7-Day Zhejiang & Anhui Village Homestay Community Service

Morning — Arrival in Huangshan
Fly into Huangshan Tunxi International Airport or arrive via high-speed train at Huangshan North Station, then transfer to Tangkou Town (about a one-hour drive), the gateway to the mountain. Your guide assists with hotel check-in and a brief orientation.

Afternoon — Hongcun Ancient Village
Visit Hongcun, a UNESCO-listed village of Ming–Qing architecture famed for its tranquil canals and the reflective Moon Pond. Its Hui-style houses and carved ancestral halls gained fame through the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Wander the cobblestone lanes to appreciate traditional design.

Evening — Hui Cuisine
In the evening, dine on Hui-style dishes such as stinky mandarin fish (fermented fish), hairy tofu, or bamboo shoots with ham, paired with local Huangshan Maofeng green tea.

Morning - induction, and the limits of the work
The programme works in villages in the Huizhou region of southern Anhui - whitewashed walls, grey tiles, narrow lanes and water channels, in a landscape inscribed by UNESCO in 2000 as the Ancient Villages of Southern Anhui. Your placement is arranged with the village committee or a local residents' association through the programme's partner in China, and the exact village, days and tasks are confirmed before departure. The induction happens on the first morning and it begins with the rules of the fabric. These are listed buildings in a World Heritage property, and almost nothing structural may be altered without permission and specialist materials; volunteers therefore do no building work, no plastering with lime or mortar, no work at height and no digging near the canals. What volunteers do is labour that frees the village's own staff: clearing, sweeping, weeding, carrying, sorting, cataloguing, and helping residents with tasks that need an extra pair of hands. The safety briefing covers what actually hurts visitors here - wet stone steps, open wells, ponds and channels, uneven paving, dogs, and heat in summer - together with consent for photographs, since people live in the buildings you will be photographing, and the emergency and insurance arrangements.

Late morning - the public spaces
The first task is agreed on site with the village's sanitation team, whose job is much larger than their number. In a village that receives visitors all year, the work that never gets done is the maintenance of the shared edges: the stone paths between houses, the canals and the footbridges over them, the courtyard in front of the ancestral hall, and the open ground where the village used to thresh. The group works alongside the team rather than in place of it, with the team's tools and at the team's direction: clearing weeds and silt from the channel margins, sweeping the lanes, taking the cut material to the collection point, and washing down the public courtyard.

Afternoon - the village hall
The afternoon is spent indoors and out of the heat, on whatever the committee has on its list. Common requests are simple and useful: sorting and cleaning the ancestral hall or the cultural hall, helping to set up a small display about the village's own history, labelling things in storage, moving furniture, and making a proper inventory of what the village owns. Where the village runs a tea room or a small museum room, volunteers can help with the low-grade work that gets postponed during the tourist season. Photographs taken for the record are handed to the committee, not published.

Evening - eating with a host family
Accommodation is with host families or in a village guesthouse arranged by the partner, and dinner is with the hosts: cured pork, bamboo shoots, wild greens, and rice from the terraces. The evening reflection is short and specific: what was done, what the committee asked for tomorrow, and anything that went wrong, which goes to the coordinator and not to the village. This is also where the group should be honest about a fact of village life - during harvest and during peak tourist weekends, the people you are helping have no spare time to supervise volunteers, so the group works around their calendar rather than its own.

Cultural Insight - living in a listed village
The Huizhou villages survived because their merchant families invested at home, and they are protected now because of what that produced: a dense, coherent building tradition of white walls, horse-head gables and carved detail. The consequence for residents is real. Repairs must use traditional techniques, alterations need approval, and modern comforts are difficult to install in a timber-framed house; tourism brings income and also brings crowds into the lanes between people's kitchens. A visiting group should understand that it is a guest in a working settlement, and that the villagers' patience with visitors is not unlimited.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Host family or village guesthouse.

Morning - listening as work
The most useful thing a visiting group can offer a village that has already been cleaned and photographed a thousand times is attention. With the committee's agreement, the morning is given to recording what older residents remember: how the canal was dredged by hand before the pumps came, which houses belonged to which families before 1949, how the fields were worked, what people ate in the hungry years, how the village decided who could build where, and what has changed fastest in the last twenty years. Recordings are made only with each person's explicit consent, taken one household at a time, with a member of the committee present or nearby, and with an agreement in writing about who keeps the file, how the person is named, and the right to withdraw. The value of this work is not sentimental. Village committees have to make decisions about restoration, signage and tourism, and a documented account of how a house or a channel was used is genuinely useful to them.

Late morning - handover
The handover is short and concrete. The group states what was done during the two days, returns tools, hands over the photographs and any inventory it produced, and confirms in writing that no image of a resident will be published without a fresh agreement. The committee is asked directly what was not useful, and the answer is passed to the partner organisation so the next group is better briefed. Where the partner issues a record of participation it is presented here.

