The village of Baoshan in northwestern Yunnan Province had the cleanest outhouse I’d seen in all of China – not a single maggot, not a speck of filth. Moreover, Baoshan must have had a higher ratio of pigs to people than any other village in the Middle Kingdom. The two phenomena were directly related, as I learned when I made my way to the communal open-air outhouse the morning after we arrived. I had to shush a whole family of fat, breakfasting pigs out of my stall before I could get down to business. We had arrived hot, dusty, and homeless the afternoon before – a vagabonding Frenchman and I, after a two-day, 35-kilometer trek through the Jade Dragon Snow Mountains, then down, down, down into the Jinsha river valley, through small villages inhabited by the Naxi minority who people those parts of China. Baoshan clung to a spit of gray rock that jutted out from the valley slope like the long neck of a dragon. We approached the village gate, where a young, spare man in loose trousers with a shaggy haircut stepped forward and said in clear, careful English, “Hello, I’m Mr. Mo,” as if he were expecting us. He led us down a tiny lane sandwiched between the outer village wall and a flank of sturdy, ancient-looking stone-and-brick houses. An abrupt turn landed us inside a courtyard cluttered with chunks of rock, piles of logs, and foraging chickens. Pumpkins were scattered across the tiled roof of the main house. “This is my house,” Mr. Mo smiled modestly. “You can stay here. But I’m very busy. Preparing. New building.” This last word he pronounced like “beauty” as he motioned to the cluttered mess around us. We nodded hello to an elderly man who was squatting on one of the logs, beaming a gentle, toothless grin (“My father,” said Mr. Mo), and a lively-eyed woman wearing a traditional Naxi head-wrap and jade hoop earrings, who was scooping a pan of water from the stone well in the corner of the courtyard. (“My mother,” Mr. Mo explained). Our room was sparsely furnished, with removable wooden slats instead of windowpanes, and a view over the neighbors’ rooftops and courtyards. From the rafters hung shanks of dried pork as big as punching bags. The walls were papered with pages torn from an old high school English workbook. Chickens wandered in and out, pecking among the floorboards for lost sunflower seeds. Pigs could be heard snorting underneath us. That evening, we crowded with Mr. Mo and his family around a small, low table in the courtyard where the new house would soon stand, and ate dinner with chopsticks in the twilight. The following afternoon, we returned from a rambling reconnaissance of the surrounding countryside to find that the timber strewn about the courtyard had been transformed into framework puzzle-pieces neatly stacked on the ground, waiting to be raised the next morning. Relatives and friends of the family worked into the night over sawhorses and chisels, putting the finishing touches on the preparations. The day of the house-raising arrived. Pigs snorted in their pen, chisels pounded away in the courtyard, a rooster throatily asserted himself, and the soft excited rise and fall of Naxi-hua (Naxi speech) filled the air. Mr. Mo hurried into our room with strings of firecrackers, stacks of red banners, and a huge tray of cigarettes, “For celebration!” The next several hours revealed what must be a lost art in most of the “developed” world – the construction of a house frame with not a single nail; every piece of wood was cut just so as to slot into the next. By midday or so the hard work was done. The firecrackers sounded, the red banners were plastered on the erected beams, and cigarettes were smoked all around. The party shifted to Mr. Mo’s sister’s house down the road, where a feast had been prepared, using every conceivable part of the pig. Men, women and children crammed into the modest, sunny courtyard – smoking, eating, drinking, belching, playing cards, gossiping, laughing. I helped myself to a piece of succulent pork, and tried not to think of that spanking clean outhouse down the hill.