The Muong Hoa valley below Sa Pa, in the far north of Vietnam, was cut into steps by hand, and the hand is visible in all of it. The walls holding each paddy are packed mud, the channels between them were cut with tools, and the rice goes in plant by plant. Footpaths drop from the town through terrace after terrace to the Hmong and Giáy villages on the valley floor, Lao Chai and Ta Van. Much of the way runs along the earth dykes between one paddy and the next, and you walk it single file. Buffalo stand in the mud, and women plant bent double. The paths are unmarked and cut straight through working fields, so a local woman usually walks them with you.
From the high road you first meet the staircase whole, curve stacked on curve down every fold of the mountain. On many mornings cloud fills it at first light and then slides downhill, uncovering the terraces step by step. Late in the afternoon the flooded steps catch the low sun and go coppery, tier after tier to the stream. The calendar decides the colour. The steps hold water and the sky in May and June; from mid-September the ripe rice burns gold down the whole valley before it is cut. More than three-quarters of the people here are Hmong and Dao, and their cloth tells them apart — deep indigo hemp, with hands stained blue-black from the dye vats, or bright red headcloth. Above it all the cable car takes you across the valley and up to the top of Fansipan, the highest mountain in Vietnam, in fifteen minutes. On the valley floor lie more than a hundred carved boulders, older than the terraces by centuries and still unread. Among the spirals and human figures on them is a grid of stacked lines that looks exactly like the terraces on the slope above, cut long before those terraces were there.