Yi women consult a local female shaman in Meigu county, Guizhou province. Livia Monami / China Daily

Photo Beijing 2014 kicked off

Centurial photos from France reveal old China

In Nanlong, 30 kilometers south of Xingyi, she met the Bouyei people. She savored the fact that their ethnic clothes were for everyday use, not a tourist show; the way women dyed wool and cotton cloth with vegetable pigments and wine; the way they made their special embroidery; the way villagers in areas susceptible to droughts gathered rainwater to wash their hair; the way old banyan trees were celebrated for their fantastical, animal-like shapes; the way music was always part of life and the way houses were built on fengshui rules.

She learned about the "eight sounds" music style, enriched with traditional stringed instruments and flutes, and after performing with her own flute, Monami surprised her hosts by presenting it to them.

She was amazed by the Yi shamans in the village streets of mountainous Meigu county.

"In Siberia, and in the movies, you have to travel a long way through the wilderness to find shamans," she says. "There, shamans were everywhere, and people were lined up to pay a small amount of money for fortune-telling."

The most moving moment, perhaps, was when a group of women asked Monami to photograph them - for their grave sites.

She met "nice Soga women" in Longga, who binded her hair to a wooden horn with hemp fiber and dyed black woolen yarn, in their traditional hairstyle.

Journalists tend to document murder, disaster and general bad news, she says, but her mission is to find the positive side of the human story, which she chronicles on her website Liviamonami.com.

She also shares her experiences with students aged between 6 and 14.

"Kids come excited to see people from faraway places," she says of her photographs, "but they become sensitive to other cultures when they see, behind the differences, that these are really people like themselves."

Monami was particularly charmed by one of her last stops in Guizhou, where her driver - who was given up for adoption as a child - asked if she would be willing to stop by the village where he was born. She agreed, and was overwhelmed to be greeted by adults bearing flowers and children carrying small gifts there.

"I never saw anything like it in my life - even in Italy, where family is so important," she says. Monami is keen to return to China in November - she'll split her time between Chengdu and the Wudang mountains, where she will study martial arts.

"If you open your heart," she says, "you will have friends everywhere".