In response to the decline of ethnic minority cultures in the past four decades, the Chinese government implemented measures to introduce cultural content into school practices in order to preserve minority heritage. Based on an empirical study in two ethnic minority areas with different degrees of assimilation into mainstream Han culture, this article investigates manifestations of ethnic minority cultures and teachers' practices in education. Drawing on the concept of internal orientalism and approaches to multicultural curriculum reform, it argues that the superficiality of how ethnic minority cultures manifest in schools can be explained by deeply ingrained internal orientalism, in which ethnic minority cultures are essentialised as static cultural artefacts. Due to the highly centralised nature of educational governance, teachers' practices in implementing ethnic minority cultures are, at best, of an additive nature, and leave the fundamental structure and objectives of the curriculum unaltered.