Yang Gancai and his wife, Wang Yi, spent seven years chronicling the "disappearing world" of a remote village, and it appears to have paid off.

The couple is known for last year's Transformation, a 140-minute documentary shot over five years. It depicted the slash-and-burn agricultural methods of the Akha people, who live an isolated existence in Manbang village, Yunnan Province.

They stopped these agricultural practices when a patrol road was built in 2001, along the border with Myanmar. The documentary recorded the radical changes that followed as traditional houses were demolished and electricity was installed.

A bronze sculpture unearthed in Sanxingdui. (photo: Xinhua)

Transformation has won several awards at international documentary film festivals in Europe and was among China's top 10 documentaries last year.

More recently, however, Yang and his wife made another interesting, if not astounding, discovery about the Akha people.

Yang, 51, and Wang, 43, claim that they have found in the Akha people a live version of the pre-historical Sanxingdui civilization that has puzzled historians since its discovery in 1986.

Sanxingdui is about 40 km from Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan Province. Historians have found the Sanxingdui culture, which blossomed from 5,000 BC to 3,000 BC, to be enigmatic and resembles no other pre-historic cultures found so far.

One explanation even points to outer space for the source of the strange figures produced at Sanxingdui. About 20 years ago, rumors were spread that locals had actually spotted UFOs.

But when Yang and his wife visited the Sanxingdui Museum earlier this year, they found evidence of what a shaman had told them back in the Akha village of Yunnan.

"The shaman told us that people would worship the sacred tree every spring and autumn, and the number of its fallen leaves would represent the number of babies to be born that year."

Among the sacrificial items unearthed from Sanxingdui's pits were several bronze sacred trees.

The Akha people are one of the branches of Hani ethnic minority living in Yunnan Province.

According to Yang, Akha legends could well explain the cultural meanings behind the strange-looking bronze images of humans and birds, and the part-human, part-animal masks with oversized eyes and eyebrows unearthed from the ruins of Sanxingdui.

"The Akha villagers believe a deity in ancient times gave his eyeballs to a huge blind bird that had the power of annihilating every evil it saw," Yang says. "The villagers therefore worship the bird, or rather its eyes, as their ancestor."

Every Akha family has at least one wooden bird nailed to the roof. "Some families have as many as nine," Yang says.

Yang and his wife say that cultural relics from the two sacrificial pits at Sanxingdui seem to have the same cultural connotations.

"For example, not a single human image has eyeballs. Only the birds do," Yang says.

At Sanxingdui, some jadeware pieces were inscribed with a boat between two mountains, which researchers say was a symbol of the soul being returned to its ancestral home.

Until today, Akha coffins are in the shape of a boat, even though their village is landlocked in the mountains.

"I doubt that any Akha person has ever seen a real boat," Yang says.

Yang and his wife now work as freelance journalists, after selling their advertisement company in Kunming. They were deeply attracted to the Akha people and tried to settle down in the Akha village of Xishuangbanna in 2001. However, the 316 villagers considered them "aliens" and wouldn't accept them into their community.

The couple spent the first nine months in a cabin several kilometers away from the village, and followed the villagers whenever they worked in the fields, weaved cloth or performed rituals. In 2001, the couple tried but found it impossible to take out their camera in public.

"When we did, everyone was in panic: The men would threaten to fight us, the women would scream and the children would cry."

An incident in the 10th month of their stay broke the ice. The couple detected signs of a fire, cried out for help and saved the village. They have since won the villagers' trust, been allowed to attend some rituals, and have learned their dialect.

With the medicine they brought and their limited knowledge of infectious diseases, they saved at least seven villagers who had been declared hopeless cases by the village shaman.

At the end of the fourth year, the couple had shot more than 200 hours of video and 20,000 photos. They witnessed the villagers' first ever use of a light bulb and took note of nearly all the epic stories told by villagers.

These epics, handed down orally from generation to generation, are a vivid record of the group's migration, Yang says.

A bronze bird found in the Sanxingdui ruins.

The Akha, whose population is around 500,000 in China and Myanmar, is one of more than 20 branches of the Hani ethnic minority.

"Their ancestors used to live as nomadic tribes in today's Qinghai and Gansu provinces and Tibet Autonomous Region," Yang says.

A noted scholar on Sanxingdui studies has found Yang's interpretation of the Sanxingdui "exciting".

"The seashells unearthed from the site are found only in the deep water of the Indian Ocean, but were later found at several other heritage sites in Yunnan and Sichuan," says Professor Duan Yu with Sichuan Normal University.

All these sites are along an ancient trade route to Myanmar and Southeast Asia, with Sanxingdui at the starting point.

"If Yang's hypothesis proves true, we can probably assume the Sanxingdui civilization used to dominate southwestern China and even South and Southeast Asia," Duan says.

It would mean the forefathers of today's Akha people trekked a long way to spread their civilization to where it is today, says Professor Yang Hui, an anthropologist with Yunnan University.

Yang has brought a full set of miniatures of the Sanxingdui ruins, which he plans to show the Akha villagers soon.

"Hopefully we'll find out more mysteries about the Sanxingdui culture."

(China Daily December 19, 2007)