Get to know Dratang Monastery

About 48 km east of Gongkar airport is the turn-off to the 11th-century Dratang Monastery, located 2km off the main road in the Dranang Valley. This small akyapa monastery of only eight monks is of interest mainly to art specialists for its rare murals, which combine India styles. Bring a torch to see the murals. If you are interested in murals, you should not miss it for your China vacation deals.
The assembly hall has central statues of Dorje Chang and the monastery’s founder, Drapa Ngonshe. Look for the interesting oracle costume and mirror in which the oracle would discern his visions. The inner sanctum holds all that remains of the mural, the best of which are on the back hall.
A side protector chapel is accessed by steps outside and to the left of the main entrance. The chapel has a passage at the back that leads to a rooftop chapel and kora.
Also worth visiting if you have a particular interest are the ruins of the Jampaling Kumbum, on the hillside a half-hour walk southeast of Dratang. The 13-storey chorten, built in 1472, was one of the largest in Tibet with an attendant monastery of 200 monks before it was dynamited by the Chinese in 1963. Rebuilding efforts are limited to a two-storey Jampa chapel. Check out the little brass toe on the throne - ll that remains of the original Jampa statue after which the complex was named.
To get to Jampling, walk south out of Dratang Monastery (a main travel destination for your China best tours) and after a couple of minutes turn left, following a path to the base of the ruins visible on the hillside above.
A direct minibus runs to Dratang from Barkhor Sq in Lhasa every day at 8am. Otherwise, take any Tsetang-bound bus to the Dratang junction, from where it’s a short three-wheel motor rickshaw ride or 20-minute walk to the monastery. The pilgrim bus from Samye to Lhasa stops here briefly.
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Learn something about Chengkan

Chengkan (famous destination for affordable China travel packages) was originally laid out by a local fengshui master, who designed the village in accordance with the theory of the bagua or ‘eight trigrams’ described in the Yi Jing or Book of Changes, one of the oldest known Chinese classical texts. The eight mountains surrounding the village correspond to the eight directions on the circular ‘Trigram Chart’, and the s-shape Longxi River passing through the village was seen to represent the boundary between the well-known black and white Yin and Yang fish symbol in the center of the chart. Therefore the fengshui practitioner decided that the village should laid out in accordance to this chart in order to bring health and prosperity to all who lived there. Nothing was left to chance; even the village’s town temples were placed on the eyes of the fish for added symbolism.

The village layout has stayed roughly the same throughout 1800 years history, integrating different architectural styles from different time periods into its original design. However, following the award of the UNESCO World Heritage Status to several other villages in the region in 2000, Chengkan has underdone a fair amount of refurbishment in preparation for the arrival of tourists.

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A Typical Village with Huizhou Style - Zhang Tan

Just a few kilometers upstream from Jiangjun Bu lies another peaceful village called Zhang Tan. The first noticeable feature of the village is the colossal, 1000 year-old camphor tree that rises from the main village (you should consider it for your China tour deals) square and covers a large proportion of Zhang Tan which its thick canopy. With the sun peeking through the thick foliage and a gentle breeze blowing in from the river, this square is a perfect place to grab a snack from the number of small restaurants stationed under the tree’s branches that serve up delicious local fish. The village also contains a large selection of items associated with ancient weddings. The centerpiece of the museum is a wedding carriage built for the marriage of Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang. One of the largest and most sophisticated in terms of design, this carriage has been restored to a very high level, preserving the intricacy bas-relief wood carvings that cover its exterior.

Local legend tells a story how the wedding carriage and many of the wedding gifts for the Emperor came to be in this area. According to this legend, Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang became completely enamoured with a woman at the imperial court and decided to leave the central seat of his Empire to live with here in Anhui (famous travel destination for China best tours). While in Anhui, the Emperor decided that he wanted to marry this woman and ordered for the gifts and carriage to be sent here. However the soon-to-be princess decided she could not bear the pressures of a regal existence and killed herself before the wedding took place, and the numerous gifts have remained untouched in the village ever since.

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Escape the Hot Summer Days on Guanshan Grassland

Guanshan Grassland is located in the southwest of Long County, Baoji City and about 134 kilometer away from Baoji in Shaanxi Province (main travel destination for best tours of China). The grass land is a national 3a scenic area with European style. In the grassland, you can witness forest, grassland, brooks, valleys. So it is the best destination to escape the hot summer days.

