In real life, the villagers placed more importance on education than martial arts. This was also the location of the curtain raiser in the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, when lead actor Chow Yun-fat led his horse across the lake and into the village. Shi Guangde / For China DailyĪ long stone causeway cuts across South Lake, providing an elegant entry to the village. Bottom: Hongcun is the perfect picture of idyllic rural life, seemingly caught in a time warp. Top: White geese swim in the dark green tranquil waters of the village pond. In ancient days, Anhui men left home to trade when they were as young as 12 or 13, and the horse heads on the walls are good talismans, which ensured that the boys came back home safely, loaded with wealth and honor. The walls may be of differing heights but all are topped with eaves that have corners shaped like horse heads. Like other villages in South Anhui, these village dwellings are tightly packed together, separated by high walls that served both to provide privacy and fire breaks. Hongcun has 137 houses on the preservation list, and it is a living museum of traditional Anhui architecture. The clustered white-bricked houses and black roofs are typical Anhui-style, and they fit into the "painting" like black silhouettes against a white background. The houses and their reflections are in perfect symmetry, even while they are partly veiled by the morning mist. The South Lake, or Nanhu, dug during the Ming Dynasty for irrigation, lies calmly before the village, its mirror-like surface reflecting the contour of distant hills with its row upon row of ancient buildings. Looking from the entrance of the village, the vista spreads out and gives the illusion you have stepped into a Chinese ink-and-brush painting. Hongcun boasts all the simplicity and calm of ancient rural society, and the 30-hectare village stirs up strong nostalgia for those times, more so even than the more commercialized tourist traps of Lijiang or Pingyao, also World Heritage sites. The village's winding original man-made irrigation system of stone canals comprises the bovine intestines. Its natural position already conforms to the ideal layout, with its back to a mountain, Leigang Hill, and its front facing water, the West Creek.Ī half-moon pond within the village is the oxen stomach and a larger lake to the south is its belly. The ox itself is an auspicious animal in Chinese beliefs, and Hongcun is laid out according to the principles of fengshui, the Chinese art of geomancy. In fact, this little village in southern Anhui province, not too far away from the famous Huangshan mountain scenery, resembles an ox on its belly more than the more ferocious beast. It was one of the key locations for the filming of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee's martial arts film that so captured the imagination of Western audiences. Nine hundred years later, Hongcun is still well preserved, having escaped the turbulence of changing rulers in the Ming and Qing eras and having survived the threats of modernity in more recent years.
It was first built in the days of the southern Song dynasty, in 1311. The half-moon shaped pond, named Yuezhao pond, is the center of Hongcun and it is here that village activities revolve, even up to now. Tan Zongyang visits Hongcun, a village in Anhui that is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. This is an ancient village untouched by war and chaos, and beautiful in its tranquility.
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