5-Day Huangshan Culture Tour: Hongcun, Xidi and Tunxi

Why food is a legitimate way to read a place
Huizhou's cuisine is one of the eight great traditions of Chinese cooking, and like everything else in Huizhou it came out of the geology. The mountains gave little flat land, so the region preserved, dried, salted and fermented what it could not eat fresh, and the results - a fish cured in salt until it smells of something else, a bean curd grown over with white mould - became the dishes the region is famous for. Cooked properly, both are delicious. They are also the best short lecture on Huizhou's character that anyone can give you.

Morning - the China Hui Cuisine Museum
The museum sits in Liyang, on the south bank of the Xin'an River. Its business is the history rather than the eating: where the ingredients came from, how a Huizhou family banquet was laid out, what a merchant's table looked like when he came home, and how a way of cooking that began as a defence against poverty turned into a cuisine worth exporting. Then you go into the kitchen. You make one dish yourself - the fermented bean curd is the one most people choose, and it is also the most instructive, because you have to handle something you would normally throw away and be shown what it becomes.

Afternoon - Liyang Old Street
Across the river from the famous Tunxi Old Street, Liyang is the older settlement: the local saying runs that Tunxi belongs to the Ming and Qing, while Liyang goes back to the Tang and Song, and the two streets look at each other across the water. Eleven of its old Huizhou houses still stand, and the best of them, the Shi family house, was built by descendants of Shi Shouxin, a founding general of the Northern Song. It has the whole grammar of a Huizhou house - the shallow steps before the door, the carved door lintel, the deep plan with the courtyard in the middle so that rain from all four roofs falls inward, which is what the family wanted, because rain was money. The lanes around it now hold printing and lacquer workshops and a small opera stage, and we will look into at least one of them.

Cultural Insight
There is an old Huizhou description of the region's own food as heavy in salt, dark in colour and fond of a slight fermentation - which sounds like a complaint and is meant as a compliment. The two famous dishes are both stories about scarcity: the fish was salted on a long journey so that it would not spoil, and the bean curd was eaten anyway when it grew its coat of mould, and turned out better that way. Huizhou's achievement was never abundance. It was refusing to waste anything, and then charging other people for it later.

Meals
Lunch (Huizhou cuisine, including a dish you prepare yourself)

Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.

Morning — Hongcun, a village planned like an ox
Hongcun was settled in the Southern Song dynasty and laid out, in the reading the village still uses, in the shape of an ox: the hill behind is the head, the two old trees on it the horns, the houses the body, the water channels that run past every door the intestines, and the bridges over the stream the legs. Your guide walks you through that plan and then into it. At the centre is the half-moon Moon Pond, dug in the Ming dynasty for washing and as a reserve of fire water; beside the South Lake stands the South Lake Academy, built in the early nineteenth century to teach the sons of the Wang clan. Inside the larger houses - Chengzhi Hall above all, the house of a nineteenth-century salt merchant - the point is the woodwork: Huizhou's three carvings, in wood, brick and stone, covering beams, door hoods and window panels.

Cultural Insight
Hongcun and Xidi were inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2000 as the "Ancient Villages in Southern Anhui", cited for the way their layout and their houses record a merchant society whose men left to trade and brought the profits home in brick and timber.

Lunch
A village restaurant: braised Huizhou pork, seasonal wild greens, and a chicken or river-fish dish.

Afternoon — Xidi
Xidi is the other half of the same inscription and it reads differently: less water, more architecture, and lanes that follow two streams down the hill. You enter past the Memorial Archway of Hu Wenguang, a three-bay stone arch raised in 1578 to a Ming prefect, and then walk the lanes between the surviving merchant houses - Lufu Hall with its couplet-hung reception room, Dafu Di with the small viewing balcony its family built over the lane - looking at the carved stone door frames and at the horse-head gables that step up the party walls. The three carvings are at their most confident here.

Evening — Return
Private vehicle back to Huangshan city (Tunxi). The evening is yours.

Meals
Lunch

Accommodation
Day tour - 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.

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.

Morning — The seven arches of Tangyue
Seven stone memorial arches stand in a line along the approach to Tangyue, raised over the Ming and Qing dynasties by and for the Bao family. Each one is a public reward for a private virtue - loyalty to the throne, filial piety, chastity, charity - and read in order they are a short course in what the imperial state expected of a family and what a family could expect in return. Your guide takes them one by one: who was honoured, in which reign, and why the sequence was arranged the way it was. The village behind them still works its fields.

Late morning — Bao Family Garden
Beside the arches, Bao Family Garden was laid out on the site of the Bao family's own Qing-dynasty garden, and it is now best known for its collection of penjing - the Chinese art of miniature trees and rock, trained over decades and set out in long beds under the white walls of the garden. It is a quiet place to walk after the arches, and it shows what a Huizhou merchant family spent its money on besides houses.

Lunch
A local restaurant, with Huizhou braised pork, river fish and seasonal greens.

Afternoon — Onward travel
Your guide assists with check-out, and the private vehicle carries you to Huangshan North railway station or Tunxi Airport, with help through the ticket barrier or at check-in.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch

Accommodation
Not included - departure day.