4-Day Huizhou's Ancient Trails: the Merchant Road, Qiyun Mountain and the Prefecture City

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.

Why this trail exists
Huizhou had too many people for its fields. From the Tang onwards, its young men left to trade, and the shortest way out to the rich coast was not a river but a footpath over the mountains to Hangzhou. The Huihang Ancient Trail is that path, and it is counted - rightly or wrongly, but the claim is standard - as the third of China's great trade routes after the Silk Road and the Tea Horse Road. It begins at Jiangnan village in Fuli, in Jixi county, and ends at Zhechuan in Lin'an, on the Zhejiang side. Hu Xueyan, the most famous of the Huizhou merchants, walked it as a boy carrying goods on a shoulder pole; so, later, did Hu Shi, who went on to lead the New Culture Movement. The trail's Jixi section was listed as a national key cultural relic in 2013.

Morning - Jiangnan Pass
We start at the trailhead and climb to Jiangnan Pass, the gatehouse of the route, at about 424 metres above sea level and 1400-odd steps up from the valley floor. The pass is not built in the ordinary sense: the doorway is formed by four natural rock slabs laid across the gap, which is why it looks less like a fortification than a weakness in the mountain that someone happened to formalise. On the west face the lintel carries the words Jiangnan First Pass; on the east face, the Huizhou-Hangzhou Lock. The present form of the gateway is credited to Hu Zongxian, the Ming general who fought the Japanese pirates, who held the command in this region in the Jiajing period and had the pass enlarged and named.

Late morning to afternoon - the stone road
Beyond the pass the trail is exactly what it has been for a millennium: a stone-flagged path about a metre and a half wide, laid in slabs, running through a gorge and then over the ridge. We pass the tea pavilions that gave travellers water - Shicha Pavilion, Yujuan, Guxi - the hamlets of Huangmaopei and the two Xuetang villages, and the great boulders the route has named, General's Stone among them. The path climbs steadily and then reaches Blue Sky Hollow at about 1050 metres, the highest point of the crossing, so called because two shoulders of mountain meet in a hollow with the sky set into it. From there it runs down and east to Yonglai village on the Zhejiang side, which is where we turn back.

How far we walk
The full crossing from Jiangnan village to Yonglai is roughly fifteen kilometres and six to seven hours, and we will not ask that of everyone. Two options: the classic crossing on foot, at a steady pace with a proper lunch stop, or the shorter loop around Jiangnan Pass - the pass, the gorge walkway and the named stones - which gives the best of the scenery in three or four hours and suits families and anyone who would rather look at the mountains than at their own boots. We decide at the hotel, on the morning, having seen the weather.

Cultural Insight
The old Huizhou saying is blunt about the arithmetic of this road: if you have not been good in a previous life, you are born in Huizhou; and at thirteen or fourteen you are thrown out of the house. The trail is where that sentence was carried out. A boy walked east with a pole on his shoulder, and if he came back, he came back rich and built an archway in his village. The stone under your feet is what most of them never got.

Meals
Lunch (a Huizhou farmhouse meal at the trailhead or on the ridge, depending on the pace chosen)

Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.

A mountain that is not Huangshan
Qiyun is forty kilometres west of Huangshan and one fifth its height - 585 metres at the highest point - and it is not a lesser version of the same thing. Where Huangshan is granite and vertical, Qiyun is red sandstone and horizontal, and it has been a religious mountain since a Daoist named Gong Qixia built a hut on it in the Tang. It is counted among the four great Daoist mountains of China, and the comparison the region itself prefers is not with Huangshan but alongside it: Mount Huang for strangeness, White Peak for elegance. The name Qiyun - as high as the clouds - comes from the summit ridge, a single rock that appears to stand level with the sky. It is also called Baiyue, the White Peak.

Morning - the inscriptions
Climb - or take the cable car, if you prefer, and then climb the rest - to the Tianmen gates and Zhenxian Cave, which is the heart of the mountain and one of the great concentrations of inscriptions in China. The mountain still carries 537 carved inscriptions; the four characters TIAN KAI SHEN XIU, the divine beauty opened by heaven, are the ones everyone photographs, and they are the largest. Below them, the cliff faces are carved with poetry, dedications and records left by pilgrims and officials of the Tang, Song, Ming and Qing. Read them as a visitor book: everyone who came here for a thousand years wanted the mountain to know they had.

Late morning - the village on the ledge
Yuehua Tianjie, the Moonlight Street, is a village built along a ledge halfway up the mountain, and about half the families living on it are descendants of the Daoist priests who served the temples here. It is inhabited in the ordinary sense - there are kitchens, laundry and grandchildren - which is precisely what makes it worth the climb. The route through it passes the great temple of Xuantian Taisu, built on the order of the Jiajing emperor in the sixteenth century and known locally as the first imperial Daoist sanctuary south of the Yangtze; and further on, the cliff temple of Yuxu, where a stele carries calligraphy attributed to Tang Yin - Tang Bohu, the painter and wit of Suzhou - who came, saw and signed. At its height, in the Jiajing period, the mountain supported 108 halls and temples.

Afternoon - the natural taiji
We come down on the river side, to Dengfeng Bridge, the old stone bridge across the Heng River. The river makes a great S-shaped bend here, with Huizhou villages of white walls and black tiles on both banks, and the whole view reads as the taiji diagram laid out in water and fields - which is the sort of thing this mountain would do. The descent is short and easy, and there is a wooden raft on the river for anyone who wants to see the bend from the water rather than above it.

Cultural Insight
The Qianlong emperor, who was fond of a good line, called Qiyun unmatched under heaven and the first mountain in Jiangnan. Whether or not he said it in those words, the mountain has repeated it ever since. There is also a useful etiquette here: a Daoist shrine is saluted with the left hand closed over the right in a fist, and not with palms pressed together, which is the Buddhist gesture. A guide will show you before you go in, and nobody will mind your getting it wrong the first time.

Meals
Lunch (Huizhou cuisine, in Yuehua Tianjie or at the foot of the mountain)

Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.

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.