6-Day Huangshan Classic: Villages, Sunrise and Ink Workshop

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.

Morning — the Tangyue arches
A few kilometres west of Shexian, on the edge of the old Huizhou prefecture, a line of seven memorial arches stands along a raised stone path with fields on both sides. They were put up over several centuries by the Bao family - the sequence runs loyalty, filial piety, chastity and righteousness, the standard virtues of the imperial order - and the carving on the Ming and Qing stone is among the best surviving work in the region. The walk from one end to the other is flat, shaded in parts, and takes about an hour at a gentle pace; a garden and the family's ancestral hall adjoin the path. Your guide will explain who paid for each arch and what a merchant family bought with its money in this part of China.

Late morning — a Huizhou village
Huizhou architecture is easy to recognise once you know it: whitewashed walls, black tile roofs, high horse-head gables to stop fire spreading between houses, a narrow lane plan, and an ancestral hall at the centre. Many villages in this prefecture are still lived in, and your guide will choose one on the day according to the crowds, taking you through at a slow pace with a stop for tea. The interior courtyards are cool and dim, built for a humid climate, and the carved beams over the main rooms are the reason Huizhou woodwork has its reputation. Ask to see the ancestral hall if it is open; the family registers and the altars inside explain how these villages were governed long before there was any local administration in the modern sense.

Lunch — Huizhou cooking
Huizhou food is heavier than Hangzhou's and famous for its fermented flavours: braised pork with dried bamboo shoot, smoked and dried tofu, wild vegetables, and the region's notorious fermented mandarin fish, which smells strong and tastes mild. Ask for the fish to be left off the table if you would rather not; the rest of the meal is excellent, with plenty of steamed dishes and local rice. The kitchen will keep the oil and salt low if you ask, and there is almost always a clear chicken soup on the menu, which is the safest choice before an afternoon in warm pools.

Afternoon — the hot spring
The hot spring at the southern foot of the Yellow Mountains has been used for a very long time - it is counted, alongside the pines, the rocks and the sea of cloud, among the four traditional attractions of the mountain - and the water comes out of the ground warm and clear from the fault line above it. The modern spa has a series of outdoor pools at different temperatures, herbal soaking pools, and quieter indoor baths. You have between ninety minutes and two hours here, which is enough for a slow circuit of the pools and a foot bath. Take it gently: drink water, do not stay in the hottest pool longer than ten minutes at a time, and follow your own physician's advice if you have heart or blood-pressure conditions, or are pregnant.

Evening — herbal cuisine and rest
Dinner at the hotel or at one of the small restaurants on the mountain's edge, with a menu built around the region's herbs and mountain vegetables: bamboo shoot braised with pork, Chinese yam, black-bone chicken soup, wild fern, wood ear fungus and mountain rice. It is a mild, warming menu, and it is what the villages here have always eaten in the wet season. An early night; tomorrow is the mountain itself, with the cable car doing the climbing. The hotel at the foot of the mountain keeps a short menu of these dishes all year and can serve dinner early, and if you would rather eat in your room after the hot springs that is straightforward to arrange.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Huangshan (at the foot of the mountain).

Morning — Eastern Steps Hike
Take a shuttle to the Yungu Temple cable car and ascend to Begin-to-Believe Peak, the gateway to Huangshan's eastern ridges. Hike among twisted pines and granite summits above a sea of clouds, passing Lion Peak, Monkey Gazing at the Sea, and Dawn Pavilion. Your guide sets a pace suited to the group.

Lunch — Mountain-Top Meal
Enjoy a simple lunch at a summit restaurant; options are limited, so packing snacks is wise.

Afternoon — Western Sea Grand Canyon
Descend into the dramatic Western Sea Grand Canyon, a vast valley with cliffside trails and panoramic viewpoints. For a thrilling shortcut, ride the small Cloud Tram monorail or hike the steep “Fairy Walking Bridge” path.

Evening — Sunset at Bright Top
Check into a mountain-top hotel such as Beihai or Xihai, then catch the sunset from Bright Top Peak, Huangshan's second-highest point, with 360-degree vistas of mist-swirled peaks.

Before dawn — Sunrise
You leave the hotel while it is still dark, with a torch, and walk to one of the sunrise viewpoints on the summit ridge - Bright Summit or Clear Cool Terrace, depending on where the weather is coming from. Your guide will have checked the forecast the evening before and will tell you honestly whether sunrise is worth the alarm; when it works, the cloud below the ridge lights from underneath and the granite peaks stand out of it one after another. Expect to stand still in the cold for twenty minutes, and dress for it.

Breakfast
Back at the hotel for breakfast, or a packed breakfast if the group prefers to stay out.

Morning — The high ground
With the tour groups still on their way up, the morning belongs to anyone already on the mountain. You walk out to Paiyun Pavilion and the Flying-over Rock, a block of granite balanced on a narrower base that has been photographed from every angle for a century, and take the ridge paths with the cloud still in the valleys.

Lunch
A set meal at a restaurant on the mountain.

Afternoon — The Guest-Greeting Pine and down
The descent goes down past the Guest-Greeting Pine at Yuping, the pine growing out of the rock that has become the emblem of Huangshan, and then down the stairway or by the Yuping cable car to the lower station. The scenic shuttle returns you to the transfer terminal, where your driver is waiting.

Evening — Back in the city
Private vehicle to Huangshan city (Tunxi). On a two-day programme the tour ends here; on a longer programme you continue the next morning.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch

Accommodation
Not included - this day ends back in Huangshan city; on a longer programme it is an overnight in Huangshan city (Tunxi).

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.