One must-do in the grassland is riding horses. With frondent grassland, lush forest and large land, Gaunshan has been a famous natural grassland since ancient China. There are 2000 horses and over 400 of them after being trained, selected and quarantine inspection are prepared for tourists to ride. Growing up in such a inspiring natural evironment, every horse is very strong. Riding horses through the beautiful grassland is very big-hearted and facinating.
Toxophily has a long history in China. Bow and arrow was once used in war in ancient China. But now it is a kind of entertaining sport and is an necessary item in grassland. You can try to shoot bow here under the instruction of professional archer.
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The general introduction of Jiangjunbu and Hongling Village

Jiangjun Bu, a small fishing village located around ten kilometers from Nanyuankon Village, is home to an ancient opera house which has been recently restored. Several times a day the villagers put down their fishing nets, dress up in old custumes and put on performances of local Hui Opera (learn more about it via China guide) for the groups of unsuspecting tourists who venture to this sleepy hamlet. Jiangjun Bu is nestle among a few large tea plantations and in many of the houses you can catch a glimpse of the traditional ‘tea roasting’ process, where the tea is dried by hand over charcoal on a contraption engineered by the villagers.

 Hongling village is another interesting place that rests in a small inlet on Xin’an River. The villages refer to it as Maihuayu. Although the villagers do fish, the main trade here is the cultivation of bonsai trees, hundreds of which can be found scattered throughout workshops and miniature orchards.

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Get to know the essence of Xidi Village

The real attraction of Xidi, however, lies in the exquisite craftsmanship of the stone and woodcarvings that decorates the houses and larger halls. There are black marble doorframes, delicate stone sculptures of different plants and animals and many other works that are uniquely characteristic of Xidi and its surrounding area. A local quarry is to thank for the abundance of blue-black marble which was delicately shaped by artisans from the nearby village of Hecun.

Most of the dwellings in Xidi (the most famous destination for China vacation deals) are structured in a traditional 3-room or quadrangle courtyard shape, and decorated with elaborate canopies and eaves, wooden courtyard panels and wood, brick and stone carvings. Red Chinese couplets or duilian adorn the entrance pillars to each house, and deep grooves in the floor by the front door were used to help support barricades which stopped unwellcome intruders entering. The homes are typically illuminated by uncovered skylights int he center of the residence, and beneath the skylights stone throughs are placed to collect rainwater.

An interesting architectural detail in Xidi involves the dividing walls built between the houses, which are often built higher than the roofs of the dwellings in dorder to prevent fire from spreading. In an era when most houses were made predominately of wood and people used oil lamps to light their way at night the risk of building catching fire was high, and over time the villagers evolved many preventative practices against thins. One of the more extreme is that none of the houses in Xidi face south as this symboliss bad luch and fire, although this supersitition may have a more practical basis to do with the valley’s prevailing winds. You should know these things during your China best tours in Xidi

One architectral element of the dwellings that raises a few eyebrow in mordern times in the number of small upstairs window looking down onto the street outside. As mnay of the adult males in the village were merchants trading in salt or porcelain they would marry and then leave their wives at home to go to seek their fortune, of not returning for years on end; tables in some houses are split into two piece to symbolize the ‘half-half’ incomplete nature of the home. In the days of neo-Confuciannism it was generally accepted that women were of a lower status than their mal counterparts, and therefore wives usually didn’t venture outside or even downstairs for fear of causing scandal for their in-laws, so the small window were built for them to look out onto the outside world.

Xidi is a best place to learn the ancient Huizhou culture and customs during your travel to China

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The highlights in Wan’an

On the main commercial street, the facade of the old houses are well-preseved and fascinationg to look at, baring popular commercial slogans from the early twentieth century.

The town’s main commercial street also has a barber shop that has survived from the early twentieth century and is worth a detour if you have time.

There used to be three outstanding luopan workshops in Wan’an called Wu Luheng, Fang Xiushui and Hu Ruyi, named after the craftsmen who once piled their trade there. Unfortunately, following the economic downturn in Wan’an and the Sino-Japanese War of the early twentieth century on the Wu Luheng Workshop remained, and even that was shut down during the cultural purge of the 1960s. In the 1980s all three worshops restarted production in some form or other, attracting tourists, fengshui practitioners and antique dealers from home and abroad to rediscover the lost art of the luopan fengshui compass.

