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.
