Zhuang

The Zhuang are China's largest officially recognized ethnic minority, a Tai-Kadai-speaking people native to Guangxi in southern China, where most now live within the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region established in 1958, with related populations extending into northern Vietnam. Traditionally wet-rice agriculturalists, the Zhuang historically worshipped a pantheon centered on ancestor veneration and nature spirits, later blending with Daoist and Buddhist practice, and the Huashan rock art site in Guangxi, attributed to Zhuang ancestors, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016. A standardized Zhuang script based on the Latin alphabet was introduced in the 1950s to supplement centuries of earlier logographic Sawndip writing derived from Chinese characters.