Yingjiang is a frontier county in southwest Yunnan, China, with distinctive ethnic and cultural diversity. Bilingual education (BE) has been a prominent feature in Yingjiang since the 1950s due to supportive policies and measures at various levels. BE in Yingjiang developed so well in the 1980s that a bilingual school was awarded the title of 'flower of ethnic minority education'. However, since the late 1990s, BE in Yingjiang has gone dramatically downhill. The old "followers of bilingual education" are in danger of withering. This can be seen from the shrinkage of the scale of BE and the dramatic reduction of bilingual schools and bilingual students. At the same time, the number and quality of bilingual teachers has been called into question. This paper, based on a document review and a field study, discusses the challenges and prospects for BE in Yingjiang. It is argued here that as the ethnic minority people in Yunnan are trying to make socioeconomic progress like other places in China, it is necessary to promote BE by reviewing the current BE mechanism, social reality and to take more sensible measures to revitalize BE, as was done in the late 1980s. (Contains 2 tables and 6 notes.)