3-Day Huizhou Prefecture: Ancient City, Archways and the Ink Workshop

Why Shexian, and not another village
Huizhou was a prefecture with six counties - Shexian, Xiuning, Wuyuan, Qimen, Yixian and Jixi - and Shexian was its seat. The villages everyone photographs, Hongcun and Xidi, were the countryside of that prefecture. Shexian was its capital: the walled town where the prefect sat, where the merchants built their town houses, and where the examination successes had their archways raised. This day goes to the capital. There is no water channel shaped like an ox here and no Moon Pond; there is a city, and it is a different story.

Morning - the archway with eight feet
The Xuguo Archway stands at the centre of the old town and is the reason most visitors come. Xu Guo was a Shexian man who passed the imperial examination in 1565, rose to be Minister of Rites and a Grand Secretary, and was granted an archway after a campaign in Yunnan. It was raised in 1584, the twelfth year of the Wanli reign. What makes it extraordinary is its plan: four sides and eight pillars, a footprint almost never used for a memorial archway in China, where the standard form is three bays and four pillars. The result reads as a small building rather than a gate, and it is the only one of its kind still standing. The inscriptions were brushed by Dong Qichang, the most celebrated calligrapher of the late Ming. It was listed as a national key cultural relic in 1988.

Late morning - Doushan Street
A few minutes away, Doushan Street is a lane of Ming and Qing merchant houses, narrow, paved, and still lived in. Its houses belonged to the families that made Huizhou's money: the Wang, the Yang, the Xu, the Pan. You will see the family halls, the carved timber and the stone door frames, and the well the lane has used for centuries, and - tucked into the same street - a chastity archway raised for a widow of the Ye family, which is the social arithmetic of the place in stone: the men went away to trade, the women stayed and were celebrated for staying.

Afternoon - the Yuliang Weir
The Yuliang Weir is the oldest thing on this itinerary. A stone barrage across the Lian River, first built in the Tang and rebuilt in the Ming, it has held the water back for close to fourteen hundred years and is still doing the job it was built for. It is often called the Dujiangyan of Jiangnan, and while the comparison flatters it, the engineering deserves the sentence: the stones are joined by interlocking keys cut so that the whole structure resists the current as one mass. Above it, the Yuliang Old Street runs along the bank where the river port used to be, its stone steps worn into curves by the loading and unloading of boats. In the Ming and Qing, this was where goods left Huizhou for Hangzhou and the coast.

Cultural Insight
Huizhou was poor land and rich people. The mountains gave too little to farm, so its sons left to trade - the saying runs that a boy of thirteen or fourteen was thrown out of the house to make his way - and came back with money that had to be turned into something permanent, because a merchant's money could not buy his family rank. What it could buy was stone: archways for virtue, halls for ancestors, academies for sons. The Xuguo Archway, the halls of Doushan Street and the weir that kept the river in its place are all the same sentence written three different ways.

Meals
Lunch (Huizhou cuisine, in the old town)

Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.

Seven archways in a line
Tangyue is a village in Zhengcun, about half an hour west of Shexian, and it has something no other place in China has: seven memorial archways built by a single family, standing in a row across the open fields, close enough together to be read as one sentence. They were raised by the Bao clan over more than four hundred years, from the Ming into the Qing, and the order in which they stand is the order of the values they celebrate - loyalty, filial piety, chastity, righteousness. Three are Ming, four are Qing, which is exactly what you would expect: the family built in both dynasties and kept building.

What an archway was for
An archway was not a decoration. It was a petition to the throne - a family asking the emperor to recognise one of its members for a virtue, and the emperor agreeing - and the stone was the receipt. Because they had to be earned, they were rare, and because they were rare they became the most expensive form of social climbing available to a merchant family with no hope of buying rank. The Baos earned them the slow way: a son who served the state, a widow who did not remarry, a son who buried his parents properly. The Qianlong emperor is said to have written, for Tangyue, that there was no household in the realm more filial - which is the sentence the village has quoted ever since. The group was listed as a national key cultural relic in 1996.

Late morning - the ancestral halls
Beyond the archways stand the Bao clan's ancestral halls, and the pair of them is worth the detour: one built for the men of the family and, beside it, one built unusually for its women. A clan hall is where a lineage kept its genealogy, its rules and its punishments, and where the dead were fed on the days they were owed. To walk both halls in ten minutes is to see, laid out in brick, exactly who held the family's memory and who was permitted to be remembered.

Afternoon - the Bao Family Garden
The garden next door was laid out by Bao Qiyun, a merchant of the same clan, and it is one of the largest private gardens in China and one of its great collections of penjing - the miniature trees that Huizhou gardeners have cultivated for centuries. This is the other half of the archway story and the more honest half: the stone went to the emperor's values, the garden went to the family's own pleasure. We finish with tea in the garden, which is the correct way to finish a garden.

Meals
Lunch (Huizhou cuisine, near Tangyue)

Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.

Morning — Tunxi Old Street
Tunxi Old Street runs for over a kilometre along the Xin'an River and is one of the few shopping streets in China to keep an intact Qing-dynasty street wall: two or three storeys of whitewashed shopfronts behind a continuous arcade, grey tiles overhead and the horse-head gables of Huizhou stepping up the party walls. It was a working commercial street long before it became a sight - timber, tea and medicinal herbs came down out of the hills through here - and the shops still sell what the region makes: ink sticks, inkstones, tea, dried bamboo shoots. Your guide points out which buildings are original, how the street was restored, and what the goods in the windows actually are.

Cultural Insight
A Chinese scholar's desk was set with the "four treasures of the study" - brush, ink, paper and inkstone - and Huizhou produced two of the most prized: Hui ink, and the She inkstone cut from stone beds in Shexian, a few counties away.

Lunch
Huizhou cooking in the old quarter: the region's salted mandarin fish, hairy tofu, and a clear soup with bamboo shoots.

Afternoon — Hu Kaiwen Ink Stick Factory
The Hu Kaiwen name dates from the late eighteenth century and remains one of the recognised makers of Huizhou ink. You follow the process end to end: soot collected from burning oil, mixed warm with glue and a little musk and camphor, pounded on a stone while it is still hot, pressed in carved wooden moulds, then dried slowly over weeks and finally lettered in gold by hand. In the hands-on part you paint the gold lettering onto a finished stick and press a small stick of your own in a mould to take home.

Late afternoon — Inkstones
A short stop with a shop that works She inkstones, so that you can see the stone the ink is ground in and how a stone is judged by its grain and its sound.

Meals
Lunch

Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.