Yixian

Rural county in southern Anhui containing the UNESCO-listed Huizhou villages of Hongcun and Xidi, the best-preserved examples of vernacular merchant-class architecture in China. The county town itself is minor; the surrounding villages are the draw.

Yixian County is the administrative area in southern Anhui that contains the two UNESCO World Heritage Huizhou villages — Hongcun and Xidi — as well as a wider network of smaller villages that preserve the distinctive architecture, culture and landscape of the old Huizhou merchant culture. The county itself is minor: a small town by the Leishui River with ordinary rural infrastructure. The reason visitors come here is the villages, and the landscape of paddy fields, ink-wash mountains and traditional whitewashed buildings that surrounds them.

Hongcun village is the more famous of the two UNESCO sites, largely because of its role as a filming location for the 2000 film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Its defining feature is the artificial water system — channels running from a natural spring through the village and into the semicircular Moon Pond at the centre — which was designed as a fire prevention and water supply system during the Ming dynasty. The surrounding hills and paddy fields, particularly the rapeseed fields in spring, produce compositions that have become a canonical image of rural China. Entry now requires a ticket and the village is heavily visited in peak seasons.

Xidi village has a more linear streetscape and is slightly less crowded than Hongcun. Its ancestral halls, memorial arches (paifang) and residential courtyards are among the best-preserved examples of Ming and Qing Huizhou domestic architecture. The Huizhou merchants who built these villages were absent for years at a time, trading in distant cities; the architecture's elaborate interiors and the prominence of the paifang arches reflect both wealth and the particular social codes of Huizhou society.

Beyond the two famous villages, Yixian county contains dozens of less-visited but still significant settlements — Nanping, Guanlu, Mukeng — that are worth seeking out for visitors who find Hongcun and Xidi too managed. Local buses and hired motorbikes connect the county town to these outlying villages.