Hongcun

Interesting facts

The village was originally written with a different character for Hong and was renamed in the Qing era to avoid echoing the Qianlong Emperor's personal name, Hongli.

In the early fifteenth century the Wang clan hired a feng shui master to replan the village and bring the river water in, creating the layout seen today.

In the ox-shaped plan, the Moon Pond is read as the animal's heart, South Lake as its stomach and the winding water channel as its intestines.

Lexu Hall, the Wang clan's ancestral temple on the north side of the Moon Pond, is the only Ming-dynasty building left in the village.

Chengzhi Hall covers about 2,100 square metres, with more than 60 rooms arranged around nine light wells and 136 carved wooden columns.

The salt merchant's mansion even had a room for smoking opium and another, with a playful name, set aside for playing mahjong.

South Lake Academy grew out of six private schools of the late Ming, merged and rebuilt in 1814 as a single clan school on the lakeshore.

Some families led the channel water right into their homes, creating small water courtyards with fish ponds inside the walls.

Of the historic houses standing today, one dates from the Ming dynasty, 102 from the Qing and 34 from the Republican era.

The lanes beside the water channels are still paved with the original granite quarried in Yi County.

Why it is worth it

Hongcun is a village designed around water and read, by its builders, as an animal. It was founded in 1131, under the Southern Song, by the Wang clan, and over the following centuries - especially from around 1400 to 1900, when Wang families prospered as merchants - it grew into one of the richest settlements in the hill country of southern Anhui. Its plan follows the shape of an ox: Leigang Hill behind the village is the head, two great old trees the horns, the bridges over the Jiyin stream the legs, and the houses the body. The water inside the village plays the animal's organs.

That water system is what makes Hongcun unlike any other village of its kind. A narrow channel, about a metre wide, was dug to carry stream water through the settlement, winding past the doors of the houses with many bends and turns, so that households could draw water for cooking, washing and fire-fighting at their own thresholds. It feeds the Moon Pond at the centre of the village, a half-circle of still water ringed by grey-and-white houses whose reflections double them on calm mornings, and South Lake at the southern edge, a broad bow-shaped sheet of water. Walking the lanes, you are rarely out of the sound of running water.

The houses themselves are classic Huizhou architecture: whitewashed walls, black-tiled roofs and high stepped gables, built around small inner courtyards. Inside, the merchant fortunes went into timber. More than a hundred buildings from the Ming and Qing dynasties survive, and the grandest, Chengzhi Hall, built in 1855 for the salt merchant Wang Dinggui, is known for the density of its carved beams, brackets and lattice panels. It holds a small museum.

In 2000 Hongcun was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List together with the neighbouring village of Xidi as the ancient villages of southern Anhui, preserved examples of a rural settlement pattern that elsewhere has largely vanished. Film-goers may recognise the Moon Pond and the lake from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which shot scenes here.

Getting there

Hongcun lies in Yi County, Anhui, about 11 km north-east of the county seat and on the south-western flank of the Huangshan range. Huangshan Tunxi International Airport (TXN) is about 40 km away. Buses run to Hongcun from the Huangshan bus station and from Tangkou, the town at the foot of Huangshan's main scenic area.

Hongcun

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

On these lists

From the encyclopaedia