Anhui · Two Villages the Money Left Behind
Xidi and Hongcun (西递宏村)
Two villages in the hills of southern Anhui, listed by UNESCO in 2000 and still lived in. One of them was laid out in the Ming dynasty in the shape of an ox, with a piped water system that runs past every front door and still works.
Quick Facts
The Short Version
| What it is | Two Ming and Qing villages of the Huizhou merchant country, inscribed by UNESCO in 2000 and still ordinary working villages |
|---|---|
| Where | Yixian county in Huangshan prefecture, southern Anhui. The commentary puts Shanghai about 300 km away |
| What survives | Xidi has 124 Ming and Qing houses and three ancestral halls. Hongcun has 158 old buildings, 137 of them intact. Those are the site’s figures |
| The two villages | A short drive apart, ticketed separately, and different in character. Hongcun is about water, Xidi is about halls and carving |
| Why they are intact | The merchant money stopped in the late Qing and nothing was knocked down and rebuilt after that |
| Booking | A ticket at each village gate. No advance booking needed outside holiday weeks |
| Time needed | Half a day for each. A night in one of them changes the visit completely |
| Language | Chinese signage with English on the main boards. House interiors are labelled in Chinese |
Why Go
An Ox Made of Streets, and a Fortune That Stopped
1. Hongcun was designed as an animal
The Wang clan settled here in the Song dynasty. A long storm later pushed the stream at the foot of the hill into a second watercourse, and the village found itself with high ground behind and water in front, which is the arrangement Chinese siting doctrine asks for. In the Ming the clan hired a geomancer named He Keda and gave him the whole village to replan. He took ten years over it.
What he settled on was an ox lying down. The hill behind is the head, two trees were the horns, the houses are the body, four bridges are the legs. A spring in the middle of the village was dug out into a half-moon pond, the Moon Pond, and that became the stomach. The half-moon is deliberate: a full moon and an open flower have nowhere to go but down, so both are kept short of full.
It did not work, so he looked again and decided the plan was right and the detail was wrong. An ox chews the cud and needs two stomachs. The paddy south of the village was dug out into a second sheet of water, South Lake, and the Moon Pond was made to drain into it. Channels carry stream water down from the hill, through the Moon Pond, along the lanes past every front door and on into the lake, with enough natural fall to keep it moving. Villagers have washed in it and fought fires with it ever since, and the lanes run cooler than the fields because of it.
2. They survive because the money stopped
For two or three centuries the merchants of Huizhou held near monopolies in timber, tea, silk and salt. Clans put their sons through the examinations, those sons became officials, and the officials protected the family trade. A Chinese saying holds that to get rich and not go home is to wear embroidered clothes in the dark, so the money came back here and went into houses, halls and carving.
Then the late Qing took the dynasty down and the merchants with it. No new capital arrived in these valleys afterwards. That is the whole reason there is anything left to look at: nobody had the means to pull the old houses down and build better ones. The villages were preserved by going broke.
The catch. Most visitors photograph the Moon Pond, walk one lane of Hongcun, drive over to Xidi for the arch and leave. The thing actually worth following is the water: where it comes into the village, which side of each doorstep it runs along, and where it goes out. Half an hour spent tracing one channel teaches more about how this place worked than a day of courtyards.
Orientation
Two Villages, Two Visits
Hongcun is the one to walk slowly. Enter across South Lake, work up to the Moon Pond, and let the channels rather than the map decide the route. Art students sit along the water in term time, which is a fair indication of where the views are.
Xidi is tighter and drier: one long lane with side alleys, the stone arch at the entrance, and the ancestral halls. It rewards going into the houses rather than walking past them, because the contrast between the plain white outside and the carved interior is the point.
Practical
Things Worth Knowing
Follow one channel end to end
Into the village, through the Moon Pond, past the doorsteps, out into South Lake. It takes half an hour and it is the only way the plan becomes visible.
