Hongcun Village and Huangshan
(Yellow Mountain):
Land of the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

When I saw the film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, I just assumed the villages in the film were movie sets. Well, surprise, surprise, much of the film was shot on location in the surrounding areas of this village. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that such beautiful ancient villages had been so well preserved for all of us to appreciate and enjoy.

The present village was built over eight hundred years ago. All inhabitants to this day have the same family name, Wang. I met an old gentleman who claimed to be the ninety-second generation of the original family who settled there. His perspectives on life and time had to be quite different from most of ours.

The villagers lost everything in two big fires before this village was built on the present site. They hired a Feng Shui master to design their new village. In my opinion, that gentleman was an engineer disguised as a Feng Shui master. He put a big pond in front of the village, as well as a smaller one in the middle. Then, he diverted a mountain stream which ran through the village to feed the ponds. The same creek or canal still flows past every house within the village today.

Needless to say, the villagers never had another disastrous fire and every home had running water. They are still using the same water-supply system this very day. The water looked remarkably fresh and clean when I was there. The houses were well cared for and they all dated from the Ming and Qing dynasties. During the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, the villages put mud on their decorative walls and woodcarvings and plastered them with revolutionary posters! It is now protected as a United Nations World Heritage Site. The architecture of most of the houses in this village exemplifies the distinctive and functional styles from the Ming and Qing dynasties. The Peabody Essex Museum purchased one of such houses near here and put it back together brick by brick in Salem, Massachusetts.

Hongcun Village is located in the Huangshan area in Anhui Province. Huangshan is one of the best known scenic areas to the Chinese and is one of the must-visit areas to them. My parents visited there before the Second World War. I was most impressed by the cloud formations I saw on the mountain. Fortunately, the weather was perfect on both of my visits over the last two years. I literally walked in many classical Chinese landscape paintings while hiking on the mountain; there were clouds rolling through the jagged peaks and the twisted pines. Many times distant cloud formations looked like oceans shrouded in mist.

Huangshan is only about an hour away from Shanghai by plane. I highly recommend anyone visiting Shanghai to make a side trip to the Huangshan area and spend a few days there. Tourist facilities are well developed there.

Cloudfall

Entrance to Hongcun

Hongcun Village Pond

Huangshan

Misty Huangshan

XinAn River Town