Afternoon - east into Zhejiang
After lunch the group travels east, roughly three to four hours by road, into the hill country of northern Zhejiang. The landscape changes with the province: more tea, more bamboo, more water, and - along the river valleys - villages that have turned themselves into places to stay. You arrive at the host village in the late afternoon, meet the families who will put you up, and eat with them. Accommodation is with households rather than in a hotel, which means a room in a family's own house, shared bathrooms, and the expectation that you will fit in with the household's hours rather than the other way round; the partner organisation has agreed the rate directly with each family and you do not pay anyone yourself. The evening session sets out the plan for the Zhejiang half of the programme, which is built around the households that run guest rooms and the association that represents them. Two binding rules are restated: volunteers never handle money, bookings or guests' personal data, and no guest is worked with unsupervised.

Evening - the household economy
Dinner with the hosts, and a first conversation about how the household works: who cooks, who cleans, who answers the phone, who drives to the station, what the rooms cost in high season and in January, and what breaks when the family is ill or busy. That conversation is the material for the next two days.

Cultural Insight - recording the past with consent
Oral history in a village is not a neutral act: families have disagreements about inheritance and reputation that a tape recorder can reopen, and visitors who publish someone's account of the past can leave trouble behind them. That is why the programme requires consent per person, a written agreement about storage and naming, and the committee's involvement at every step. The same rule applies to the finished product: the recordings and transcripts belong to the village, not to the volunteer's portfolio.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Host family in the Zhejiang village.

Morning - the garden and the kitchen
You work with the family you are staying with, at their direction, on the jobs they would otherwise do before breakfast. In a Zhejiang hill village that usually means the vegetable plot, the tea bushes on the slope, the bamboo stand, and the kitchen: picking and washing greens, preparing the cold dishes, boiling water, setting the tables for whoever is staying. In picking season, tea leaves have to be handled the day they are picked and the whole household is on the hill from first light; a group that can carry baskets and sort leaf is genuinely useful, and one that cannot will be politely sent indoors. The work is not a demonstration of rural life and should not be treated as one. It is the household's actual labour, and doing it badly costs the family money.

Late morning - rooms and turnover
The second job is the one that fills the family's day in season: turning over guest rooms. Stripping beds, laundering and folding linen, cleaning bathrooms, restocking the tea and the slippers, checking the shower, the air conditioning and the wifi, wiping the balcony, and getting the room back to standard between one guest leaving at ten and the next arriving at two. The housekeeping rules are the family's and are followed exactly; volunteers do not handle the booking system, the guests' identity documents or the money, and they do not enter a room while a guest's belongings are in it unless the host is present and the guest has agreed. The point of the morning is not that visitors are good at making beds; it is that they see how thin the labour margin is in a family business with two or three rooms and no staff.

Afternoon - the village and the season
After lunch the pace drops. The group walks the village with the host or with a representative of the guesthouse association: the lanes, the stream, the old hall, the tea terraces, the bus stop, the path to the next village. Conversations here are the raw material for the project on the following day - what guests ask for and cannot find, what is hard for an older host to explain, what the village has that nobody photographs, and what happens in the months when nothing is booked. Notes are kept and shared with the association rather than kept private, because the plan is to build something they can use.

Evening - dinner and the household's books
Dinner with the family, and, if they are willing, a conversation about the numbers: what a room earns in the golden week, what it earns in winter, what the commission on a booking platform takes, and what it costs to keep a house open all year. Nothing is recorded or repeated outside the group. The reflection session afterwards is about the ethics of this half of the programme: visitors are not consultants, they cannot fix a marketing problem in two days, and the most valuable thing they will produce is a small set of practical tools in the village's own language and style.

Cultural Insight - the minsu economy and rural policy
Zhejiang is the centre of China's minsu (homestay) industry, and the growth of guest-room businesses in its villages was deliberately encouraged under the rural revitalisation strategy pursued since 2017. The results are uneven. Villages near Hangzhou and on the tourist routes are busy and profitable; villages an hour further out have the same houses and far fewer guests. What separates them is rarely the scenery. It is access to the booking platforms, the ability to answer enquiries in a language the guest uses, and whether a family has enough labour to keep standards up during peak weekends. That is the gap this placement works in, and it is why the project is language and information, not construction.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Host family in the Zhejiang village.

Morning - decide with the association, not for it
The project for the day is agreed in a short meeting with the guesthouse association and the families who want to take part. It is important that they choose the outputs, because anything the hosts do not want will not be maintained after the group leaves. In practice, the requests cluster around a handful of things: a one-page welcome sheet that explains the house rules, the shower, the breakfast time and the wifi in language a foreign guest can follow; a short village walk with a map, five or six stops and the time each leg takes; a menu translated with the dishes described rather than merely named, plus a line on allergies and on not being able to guarantee a kitchen free of a given ingredient; and, for hosts who use booking platforms, a set of short English replies for the twenty questions guests ask most. All of it is written in the village's own tone - nothing about the place is invented, and anything the group cannot verify is left out.

