Morning - the Chen Clan Academy
Guangzhou's finest building of its kind is also the easiest to misread. The Chen Clan Academy was begun in 1888 and finished in 1894, seven years of work paid for by families of the Chen surname from seventy-two counties of Guangdong, and it was built as much for examinations as for worship: clan sons coming to Guangzhou to sit the imperial examinations lodged here, which is why it is also called the Chen Clan Academy (Chenshi Shuyuan), the clan academy. After the examinations were abolished in 1905 it became a school, and in 1959 it was turned into a folk-art museum - today the Guangdong Folk Art Museum. It has been a National Key Cultural Relics Protection Unit since 1988.
What repays the time is not the plan but the surface. Nineteen halls and courtyards make up the complex, on a footprint of 13,200 square metres, and every available band of the building - door, window, screen, wall, balustrade, roof ridge - carries ornament: wood carving, stone carving, brick carving, lime sculpture, ceramic ridge figures and cast metalwork. Six large brick reliefs flank the main entrance, the best known of them depicting the heroes of the marshes. Your guide reads it the way it was meant to be read, as a catalogue of trades and techniques rather than as decoration.
Lunch
A Cantonese lunch in the Xiguan quarter.
Afternoon - the arcades of Xiguan
The district around the academy is the old merchant Guangzhou, and its form was dictated by climate. The shophouse colonnades of Shangxiajiu and Enning Road were built to give shade and shelter in a city of long sun and sudden rain, and the same streets carry the Cantonese opera tradition: the opera museum and the restored Yongqingfang lanes sit a short walk apart. Your guide explains how the arcade solved a practical problem and then became the city's commercial identity, and how the neighbourhood is being re-let today without losing its scale.
Late afternoon - Lychee Bay and the Xiguan mansions
The day closes along the Lychee Bay waterway and Liwan Lake, where the old canal-side lanes have been reopened to the public, and at the Xiguan Mansion in the Liwan Museum - the best surviving example of the courtyard houses built by the district's merchant families, with their high ceilings, interior wells and carved screens. It is a small building that makes sense of everything you have walked through.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
