Some live in western Guangxi (Longlin Various Nationalities Autonomous County), southeastern Yunnan and southern Sichuan.

Gelao men's traditional suit consists of a jacket fastened up the side and long pants.

The Gelao make a two-stringed fiddle with a body made from a cow horn, called the jiaohu (角胡; pinyin: jiǎohú) used in their traditional music.

In the past two or three hundred years, they have been greatly influenced by the genre of Han poetry, and many have borrowed Chinese words and phrases.

However, in September 2008, The History of Jiu Tian Da Ling (English: Record of the Nine Heavens) was found in Guizhou.

The discovery of Record of the Nine Heavens fully proved that the Gelao people and their splendid culture have a long history, reaching back to ancient times.

Although the book identifies the distribution area of the Gelao ethnic group described in Record of the Nine Heavens in a manner consistent with information that circulated locally during the mid-1980s (for example, it states that the origin of the Gelao is in Wuchuan, but core parts of Yelang now lying in Panjiang, Chishui, and Hebei are ignored), it deviates from local history records dating from the Ming and Qing dynasties.

[1] The Yi (羿), who number no more 3,000 people, live in the Chishui (赤水) area in Xuyong County, Sichuan, which is on the border with Guizhou.

There are 2,636 Gelaos in Vietnam (2009), mostly inhabited in the karst plateau Hoàng Su Phì and Đồng Văn districts of Hà Giang province.