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.
