Cobbled onto the side of a hill in the arid Taihang mountain range of landlocked Shanxi province, Dapin is one among tens of thousands of villages that are disappearing amid China’s rise as a global economic powerhouse. “China has a 5,000-year farming history,” says photojournalist Wang Xiaoyan. “The village is the most basic unit of a Chinese society. Most of us have rural village roots.” Wang has visited more than 100 traditional – or “ ziran ”, “natural” – villages across 10 provinces to photograph a rural population that has seen 300 million people abandon agrarian life for work in the cities. “The exodus began in the 1990s,” he says. By then, “the average monthly salary in a city was what a farmer might earn in a year”. By 2012, the government had earmarked 20 billion yuan (HK$22 billion) to create a list of traditional villages. Any village that could show it possessed the requisite intangible cultural heritage of social or economic valueand that more than 60 per cent of its structures were built before 1949would be issued a one-off lump sum of three million yuan for conservation efforts. But much has already been lost. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of eligible ziran fell from 3.6 million to 2.7 million, which translates as 245 such villages disappearing every day. Dapin joined the list in 2013, along with more than 6,000 other registered, beneficiary villages. Seventy kilometres from the nearest town and dating back to the Ming dynasty, Dapin was home to roughly 300 Han farmers until the 1960s. Its last secondary school closed in 1975, and with the great exodus of the 90s, the last primary school shut it doors in 2000. Today, farmlands on terraced hills bristle with weeds as tall as people, a brook meanders through the village, curving near a 1,000-year-old pagoda tree that stands guard over the remaining 13 residents, three dogs, six cats and 68 chickens. “Dapin has its own drama-and-music troupe that dates back to the Qing dynasty,” says Wang. “Their costumes were beautifully made, their fireworks used during Lunar New Year were home-made – there’s a guy who grinds human skulls into powder to make fireworks that release blue flames.” For the past 800 years, the inhabitants of Dapin have worshipped the Stone Dragon Royal Lord, patron saint of the village who has blessed the area with rain. Soon after the founding of the Chinese Republic, in 1949, the Communist government forbade deity worship as part of its crackdown on superstition and, more widely, religion. In 1954, villagers secretly praying to their patron saint for rain were discovered by officials who sent in soldiers to decapitate the saint’s effigy. The severed head was stored in the local government office until villagers stole it back and reunited it with its body. “On August 15 every year,” smiles Wang, “all 300 villagers come back from afar to worship him, whether they are in Xinjiang or Guangdong.” Dapin Village – The Last 13 People , by Wang Xiaoyan, has just been released by Culture and Art Publishing House.