Late morning - write, then walk it
The materials are drafted in the morning and then tested on foot, which is the part volunteers always want to skip and the part that matters. The group walks the route as a guest would, stop by stop, and checks the timing, the signage, the points where a visitor would take the wrong turn, and whether the directions rely on a landmark that is only visible in winter. The menu is checked against what the kitchen can actually produce in each season. Photographs for the map are taken only of the public lanes, and any image of a person or the inside of a home is used only with permission.

Afternoon - production and handover format
Then the materials are produced in a form that survives: printed and laminated where the association can fund it, and left in editable files - plain text and simple images - with a one-page instruction in Chinese explaining how to update the prices, the times and the seasonal notes. The group does not promise to maintain anything from abroad, and it does not promise that the materials will bring bookings. What is handed over is a template and a set of finished copies.

Evening - tea with the hosts and reflection
The evening is spent with the families, testing the welcome sheet on the hosts themselves and correcting anything that reads oddly. The reflection session follows: what the group assumed about what would help, and what the hosts corrected. This is normally the point at which volunteers realise how much of their own project was guesswork, and it is the most useful hour of the placement.

Cultural Insight - language access as a practical need
China's inbound tourism has been recovering unevenly, and the villages that benefited most from foreign visitors before 2020 are the ones that lost the most when borders closed. A host family in Zhejiang may now see a handful of international guests a month, and the difference between a booking and an enquiry that goes unanswered is very often the language the enquiry arrives in. A bilingual welcome sheet and a set of ready replies is a small intervention, but it addresses a real constraint, and unlike a website rebuild it can be updated by the host with a phone.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Host family in the Zhejiang village.

Morning - handover and instructions
The last morning is for finishing and handing over, and for making sure the association can maintain what it receives. The printed copies, the editable files and the one-page Chinese instruction are walked through with whoever will hold them, on that person's own phone or computer, so that updating a price or a bus time is something they have done once before the group leaves. Anything unfinished is either completed or withdrawn; a half-made website or a list of promised translations is worse than nothing. If the association wants a short English-language session for a few hosts - pronunciation of the twenty most common guest questions, for example - it is run here, with a recording left on their phones.

Late morning - the settlement
The group settles its own account with the households, through the partner organisation rather than in cash to individuals, and checks that nothing borrowed is missing and no room has been left in a state the family has to fix. Photographs taken during the placement are reviewed with the association: images of people or of the insides of homes are deleted unless permission was given, and any image the association wants for its own use is handed over with a written note of who agreed to it.

Afternoon - the meal
The closing event is a meal, cooked by the families and eaten together in the village, and it takes as long as it takes. It is the right way to end a placement that has been spent in other people's kitchens and guest rooms: the group is a guest, the household is the host, and the relationship does not need to be dressed up as anything else. Gifts are not handed out to individuals; where the group wants to contribute, the contribution goes to the association for a purpose the association has chosen.

Evening - the closing seminar, then the road to Hangzhou
The final session runs in the vehicle or before departure, and it is deliberately sceptical. What did a group of visitors actually change in a village that has been running guest rooms for a decade? What would the families say if they were asked honestly? Was the week's labour more useful than the money it cost to travel here? The group is asked to record what it would do differently, and to consider the forms of help that do not require a flight - funding free English classes for hosts through a local school, for example, or paying a translator for the enquiries that go unanswered. Transfer to Hangzhou follows, roughly two hours by road, for onward departure the next morning.

Cultural Insight - what a village needs from a visitor
A village on a tourist route is not short of visitors. It is short of time, of language skills and of labour during peak weekends, and it is short of continuity - the thing a two-week group cannot supply. That is why this programme ends with materials and a template rather than with a promise, and why the closing discussion asks participants to distinguish between the help they wanted to give and the help that was actually wanted. The distinction is the whole value of the placement.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Hangzhou.

Morning — Longjing Tea Hills
Spend your final morning in the tea terraces west of West Lake, in the village of Longjing — the source of China's most celebrated green tea. Walk the rows with a local grower, learn how the leaves are picked and pan-fired by hand, and taste the current season's harvest in a family-run tea house. The pace is deliberately unhurried, a quiet counterpoint to the previous ten days.

Midday — Farewell Lunch
Enjoy a farewell lunch in Hangzhou, with time to compare impressions with your group and your guide. Your guide is on hand to help with any last purchases, packing questions or onward travel arrangements.

Departure — Transfer to Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport
At the appropriate time your guide accompanies you to Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport for your international departure, assisting with check-in and seeing you through to security. Hangzhou offers direct international connections, along with frequent high-speed rail and domestic flights to Shanghai, which many travelers use for onward long-haul routes.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch.