The spectacular Chinese province of Guizhou

Guizhou is "a byword for backwardness among the sophisticates of China's cities", says Stanley Stewart in the Sunday Times. Perhaps so, but the remote southwestern province is also a magnificent land of lush mountains and spectacularly cascading rice terraces, home to an ethnic minority, the Dong, whose culture is perhaps the most colourful in the whole of China. "Brilliant carpenters", the Dong crown their wooden villages with elaborate towers designed to house drums and gongs for warning of fire or invasion. They are famed, too, for their traditional costumes of gaudily embroidered indigo cloth, which make their little settlements prettier still.

The village of Zhaoxing in the southeast of the province is a "splendidly higgledy-piggledy place", threaded by cobbled alleys and crowned with no less than five drum towers, each with up to 15 storeys of overlapping roofs. Five "wind and rain bridges", another speciality of the Dong, cross the "jade green" Bala river as it runs through the village.

Under their soaring wooden roofs, "distinguished looking fellows" sit on long benches, "elegantly dressed in classic indigo, reading newspapers, exchanging the odd significant grunt and falling asleep". Waterwheels creak below, and on the river banks women beat lengths of indigo cloth with wooden mallets to enhance their sheen.

Climbing a track up the mountain above Zhaoxing, you pass several villages, each with its own drum tower, before reaching Tang'an, a "dizzying place" from which you can gaze over "layer upon layer of mountain ridges". Steeply terraced rice paddies plummet way below and extend as far as the eye can see to either side, glistening in the sunlight.

According to a Chinese saying, Guizhou is "a land without three hectares of flat country, three days of fine weather or three coins to rub together". But it's also a place where, "however far you travel, you will never find a view more beautiful".

Steppes Travel (01285 880 980) can tailor-make a 12-day tour from £2,285pp, incl. flights. ·