A Road Trip Through Southern Anhui

Southern Anhui is compact, beautiful and criminally under-driven. Within a two-hour radius you have a UNESCO village cluster, a Taoist sacred mountain, working tea hills, an old prefecture town, and the porcelain capital just over the Jiangxi line — and the roads between them are the good part.

The Huizhou inheritance

Everything here traces to Huizhou, the historic prefecture that produced one of imperial China’s most successful merchant classes. Huizhou traders dominated salt, timber, tea and pawnbroking, made fortunes elsewhere, and spent them at home — building the villages you’ve come to see.

The architecture is unmistakable: whitewashed walls, black tiles, horse-head gables stepping up the roofline, blank exterior walls and everything facing inward onto a courtyard with a skywell. Interiors are carved brick, stone and wood, sometimes obsessively.

Two of the villages are UNESCO World Heritage sites — Xidi and Hongcun — and both are wonderful and busy. Which is why the driving matters: the unlisted villages an hour away are nearly as good and nearly empty.

The route

Tunxi (Huangshan City) — start here. Old Street is touristy but genuine, and it’s the transport hub: rail from Shanghai, Hangzhou and Nanjing.

Xidi and Hongcun — the famous pair, in Yixian county. Go at opening or in the last hour of light. Hongcun’s moon pond and the Nanhu lake are the set pieces; Xidi has the better residential fabric.

Bishan, Nanping, Taichuan — same county, unticketed or lightly so, and where you’ll find village life still going on around the architecture. Bishan has an unexpected bookshop-and-café scene.

Chengkan and Tangmo — north toward Huangshan City, both superb and both quiet. Chengkan is laid out on bagua geomantic principles and has the finest single ancestral hall in the region.

She County (Huizhou ancient town) — the prefectural capital, with an intact archway street, the old academy, and the Xin’an river.

Qiyun Mountain, Xiuning — a Taoist sacred mountain, red sandstone rather than granite, with cliff shrines and inscriptions and a fraction of Huangshan’s crowds. Half a day.

Fuxi, She County — the origin of Huangshan Maofeng tea. Tea hills, processing sheds in season, and tasting with the growers.

Huangshan itself — the mountain, which deserves its own two days and its own planning.

Jingdezhen — over the border in Jiangxi, an hour and a half from Tunxi, and the natural extension of the trip.

When to go

Late March to mid-April, when the rapeseed flowers. The combination of yellow fields, white walls and black tile is the reason photographers come, and it’s a genuinely short window.

Autumn — late October and November — is the other good season: harvest, persimmons hanging on bare trees, clear air, far fewer people.

Avoid the plum rains in mid-June to early July, when it rains for three weeks straight. See our seasons guide.

Eating

Huizhou cuisine is one of the eight great Chinese regional traditions and the least exported:

• Stinky mandarin fish (臭鳜鱼) — lightly fermented before cooking. Smells alarming, tastes superb, and is the dish to order.
• Hairy tofu (毛豆腐) — tofu with a cultivated white mould, pan-fried. Same principle as a soft cheese.
• Wild bamboo shoots, mountain herbs and preserved pork, cooked slowly
• Maofeng and Keemun tea, both from these hills

More context in our food guide.

Practical notes

Driving: you need a Chinese licence. Roads are excellent and distances short. Without one, buses connect the main villages but not the interesting ones.

Where to sleep: courtyard guesthouses inside the villages — many are restored Huizhou houses, and staying in one is much of the point.

Tickets: each village charges separately, and the unlisted ones often don’t. A day of unticketed villages is frequently the better day.