Stay the night in one of them
Both villages have guesthouses inside old houses. The day trippers leave by five and the lanes are a different place after that.
Go into Chengzhi Hall
The salt merchant’s house at Hongcun, built around the 1850s. The site gives 2,100 square metres, 136 wooden columns, nine light wells and sixty rooms, with twenty carvers working four years on the woodwork.
Remember people live here
These are working villages with a ticket gate, not an open-air museum. Courtyards that are open are marked; the rest are homes.
Timing
When to Go
| Season | The case for | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| March to April | Rape flowers in the fields around both villages, mist on the hills in the mornings, and the water at its clearest | Rain is frequent and the stone lanes are slippery |
| June to August | Lotus across the South Lake end, and the channels make the lanes noticeably cooler than the open ground | Hot, humid and the busiest months for tour groups |
| Late October to November | The best light of the year on white walls, autumn colour on the hills, and thinner crowds midweek | The first week of October is the national holiday and both villages fill |
| December to February | Snow on the black tiles against white walls, which is the image these villages are painted for, and almost nobody about | Cold and damp indoors. Old houses here have no heating |
Context
A Clan, an Examination System, and Three Halls
Xidi belongs to the Hu family, and the clan holds that it descends from a Tang emperor. The story runs that in 904 the court fled Chang’an, the empress gave birth on the road, and a Huizhou official carried the infant home and raised him under a new name. Whatever its history, the claim shaped the village: one of the halls here keeps a tablet to the second Tang emperor rather than to a local ancestor.
The ancestral hall is the building that matters most in a village like this. It is taller than the houses, plainer, and set where everyone passes it. Jing’ai Hall is the Hu clan’s at Xidi, and the whole surname gathered there to make the offerings. For men who spent their working lives on the road as merchants, the hall was the fixed point that home meant.
Reading was the other fixed point, because the examinations were how a trading family got an official into court and an official was what protected the trade. The programme counts 54 academies in Huizhou under the Kangxi emperor and nineteen top-placed examination graduates from the prefecture in the Qing. A couplet in one of the Xidi houses puts it without any pretence: reading is good and trade is good, whichever works is good; starting a business is hard and keeping it is hard, and knowing that they are hard makes them less so.
Nearby
Other Stops on the Same Trip
Spot · a morning’s drive
Mount Huangshan (黄山)
The granite peaks the prefecture is named after, and the reason most people are in this corner of Anhui at all. Two very different days.
Spot · 114 km
Qiandao Lake (千岛湖)
The reservoir of a thousand islands across the border in Zhejiang, on the road back towards Hangzhou.
Spot · 122 km
Mount Sanqing (三清山)
Granite pillars and plank walkways in Jiangxi, south of here.
Where to Base
Huangshan (黄山)
Huangshan prefecture takes in the mountain, the old Huizhou county towns and both of these villages. The transport hub is the city at the bottom of the valley, with an airport and a high-speed station; the villages are an hour or so up into the hills from there by road.
Three days covers the area without rushing: the mountain, then the two villages, with a night in Hongcun or Xidi rather than back in the city. Doing the villages as a day trip from the mountain is possible and is the version most people regret.
Experiences
What You Can Actually Do Here
On site · half a day
Hongcun and its water
South Lake, the Moon Pond, the channels along the lanes, and Chengzhi Hall for the carving.
On site · 3 hr
Xidi and the halls
The stone arch, the main lane, and the ancestral halls with their tablets and couplets.
Overnight · both
A night inside a village
Staying in a converted merchant house, with the lanes to yourself after the coaches leave.
Come for the water plan at Hongcun and the halls at Xidi, give each village half a day rather than squeezing both into one, and stay a night if the schedule allows it. The single most useful thing to understand before arriving is that these villages look this way because the money that built them ran out and never came back.
Build the Villages into a Huangshan Trip
Tell us your dates and whether you want the mountain as well, and our local team will put it together: the drive up from the station, a night inside one of the villages, someone who can read the halls and the carving, and the mountain either side of it.