Morning — the road to Wuzhen
Wuzhen sits in Tongxiang, on the southern edge of the Yangtze delta about an hour and a half from Hangzhou by road, and it has been a market town on the canal network for more than a thousand years; its name appears in records from the Tang. Unlike some of the better-known water towns, the old quarter is not a working residential district any more - it is a managed heritage area, with the craft workshops kept running as workshops rather than as displays. Arrive early, before the coaches, and the lanes are quiet enough to hear the canal. Tickets are issued separately for the East and West Scenic Areas and the workshops are concentrated in the West; your guide will have them ready so that you walk straight in.
Late morning — the indigo dye works
The Hongyuantai dye works is the reason many people come. Chinese blue calico is made by a resist method rather than by printing the pattern: a paste of soybean flour and slaked lime is applied to the cloth through a carved wooden stencil, the cloth is dipped in a vat of fermented indigo, and the paste is scraped off to leave white patterns on a blue ground, with the fine veining that makes the technique recognisable. The vats here are reworked daily and the cloth dries on tall bamboo frames over the courtyard, which is the photograph everyone takes. Your guide will walk you through the sequence from stencil to vat to washing, and the workshop sells pieces made on site.
Lunch
Local cooking in the old town: braised mutton with dried bean curd, river shrimp, smoked fish, ding sheng gao - a small steamed cake of rice flour and red bean, sold at festivals - and the local sesame-and-sugar pastry known as gu sao bing. The food is plain, sweet-leaning and regional, and better than the renown of most theme-park towns would suggest. The lanes also sell a respectable bowl of noodles and a pot of the local rice wine, and there are two or three courtyard restaurants with upstairs windows over the canal, which are worth asking for. The local rice wine is worth a taste even for people who do not usually drink spirits: sanbaijiu is distilled from rice and served in small cups at around fifty per cent alcohol, and the plum wine sold alongside it is far gentler.
Afternoon — woodcarving, wine and the canal
The afternoon is for the other workshops. The Jiangnan bed museum occupies a run of old houses and holds more than a hundred carved marriage beds, some of them eighteenth-century work with inlaid bone and dozens of carved figures on the panels around the sleeping platform; the carving tradition here is the same one that produced the town's lattice windows and cabinet work. The Sanbaijiu workshop ferments and distils rice wine in the open, and the name - three whites - comes from the white rice, white flour and white water used to make it. Then take a wupeng boat along the canal, the small covered craft that gave the water town its nineteenth-century trade, and watch the light come off the water as the day cools.
Cultural Insight — why these towns exist
Water towns like Wuzhen are not picturesque by accident. The Yangtze delta is flat, wet and largely below the level of the rivers that cross it, so the whole region was engineered: dykes, sluices, paddy fields and canals, built and maintained over centuries by the families who owned the land. In the Ming and Qing, Wuzhen was a market town where rice was loaded onto boats for the cities and silk and cloth were brought back, and the merchant families who did well put their profits into courtyards, gardens, academies and temples. The workshops you are walking through were the ordinary end of that economy; the woodcarving and the wine were work, not heritage.
Evening — back to Hangzhou
Return to Hangzhou in the evening, which takes about an hour and a half, and eat near the hotel. If the day is fine and you still have the appetite for it, the northern shore of West Lake is a good place to finish: the lights come on around the water, the music fountain at Hubin runs several times an hour on a published schedule, and the promenade is entirely level, so the walk can be as short or as long as you want it to be. The drive back is on the expressway and takes about an hour and a half; if you would rather eat dinner in Wuzhen and return late, that can be arranged in advance when you book.
Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Accommodation
In Hangzhou.
