On a misty Sunday morning in September of 2013, I made my first journey up a steep mountain path to Da Village, a small Lahu settlement on China’s southwestern frontier. The Lahu people of this hamlet, nestled deep in Yunnan’s Lancang River valley near the Myanmar border, were gathering for worship. Drawn by the gentle strains of a hymn, I slipped into the back of a small wooden church perched on the hillside. Men and women, all barefoot with their mud-caked shoes left neatly at the door, stood shoulder to shoulder on the raised platform at the front, singing in resonant polyphony. Though I could not understand the words, the flowing melody of the Lahu hymn and the serene devotion of the worshippers moved me in a way I hadn’t anticipated. Here, in a village far from the county seat, Christianity had taken firm root for several decades. Villagers prayed and sang with an orderly enthusiasm, exhibiting a peaceful vitality that confounded stereotypes of upland communities as disoriented or “backward” in the face of modernity. This Lahu Christian community stood in stark contrast to ethnographic accounts that depict the Lahu as a people marginalized by state penetration and economic exploitation, beset by poverty, family disintegration, alcoholism, suicide, and the erosion of cultural identity. This encounter raised a pressing question: How had Christianity come to blend so harmoniously with Lahu life in this remote borderland? What transformation had occurred in these hills that an exogenous faith now felt so indigenous and homegrown?