has it that the ancestors of the Basha immigrated from China's heartland to this isolated mountainous area over 2,000 years ago.

As an old Chinese story goes, one spring day when all the peach flowers are blooming, a careless fisher loses his way in a river. He keeps rowing, trying to get back to the right direction, and suddenly he enters a cave.

And after he gets through, he finds something amazing. It's a place totally different from the outside world. People live and work peacefully in the ancient style. Nobody is even aware of how times have changed.

I'm not sure how many people believe such a place really exists. But a place that clearly reminds us of the old story, a place where everything magically seems to belong to the earliest dynasties in China is recorded by the camera of Wang Chao.

Edited and translated by Gao Yinan, People's Daily Online