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.
