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.
