We descended Huangshan late Sunday morning on the Taiping cable car and at the base hired a minibus driver to take us to Hongcun about 50km to the south-west. Hongcun and its close neighbour Xidi are World Heritage listed ancient towns often referred to as living museums of Ming and Qing dynasty period Anhui-style architecture. The towns date back more than a thousand years and both feature narrow, slate-paved alleyways winding between high-walled stone buildings containing sturdy timber beams and some with exquisite wood carvings. The centre-piece of Hongcun is Moon Pond, a semi circular pool surrounded by a row of attached buildings.Both towns are in a glorious state of arrested decay and both are exceedingly photogenic. We stayed a night in each town at a guesthouse and spent a few hours in each place strolling through the maze of alleyways and inspecting the centuries-old ancestral halls and residences. There was plenty of nice food on offer and in Hongcun we stopped for lunch at a tiny café that was roasting golden duck legs on a bed of tea leaves over smoldering charcoal. Along with some wok-fried green vegetables and steamed rice, they made an excellent meal.
At dusk we watched the moon rise over Moon Pond and Lee Tuan set off a symphony of goose-honking that reverberated around the village when she unwittingly herded a few along the pond’s edge. We stopped to join a group of photographers gathered at an alleyway entrance but we were all quickly dispersed by a shouting shop owner furious about the damage we were all apparently doing to her business’ feng shui. After dark we stumbled on an outdoor Chinese theatre performance where despite the biting cold air, a crowd waited patiently for over an hour for the show to begin. We did too but stayed for only a few minutes after the noisy, colourful show began by which time we were more than ready for a warmer place.
In both Hongcun and Xidi there were many groups of young art students sitting on small stools, sketching buildings and streetscapes from a myriad of perspectives. We looked at their work in progress as we passed – much of it was excellent and looking around it was easy to see why these two towns are such magnets for streetscape art education.
Xidi and Hongcun are considered to have some of the best preserved ancient residential architecture in the world and while they are becoming increasingly touristy, they are still real towns with residents going about their lives as they have for decades past.
