Banaue Rice Terraces

Harvest morning in an Ifugao village. A line of women moves through a flooded paddy halfway up a mountain, bent double, cutting rice stalks with small knives. One of them starts to sing. It is not a work song in the short sense; it is an epic, a story about ancestors and heroes and a marriage between two great families, and it will go on for hours, the lead singer carrying the narrative while the others answer her in chorus. This is the hudhud, and the women singing it learned it exactly the way their grandmothers did: by standing in this same water and listening. Nothing about it has ever been written down.

That is the first thing to understand about the terraces. The people who built them did not leave dates. They left songs, and walls.

Walls, Water, And An Argument About Time

The walls are stone and packed earth, built without mortar, some of them taller than a house. Behind each wall is a level pond, and in the pond, rice. Stack those ponds up a mountainside, one above the other, and you get the landscape of Ifugao province in northern Luzon: slopes that look less like hills than like staircases cut for giants.

How old they are is the question that divides everyone. The tourist version says two thousand years. That figure came from American anthropologists in the early twentieth century, who guessed from the sheer volume of stone, and it has lived in Philippine schoolbooks ever since. Excavations and dating work done over the past two decades tell a different story: a good deal of the terrace system seems to have been built or greatly expanded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which would make it a response to the Spanish arrival in the lowlands, as communities pushed up into the mountains and had to feed themselves on steep ground. Both positions have their defenders. Because the terraces have been repaired continuously for as long as anyone has farmed them, the honest answer is that nobody can say when a particular wall was first laid.

What is not in dispute is the engineering. Above each cluster of terraces stands a patch of forest the Ifugao call a muyong, owned and protected by families, whose job is to catch the rain and release it slowly. Water leaves the forest through earth channels and bamboo pipes, fills the topmost paddy, spills over into the one below, and so on down to the river. The whole mountainside works as a single organism. Cut the forest at the top and you dry out ten families' fields below; let one wall go and the ones beneath it take the landslide. Fields have always been owned. The path of the water never was.

Who Came Up The Mountain

The Spanish ruled the Philippine lowlands from the sixteenth century, but the Cordillera kept them out for three hundred years; the terrain and the people who lived on it were equally difficult. The Americans, who took the islands in 1898, were more persistent. They built roads into the mountains, opened schools, suppressed headhunting, and sent the first anthropologists up to photograph and measure what they found. The phrase "eighth wonder of the world" belongs to that era, and the Ifugao have been living with the consequences of being a wonder ever since.

The Detail Nobody Mentions At The Viewpoint

The Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras became a World Heritage site in 1995. But the listing does not include the famous view. UNESCO chose five clusters: Batad and Bangaan, both within Banaue municipality, plus Mayoyao, Hungduan and Nagacadan in Kiangan. The central Banaue terraces, the ones you see from the roadside viewpoint and the ones printed on the back of the Philippine twenty-peso note, were left out, because the buildings and roads around them did not meet the criteria. The most photographed section of the world's most famous rice terraces is, officially, not a World Heritage site at all.

Today

A terrace survives only as long as someone farms it. Drain the pond and the wall dries, cracks, and comes down in the next rainy season. The young are leaving for Manila, Hong Kong and the Gulf, because a year of rice from one family's paddies is worth about a week's wages in the city. The 1990 Luzon earthquake and a run of typhoons brought major collapses; in some valleys giant earthworms tunnel through the walls from the inside. Tourism brings money and a new problem of its own, as guesthouses for the hikers walking down to Batad multiply faster than walls get repaired.

UNESCO put the terraces on its List of World Heritage in Danger in 2001 and took them off in 2012, after eleven years of wall repair, irrigation work and support for the farmers who stayed. Repair, in the end, means what it meant centuries ago: a person standing in mud, lifting one stone onto another. In Ifugao, owning a field was never a matter of paper. The owner is whoever keeps the wall up. Stop, and within a few seasons the mountain takes it back.