Shuyang Festival: Farming meets festivity

On thousand-year-old terraces, a single comb invokes a bountiful harvest. The Shuyang Festival is a centuries-old tradition in Ping'an Zhuang Village of Longsheng County in Guilin, Guangxi, held annually around the Grain in Ear solar term of the traditional Chinese calendar. Villagers gather at the "Mother Seedling Field" to pay homage to the "Mother Seedling Goddess," burning incense, offering prayers, sounding horns and beating drums. They use a sacred comb to groom rice seedlings before casting them into the fields, praying for favorable weather and a plentiful harvest. Once the ritual concludes, the entire village – men, women, young and old – turns to the terraced fields, where traditional farming practices such as paired plowing, seedling combing, and transplanting unfold across the layered Longji Terraces. Water ripples beneath the plows as green seedlings sink into the soil. This is the "Hometown of Terraced Fields," with over 2,300 years of farming history, telling its most authentic story of the Zhuang ethnic group's deep bond with the land and their hopes for a rich harvest.