The origin of the Dong drum tower is directly related to the Dong "Tangka" and "Tangwa", that is, the Dong "Kafang". In the Dong language, "Tang" means everyone, and "Wa" means to speak. "Tangwa" literally means "a place where everyone speaks". In the Dong village, all major matters related to the interests of the whole village must be decided after the joint discussion of all the people in the village. Therefore, there needs to be a place in the village to accommodate everyone's discussions, and the "Tangka" (Kafang) was created. The earliest Kafang was a square single-story wooden house, supported by four wooden pillars at the four corners, surrounded by wall panels, with four benches in the room and a fire pit in the middle. The bottom floor of the drum tower that people see today actually still maintains the original form of the "Tangka". The Fengyu Bridge is also called the Flower Bridge. Because you can avoid wind and rain on the bridge, it is called the Fengyu Bridge. The bridge is beautiful and has colorful paintings, so it is called the Flower Bridge. In the Ming Dynasty "Chi Ya", the drum tower was called the "Arhat Tower". The so-called "Luohan Tower" means that the drum tower at that time served as a place for young men and women to socialize. "Luohan" means a young man in the Dong language. It was called "Jutang" in the "Qianji" of the Qing Dynasty. There are 328 drum towers in Liping County, and the concentrated area is Zhaoxing. The Dong villages distributed in the adjacent areas of Hunan, Guizhou, Guangxi and the southwestern Hubei have the skills of building drum towers. The most concentrated craftsmen are in Zhaoxing, Maogong, Shuikou, Yandong, Hongzhou and other towns in Liping County. The earliest record of drum towers in history books is "Chiya" by Kuang Lu in the Ming Dynasty. It talks about the Dong village: "A big tree is buried in the ground to build a one-legged tower, a hundred feet high, and covered with colorful tiles. It looks like brocade scales. The men sing and drink, and sleep on the tower when they return home at night, and they are proud of this." The ancient Ming Wanli version of "Changmin Ceshi" records: The Dong people "may have more than a hundred families, or seventy or eighty families, or thirty or fifty families. They erect a tall tower with a drum on it. When something happens, they beat the drum as a signal, and the crowd jumps up to signal the event." Ming Li Zongfang's "Guizhou Records" says: "All the villages built a tower on a high and flat place, which was several stories high and was called Jutang. A wooden pole several feet long was used, with a hollow inside, and hung on the top, which was called Changgu. Whenever there was something unfair, they would climb up the tower to fight it. When each village heard about it, they all brought long darts and sharp blades and went downstairs to ask the village chief to deal with it." In fact, whether it is the drum tower recorded in historical documents or the drum tower that has been preserved, they may not be the oldest and most primitive drum tower, but rather a fairly mature drum tower. The oldest existing drum tower that can be seen in the Dong Village today is probably the one-column drum tower in Shudongxia Village, Liping County. The drum tower was built in the ninth year of Chongzhen in the Ming Dynasty (1636) and has experienced more than 330 years of ups and downs. In addition, there is a drum tower built in the eleventh year of Kangxi in the Qing Dynasty (1672) in Zengchong Dong Village in Congjiang County, which has clear inscriptions. From the perspective of architectural technology, the construction technology of the drum tower flower bridge is very complicated. Basically, the large structure is enclosed in a small structure, and the small structure is enclosed in an even smaller structure, and all of this is seamless. The supporting columns of the Dong drum tower are mostly eight-column, six-column, and four-column. The so-called four-column drum tower is mainly supported by four large pillars, and the upper and middle parts of the four large pillars are connected to the upper and middle four large beams with tenons. The lower part of the four pillars is connected to the base of the four large pillars with four "footings". There are four large beams in the upper part, four large beams in the middle part, and four "foots" in the lower part, which are in the form of three squares. The square at the base is the largest, followed by the middle part, and the smallest at the top. This form is obtained because the four columns are not connected vertically to the beams, but are tilted to the center. The main support frame formed in this way looks like a conical rectangular parallelepiped skeleton. The length of these four large columns determines the height of the drum tower. The higher the drum tower is, the more floors it has, and the more wooden beams need to be connected. Four more than ten feet high columns are erected outside the four large columns, which are connected with the tenons of the four beams to form four outer columns surrounding the four large columns. After adding purlins and rafters and covering tiles, the lower four eaves are formed. Then, on the beams connected to the inner large columns on each outer column, the second layer of outer columns is erected, and the outer columns are also connected with eaves beams, and purlins and rafters are added to cover tiles to form the second layer of four eaves. If the columns are added layer by layer, the height of each layer of outer columns will be significantly shortened from the second layer onwards, and the wooden beams must be shortened by a certain size for each layer. After the outer columns are added layer by layer until they are parallel to the top of the inner large columns, four columns about 3 meters high are erected on the top to serve as the drum frame, and the upper part is connected with four cross beams. The base hole of the drum frame is firmly embedded in the cross beam that penetrates the upper end of the four inner columns. There is a central column in the middle of the drum frame, and the column foot is embedded in the cross beam of the middle tenon cross beam of the four inner columns. The central column is parallel to the upper end of the frame and connected with four (or eight) cross beams, forming a radial tenon structure. The lower layer of the drum frame is at an angle of about 130 degrees to the upper radial beam. The four sides (or six sides, or eight sides) of the angle are all complex cross-type bracket structures, or herringbone bracket structures. The upper part of the roof and the upper part of the central column are then obliquely supported by four (or six, eight, etc.) top beams to form an umbrella shape. So far, a complete drum tower frame (from bottom to top) has been fully presented. Add purlins and rafters, cover with green tiles and lime mortar, carve various birds and animals on the eaves for decoration, and apply various colored paintings on the eaves and beams of the eaves, and a beautiful, ethnic-style Dong drum tower is built. The process of the four-column drum tower is roughly the same. The same is true