Day 1 - Foshan
The first day goes west. Foshan is seventeen kilometres from Guangzhou and has been a manufacturing town for most of its recorded history, which is why it produced a theatre tradition, a fighting tradition and a ceramics industry rather than the administrative architecture you find in a provincial capital. The day opens at the Ancestral Temple, first built in the Northern Song in the Yuanfeng era of 1078 to 1085 and a National Key Cultural Relics Protection Unit since 1996. It is a temple, a guild hall and a theatre in one: the Wanfutai stage on its central axis has been used for performances since the early Qing, and the compound's ceramic, brick, wood, stone and lime sculpture is crowded with opera characters and stage gestures. Huang Feihong and Ip Man both have halls here, and the local lion dance is national intangible cultural heritage.
The afternoon continues to Shiwan and the Nanfeng Ancient Kiln, built in the Ming Zhengde era of 1506 to 1521 and firing more or less continuously since - the government's own description calls it the oldest, best-preserved dragon kiln still in use in China or beyond, protected as a National Key Cultural Relics Protection Unit since 2001. A banyan of around 430 years has grown over its tail. The lanes around it keep their Ming and Qing houses, and the ceramic museum and figurine street show what Shiwan pottery was for. Return to Guangzhou in the evening.
Day 2 - Xiguan, in Guangzhou
The second day stays in the city and takes the other side of the same culture. The morning is the Chen Clan Academy, built between 1888 and 1894 with money subscribed by Chen families from seventy-two counties of Guangdong and used to lodge clan sons coming to sit the imperial examinations; it has been the Guangdong Folk Art Museum since 1959 and a National Key Cultural Relics Protection Unit since 1988. Nineteen halls and courtyards stand on 13,200 square metres, and the carving that covers them is the settled, urban counterpart of the Shiwan pottery you saw the day before.
The afternoon walks the Xiguan quarter around it: the shophouse arcades of Shangxiajiu and Enning Road, built for shade and sudden rain; the Cantonese opera museum and the restored lanes beside it; and the Xiguan Mansion in the Liwan Museum, the best surviving courtyard house of the merchant families who paid for all of it. Two days that begin with a kiln and end with a merchant's parlour make a coherent argument about where the money in this part of Guangdong came from and what it bought.
Meals
Breakfast, Lunch
Accommodation
One night in Guangzhou at a 4-star or equivalent hotel, twin share, with breakfast.
