CHINA: LI MINORITY OF HAINAN

Saving China's Vanishing Li Villages

Hainan is China's Hawaii, a tropical island paradise. Since the 1980s, mass tourism has brought prosperity to islanders, and developers have carved up its fertile forests. But not everyone has benefited. In the

mountainous interior, some villages have barely joined the modern world. Their mud houses with thatched roofs are unchanged in centuries, as is their method of subsistence farming. The inhabitants are ethnic Li, a minority group on Hainan that has long rebelled against China's autocratic rule. Their elderly women still bear tattoos on their faces.

Now the Li are keen to join the booming market economy, and to move into modern government-built houses and send their children to school.

Shot on assignment for the

Wall Street Journal Asia