for the six-column and eight-column ones. Of course, the more column heads, the higher the building, the more floors, the more overlapping the roof of the pavilion, the more complex its internal structure, and the greater the difficulty of the process. What is amazing is that such a difficult building is completely made by the craftsmen of the Dong folk, which makes people admire them. Dong people like to rest and sit in the corridor of the wind and rain bridge after work and travel. It has become a small public place. People chat about family matters, crops, the world, and sing songs. People even set up shrines on the attic of the bridge. In this way, the wind and rain bridge is not only a place for people's daily life, but also a space for people's spiritual life. The construction of the Drum Tower Flower Bridge was carried out under the leadership of the village elders, with the whole village raising funds and donating materials. The selection of materials was very sophisticated, and all high-quality fir wood that is resistant to moisture and pressure was used as the main frame. The diameter of the main column and the eaves column is about 3050 cm, and the height is more than 1820 meters. In particular, the four large columns in the middle (also called golden columns) must be made of old fir trees that are more than 100 years old. This kind of fir tree has excellent texture and is not easy to rot. A large fir tree that can be used as the center column of the drum tower has a diameter of about 50 cm and its growth period is at least about 200 years. The tree selected as the material for the drum tower must not only be large, but also require its growth and development to be normal. Trees with broken tips due to wind and rain cannot be used, as they are considered imperfect and will bring bad luck to the villagers when used as drum towers. Trees with branches cannot be used, as they are considered incomplete and will break off halfway, distracting the villagers. Only those tall, straight, and beautiful fir trees are qualified to be selected as drum towers. There is a sacred ceremony when felling the pillars of the drum tower and flower bridge. On the day of felling trees, all the men in the village bring axes and, under the leadership of the village elders and the witch, go to the selected trees. The witch recites words and performs rituals to ask the mountain gods and ancestors for blessings before the felling can be done. The Dong people have a reverent heart for trees and believe that trees have souls, especially trees that are over a hundred years old, which have become a climate and cannot be easily violated. Therefore, the witch must invite the tree before felling it, and only after obtaining its consent can it be invited to be used as the pillars of the drum tower and flower bridge. When felling trees with axes, it is taboo to fell downwards, and only upwards can be felled. It is considered unlucky to fall downwards. Because each drum tower is a big fir tree, and the big fir tree can only look up at the blue sky and take root in the earth, but not upside down. There are also regulations on the use of peeled bark. It is not allowed to be used to build cattle and sheep pens, and it cannot be trampled on at will. It can only be used to build houses or barns. Before building a drum tower flower bridge, you must first ask a magician to look at the terrain and find a good cave. There is a saying among the people that "one dragon, two caves, and three feng shui", which shows that feng shui is also very important in the construction of drum tower flower bridges. After the cave is selected, go up the mountain to look at the wood, prepare two fat pigs, hundreds of kilograms of rice and wine, and then set up the construction. Building a drum tower flower bridge requires a series of procedures such as cutting trees, ink, hammering, erecting pillars, cutting precious beams, and putting up beams. Each procedure is a small ceremony. Among them, sacrifices and taboos are indispensable. The shapes and heights of the drum tower vary, but there is a general characteristic, that is, the corners must be an even number, such as four eaves and four corners, six eaves and six corners, eight eaves and eight corners, etc., and the even number represents prosperity; the number of floors must be an odd number, from the 1st floor to the 29th floor, all are odd numbers. Odd numbers represent "yang", which is a symbol of auspiciousness and prosperity. The Dong drum tower is a building with extremely rich visual effects. As a highly formalized cultural image, it must have an image source that constitutes this picture effect. The Dong drum tower is a comprehensive building that integrates multiple architectural forms and multiple metaphorical forms. From the image of the building itself, the image source of the Dong drum tower is very clear and very intuitive. Looking from the bottom up, the drum tower is basically built by integrating the image elements of buildings such as halls, buildings, houses, towers, pavilions, pavilions, and palaces. The bottom floor of the drum tower, which is the real practical part of the drum tower, is in the form of a lobby. Tracing back to the prototype, it should be the "Tangka" (i.e., Kawu) in the early Dong village, or the "gong" in the earlier village. Until today, it still retains the function of "Zhangbu" in the traditional Dong village to gather people for discussion. It can be said that the "Tangka" is the form of the original drum tower. This is the most basic part of the drum tower, and the mature drum tower still maintains this architectural form. The architectural skills of the Drum Tower Flower Bridge are a wonder in human architectural art. It is recognized by the architectural community and the cultural relics and ancient architectural community as a variety of Chinese architecture. Its inheritance method is unique, with its incomparable "craftsman's pole" and "bamboo ruler", which can serve as the "design drawings" of any tall and magnificent building; there is a complete set of self-contained "text symbols" that are passed down from generation to generation. It has high scientific research value in mechanics, aesthetics, humanities, etc. The representative inheritance lineage of the Drum Tower Flower Bridge includes Yang Tongchen, Yang Guangbing, Yang Changhuai, Yang Shenghui, Yang Xiuguang, and Yang Zaiwen. With the development of the times, new building materials and new shapes are increasingly used in urban and rural buildings, and wooden structures are becoming less and less common. Many old wood craftsmen are too old to work on wooden buildings. As a result, fewer and fewer Drum Tower Wind and Rain Bridge projects are being built, and the craftsmen have nothing to do. In addition, the Dong people did not have written language in the past, and their skills were all passed down orally. There were no written materials or professional schools to train new craftsmen, so the Drum Tower Wind and Rain Bridge construction skills tended to be gradually lost. Information source: Provincial Intangible Cultural Heritage Center Information source: Provincial Intangible Cultural Heritage Center