Vietnam's quiet terraced valley — the Thai ethnic minority villages of Thanh Hoa province, rice terraces stepped from the valley floor to the ridge crest, and none of the crowds that found Sa Pa
Pu Luong Nature Reserve (65,634 sq km, in the Thanh Hoa Province of northwestern Vietnam, 130km southwest of Hanoi and 90km north of Thanh Hoa city) occupies the watershed of the Ma River between the Pu Luong mountain range (Pu Luong means 'tallest peak' in the Thai language) and the Truong Son mountain range. The landscape is what the Sa Pa highlands looked like 20 years ago before the tourist infrastructure transformed them: stepped rice terraces (terraced wet-rice cultivation dating back 1,000+ years, maintained by the Thai and Muong ethnic minority communities in the valley) running from…
The Thanh Hoa Province's Thai and Muong ethnic minority communities have inhabited the Ma River valley and the Truong Son foothills since at least the 10th century (the Thai migration into northern Vietnam's highland valleys from southern Yunnan in China is documented in the oral histories and the 10th-12th century Vietnamese chronicles). The Thai people (the White Thai and Black Thai branches in Thanh Hoa and Son La provinces, distinguished by traditional costume colors and by which Thai dialect branch they speak — related to Thai, Lao, and the other Tai-Kadai languages of mainland Southeast…