Context/

Taoping is a small but culturally and historically significant village of the ethnic Qiang minority in Sichuan Province, China. It is one of a series of Qiang and ethnic Tibetan settlements on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List.

Located just 17km from the faults that shook in the May 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, the historic settlement of Taoping nevertheless sustained remarkably little building damage, and no loss of life, even as the earthquake destroyed a new "tourist village" that was under construction in the neighboring floodplain. A Chinese Central Television documentary (in English), Taoping Ancient Qiang Village: The Secret of Surviving the Wenchuan Earthquake, Part 1 and Part 2, describes some of the properties of the historic village's siting and building construction that may have contributed to its resilience. Another CCTV documentary (in Chinese) compares Taoping to some of the other Qiang settlements that did not fare so well in the earthquake. The historic settlement's physical resilience enhances its built heritage value, and may offer important lessons for sustainable building and siting practices. At the same time, there is great need to reconsider development models throughout the Min River watershed, where the majority of Qiang people live and suffered in the earthquake.

Taoping village and county authorities have invited the University of Washington, Sichuan University, and the design firm Werkhart International, to propose a new plan for tourist-oriented development. The BE Lab is an opportunity to extend the principles of the original village's resilient features into an extended landscape of sustainable development, and propose a new model for the larger region.

Taoping is visible on Google Earth at low resolution, and on maps.google.com, where its topography is shown in terrain view.

Further basic geographic information about Taoping and its surrounding Li County is available in Chinese.

Methods/

Faculty of the 2009 BE Lab in Sichuan have extensive experience teaching field studios in community-based design and planning in China, Taiwan, and elsewhere in Asia. Examples of previous studios that employ some of the methods that are likely to be useful in Sichuan include Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China, Meinung, Taiwan, and Post-Tsunami Aceh, Indonesia.