'Dancing painting' of Huashan rock art tells ancient Chinese stories

On the steep cliffs of the border regions of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in south China, brownish red paintings created over 2,000 years ago vividly convey the vigorous spiritual and social life of the Luoyue people, ancestors of today's Zhuang ethnic group. 

Zuojiang Huashan rock art is one of the world's largest rock painting groups to have ever been discovered. 

The imprints of the Zuojiang Huashan rock paintings can be found by revisiting one of the most memorable moments of the Beijing 2008 Olympics Games. Due to its outstanding universal value, the group of rock paintings was included into the UNESCO's World Heritage list in 2016.

It remains a mystery how the ancient Luoyue people managed to paint on the huge rocks. 

The composition usually consists of a main character in a frog-like pose, surrounded by a group of people. This appears to corroborate the belief that the paintings describe scenes of sacrifice with the frog serving as a totem of the ancient Luoyue people, the ancestor of the modern day ethnic Zhuang people. 

In some of the paintings, people, sometimes accompanied by dogs, carry knives or swords and sometimes drums, and their heads are accessorized with ornaments, further suggesting of sacrificial practices.

Squatting human figures are common in prehistoric rock art all over the world. However, nowhere else has so many repeated squatting human figures as the Zuojiang area.

A total of 4,500 images were created on the cliff by the Mingjiang River, by ancestors of the Zhuang ethnic group, between 2,500 years and 1,800 years ago. The colossal rock paintings span over 105 kilometers, with a high concentration in areas where the terrain is the most jagged. 

The paintings are usually drawn at a height of 15 to 100 meters on the cliffs and as much as 130 meters above water, a daunting task at the time. The images feature mostly people who measure between 20 and 358 centimeters in height. The median measures between 70 and 150 centimeters.