Wooden engravings in Tuva Village

Hemu Village is located in the north of Burqin County, with a total area of ??more than 1,000 square kilometers and a population of 1,400 people, including 846 Tuva people, accounting for more than 74% of the total population. It has the largest and most concentrated population in Tuva , and it is also the village with the most complete preservation of national traditions. The government of Hemukanas Nationality Township is located here. It is nearly 170 kilometers from Burqin County to Hemu Village. It is the farthest among the three Tuva villages and the only one without access to buses. Along the way, you have to pass through mountains and canyons, forests and grasslands, and the vast Gobi. We took a 212 jeep from the forestry inspection station, departed at 12 noon, and arrived at 11 at night. The driver said: "The weather is good this season, so it's not bad!" Blue sky and white clouds, mountains, forests, herds in grasslands... The pieces of wood-carved houses constitute a unique landscape. In a certain sense, , it is the symbol of Tuva people.

The Hemu River is a tributary of the Burqin River, with a total length of 68 kilometers and an average width of 25 meters. The wooden-carved houses, where the Hemu Village Government is seated, are distributed on a terraced platform on the southeast bank of the Hemu River. They are 1.5 kilometers long and 1 kilometer wide. There are more than 250 houses in total. Many people's houses are fenced in front and back with wooden fences, and livestock sheds are built nearby.

The wooden-carved houses here bear the traditional characteristics of the nomadic people and appear primitive and simple. Wooden boards are nailed to the outside of the roof to form a "herringbone" awning, and single-layer logs are piled around the house. The logs are mostly thirty to forty centimeters in diameter, with mortises cut into both ends and a groove in the middle. The groove is lined with dry moss, which is stable, warm, and rainproof and windproof. The top is covered with a layer of wooden boards, and outside the wooden boards is a thermal insulation layer composed of grass and soil. The soil is about 15 cm thick. There is also a very old simple wooden house with only doors and no windows. Most of them are semi-underground, with round tops, a thick layer of soil on the outside, and an open hole for smoke exhaust in the middle. Many of the roofs were covered with thick and tall weeds. At first sight, I thought they were graveyards, but it was only when I saw the smoke that I recognized them as houses. I heard that this kind of house is a traditional house built by the Tuva people in the form of a yurt and has a history of more than 100 years.

Wang Zong’s home is in the southwest corner of the village. There are 2 buildings with 5 wooden ridges, 2 old ones in the front and 3 new ones in the back. The old house was built in 1938 and is the oldest wooden house in the village. It has been repaired twice and is no longer habitable. The new houses are large and sturdy, similar in style to the ridged houses in the mainland, except that the windows are smaller and the space is shorter, mainly to protect them from the cold. There are several brightly colored tapestries hung in key parts of the three rooms, which are said to be the most luxurious decoration among Tuvans.

The reason why Tuva people live in wooden houses is first of all related to the local resources. It is located deep in the Altai Mountains and is rich in forest resources. Altay region has 690,000 hectares of forest and a standing stock of 91.11 million cubic meters. The altitude here is 1,300 to 2,400 meters. It belongs to the Altai Mountain climate zone, with cold winters and humid summers. The average annual temperature is below minus 2 degrees. The average temperature in January is minus 12 to 16 degrees Celsius. The snow cover period lasts for more than 5 months. The thickness is generally 1 to 2 meters. The average annual precipitation is 350 to 600 ml, mostly concentrated in summer, and evaporation is very slow. Under such environmental and climatic conditions, wood-cut corrugated panels can provide both warmth and moisture-proof solutions. It is the most suitable and is called a house given by God. The cost of building a wood-carved house is relatively low. It usually only costs 10,000 to 20,000 yuan to build an ordinary wood-carved house in the local area, and only 20,000 to 30,000 yuan for more sophisticated ones. This is affordable for the Tuva people. In the past, the Tuva people were nomadic people who mainly lived in yurts. There have been constant exchanges between Tuva and Russians throughout history. In the 1930s, in order to escape the war, a large number of Tuva people fled to the former Soviet Union, and then returned one after another. ; Many Russians also lived there until the late 1950s. A Tuva man named Saidin confirmed to us that his fathers said that there were three Russian families in Hemukanas at first, and more than 100 families moved in in 1918. It was from the Russians that they learned to build wooden houses.