By Xinhua writers Zhou Yan and Zhou Lei

    KUNMING, Dec. 13 (Xinhua) -- For Yang Gancai and his wife Wang Yi, seven years of efforts to chronicle the "disappearing worlds" of Chinese ethnic minorities in a remote village on the country's border with Myanmar bring more than an award-winning documentary.

    The couple are known for their 2006 success with "Transformation", a 140-minute documentary shot over five years which depicted the slash-and-burn agricultural methods of the Akha ethnic group living in complete isolation in Manbang village of Yunnan Province until a border patrol road was built in 2001, and the radical changes that followed as traditional houses were demolished and electricity was installed.

    "Transformation" has won several awards at international documentary film festivals in Europe and was among China's top 10 documentaries last year.

    Yang, 51, and Wang, 43, have also found in the Akha people a live version of the pre-historical Sanxingdui civilization that has remained a mystery for historians since it was discovered in 1986.

    According to Yang, legends told in Akha epics could well explain the cultural meaning behind the strange-looking bronze images of humans and birds, and the part-human, part-animal masks with oversized eyes and eyebrows, unearthed from the ruins of Sanxingdui in the southwestern Sichuan Province.

    "The Akha villagers believe a deity in ancient times had given his own eyeballs to a huge blind bird that had the magic power of annihilating every evil it saw," said Yang. "The villagers therefore worship the bird, or rather its eyes, as their ancestor."

    Until today, he said every Akha family has at least one wooden bird nailed on the roof. "Some families have as many as nine."

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