Surrounded by scores of villages, some lush countryside and a nuclear reactor, KAILI , 170km east from China Guiyang, is a moderately industrialized, easy-going focus for China's 7.5 million Miao , though migrations and forced resettlements since the Tang dynasty have spread their population from Sichuan right down to Hainan Island. They were formerly treated as slaves by the Han, and many Miao popular heroes were rebel leaders, such as Zhang Xiumei , who seeded almost twenty years of insurrection against the Qing in the late nineteenth century before finally being defeated outside Kaili. His suppression left Guizhou in the desperately poor state witnessed by the Red Army sixty years later, when, understandably sympathetic with the Communist cause, the Miao were rewarded for their help by being given their autonomy. The Cultural Revolution set things back, but since the late 1980s the area has received government assistance in schooling, medical services and transport, and today there's no doubt that Miao culture is flourishing.