Mengzi

Since the Peasant Night School of Fine Arts in Hsinan Commune of Mengtzu County in Yunnan Province was set up in 1972, its students have created more than two hundred works of art and held four exhibitions of traditional Chinese paintings, New-Year pictures, scissor-cuts, wood carvings and clay sculptures.

“Yunnan is a forgotten province, a piece of China mislaid by the world,” wrote the British novelist Stella Benson when she was living in Mengzi, not far from the Vietnamese border, in the 1920s.