It’s hard to imagine an unspoiled habitation anywhere on the planet with a landscape exactly like that in a traditional Chinese ink-wash painting — but then I visited Hongcun village in Anhui Province.
When I saw the well-preserved town with my own eyes, it was even more extraordinary than I had envisioned.
Dating back to the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279), Hongcun was a village inhabited by a big family whose surname was Wang. The Wang family set up 13 buildings when they moved to the site and later the small village developed into a bigger town based on a fengshui master’s design. They took the initiative in applying bionics by creating the unique artificial water system for firefighting and irrigation. They did everything according to the shape of the ox the winding dam is the “intestine” of the ox; the “Moon Pond” dug beside the mouth of the spring is its “stomach”; the “Southern Lake” is its “belly”; the villagers lived in both sides of the “intestine” are its “body”. This can be said as one of the wonders in the history of construction. Of course, you have to link the two with some imagination.
So far, the water system, streets, folk houses and even interior arrangements of the village are completely preserved as the primitive conditions of the ancient village. The sceneries of the mountain and the lake are in perfect harmony with layers of houses; the natural scenes and cultural implications reflect upon each other.
And now, more than 600 years later, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” puts Hongcun on the map. Since the hit movie was filmed here, thousands of tourists have traipsed through flagstone streets to resident Wang Qingping’s cedar house to see Moon Pond and ancestral halls as impressive as those in Beijing’s Forbidden City.
To keep the tourists happy, the local government banned local villagers from opening their windows and raising pigs in the town.
These 1,400 residents of Hongcun are mere props in China’s tourism boom. The Asian giant is riding a tourism wave thanks to a runaway economy and a worldwide fascination with the rapidly developing nation. People are flocking to see the Great Wall, the ancient terra cotta warriors in Xian and lesser-known relics, such as Hongcun in south Anhui province.
But the hefty admission fees that tourist fork over often end up in the pockets of politically connected companies. These businesses have secured access to priceless temples, tombs, grottoes and other antiquities from Beijing to the far western borders in Tibet.
Like land grabs that have plagued rural China, these deals are cut quietly between businesspeople and local party bosses. Chinese and Western conservationists say villagers are left out of these negotiations and alienated from their heritage. Some can no longer freely visit temples or use buildings and land that have been in their families for generations.
On a recent afternoon in Hongcun, tour groups alighted from buses in a dirt parking lot furnished with a toilet and a wooden ticket booth. Signs in English, Chinese and Korean helped them navigate the village, about the size of Walt Disney Co.’s California Adventure theme park. The visitors jammed onto an arch bridge, snapping pictures of giant lotus leaves swaying below, before passing through Hongcun’s high walls.
Once inside, tourists gazed at Hongcun’s famous water system, which runs alongside each house so that residents can draw water for cooking and washing. The stream flows into the moon-shaped pond in the center of Hongcun, then out into farmlands.
In 2000, An Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” a martial arts love story starring Zhang Ziyi, brought fame to Hongcun when it played to packed theaters around the world, winning four Academy Awards. The movie was filmed here to reflect a traditional Chinese village.
Later that year, the United Nations named Hongcun a World Heritage Site, for its “rare surviving examples of an unspoiled way of life in harmony with nature.”
About 33 of the 830 sites on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization list are in China. Beijing has 60 sites on a tentative list to receive the designation, which is promptly placed in marketing brochures.
After getting attention by more people, some authorities have curtailed development of some historical attractions, but overall enforcement is weak. It’s common for such directives to get progressively eroded at the local level.
I don’t object to tourism companies being involved in development, but they should respect cultural relics and take care of locals, and this regulation has to be enforced at the local level.
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