Cuandixia is a village of roughly seventy surviving courtyard houses built up a south-facing slope in the Mentougou district, in the mountains west of Beijing. The houses are stone-founded and grey-tiled, packed tightly against each other in tiers so that the roof of one row sits at the level of the doorway above it, and the lanes between them are stepped rather than paved. It was inscribed as a national historic and cultural village, and it is one of the few places near the capital where an eighteenth and nineteenth-century settlement survives intact rather than as a reconstruction.
Why it looks the way it does
The village grew up on a branch of the old road that carried goods between Beijing and Shanxi, and its families made their living from that traffic before the modern roads bypassed the valley. The houses follow the Beijing siheyuan plan - an enclosed courtyard with the main hall on the high side - adapted to a hillside, which is why the courtyards step up the slope instead of sitting level. The village name itself is often explained as a reference to the two surnames that dominated it. Wooden lattice windows, brick carvings over the doors and the occasional stone drum at a gateway are the details to look for.
Visiting
The village is small enough to walk in an hour, and there is no scripted route: you climb the lanes, look into the courtyards that have opened as small guesthouses or simple restaurants, and walk up to the ridge above for the view back over the grey roofs. Several families run courtyard guesthouses with a few rooms, which is how most visitors stay if they want the village after the day-trippers leave. Local cooking in the village is plain northern food - stewed pork with dried vegetables, millet, wild herbs and home-made noodles.
Practical notes
The drive from central Beijing takes around two and a half hours, and public transport means a bus to Mentougou followed by a local service, which is slow and infrequent; a car or booked trip is the sensible option. The village charges an admission fee. The surrounding roads lead on to the gorges and the older stretches of the Great Wall further west, so it works well as an overnight stop rather than a there-and-back day. Spring and autumn are the best conditions; the lanes are steep, uneven and can be icy in winter.
