| The fire pit in a wood building in Ping'an Village. |
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| The youths and girls of Zhuang nationality singing in antiphonal style. | Every family of the northern part of Guangxi Zhuang Nationality Autonomous Region has built a fire pit in the middle of the room on the second floor of the ganlan wood house, while big wood building may have two or three fire pits.
The fire pit is a one-square-meter opening for fire burning on the floor with a subsided square dou (a measure for grain shaped like a cup), the timbers bearing the heavy load of fire pit are placed on the beams. The fire pit bottom is brimmed with wood sheeting and fireproof earth.
The wood house would be filled with smoke when the charcoal is burning in the fire pit. With the elapse of time, the walls and ceilings of the houses will be stuck with the soot, which would darken the interior space of the wood house. But the villagers said that the soot would serve as damp-proof and preservative agents.
In a family the fire pit is of great significance, in addition to its cooking functions, it is the public contact place for family getting-together, guest reception and leisure chat and so on. The fire in the fire pit will never extinct from time to time. The fire pit is also a holly place. The casual action of leaping over the fire pit is regarded as an irreverent behavior. The Zhuang villages in the Long Sheng County always sang in antiphonal style around the fire pits.
A pile of fire, a pot, a cup of tea and a song constitute the most popular local life of the Zhuang nationality and give the fire pit a cultural connotation. Here, architectural leisure life integrates with national atmosphere.
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