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Learn the history of Wan’an - the compass capital of China

For over 700 years from the Three Kingdoms period through to the end of the Sui Dynasty, Wan’an was the administrative capital of the then prosperous Xiuning County, which left a legacy of cultural and economic traditions still visible today. Nowadays,the town mostly survives on rural trade and a small but increasing number of tourists passing through, however, during the Ming and Qing dynasties, Wan’an was an extremely active commercial port with a population of up to 10,000 people, boasting a large and vibrant market and hundreds of shops and hotels.

The port was based on serving the flat river boats of the merchant who were using the Xin’an River to reach the Grand Canal. Grand Canal at the time connected Beijing to Hangzhou. Once the boats had reached the Grand Canal, they had access to two axes - the Grand Canal itself from north to south and the Yangtze River (on which you can cruise and enjoy the beautiful view along the bank during Yangtze River tour) from west to east.

Along with the construction boom that accompanied the riches brough back by the Huizhou merchant came the rise in popularity of the Wan’an luopan compass, as a prospective homeowners looked for auspicious sites on which to build new homes or looked for ways to spruce up their existing dwellings. The Wan’an became the perfect location for skilled craftsmen and fenshui practitioners to meet their merchant clients, discuss ideas and refine their compassed to meet their individual fengshui needs.

The fortunes of Wan’an declined along with the prosperity of the merchants, and as other methods of transportation started to eclipse shipping, many luopan stores and workshops that had sprung up around the town during the boom years began to close down. However, in spite of the economic hardships and persecution of “superstitious old practices” endured by luopan craftsmen during the 1960s, Wan’an remained famous nationally and internationally for its sophisticated knowledge and workmanship, and to this day you can still find a handful of craftsmen making the luopan compassed for fengshui practitioners and enthusiastic amateurs alike.

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Learn the History of Xidi

Xidi was first settled during the Huangyou period (1049 - 1053) in the Song Dynasty and, as with many of the villages in and around the ancient district of Huizhou, the rise of Xidi (the famoud travel destination for travel to China) was closedly tied to fortunes of a particular clan, in this case the Hu family. Hu Shiliang, 5th generation leader of the Hu Clan discovered the site of present-day Xidi during one of his business trips for Emperor Yuanfeng, and fell in love with the blue-black stones and green hills of the area. He took the of his trusted feng shui master and decided to leave Wuyuan which had been home to the Hu clan until then, to build a new community.

The village was originally given name Xichuan (West River), due to the west-flowing river which run through it. This is different to the vast majority of settlements in China where rivers tend to flow from high western to plateaus to the east coast. However, the name was changed to Xidi so as to properly emphasize the favorable omen of the direction of the water and bring the village success and food fortune.

During the Ming Dynasty, member of the clan began to venture outside the province as merchants, dealing mostly in salt, where they obtained the excusive right to trade salt from Yangzhou in nearby Jiangsu Province. There they controlled the supply in order to drive up the price and became extremely wealthy, leading to a construction boom in the village. Older, successful merchants returned home to not only construct palatial residence for themselves using the finest craftsmen and best materials available in order to show off their wealth and status, but they also developed public infrastructure in the village such as wells, temples and schools.

By the middle of the 17th century, the influence wiled by member of the Hu family had expanded from commerce into politics, and many were high-ranking official or Imperial Mandarins. The prosperity of Xidi peaked in the 18th and 19th centuries, at which time the village was compriese of about 600 residences with a population of over 10,000 people, four fifths of whom belonged to the Hu clan.
At the end of the Qing Dynasty, Xidi began to fall into decline as the merchant’s profits dried up and battles between the imperial Qing armies and Taiping rebels ravaged the area. Apart from the destruction wreaked during the chaotic years of the 1960s and the more sedate erosion brought on by the passage of time, Xidi remained largely unchanged or just under a century the UNESCO Heritage patrimony brough the world’s attention to Yixian. In order to avoid the worst of the crowds it is best to go in the early morning or late in the afternoon.

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Xidi - A Village Like A Beautiful Chinese Painting

Located in Yixian County, some 70 kilometers north-west of Tunxi, Xidi (a famous travel destination for top 10 China tours) is a picturesque village set in a lush valley against the backdrop of the Luo mountains. Along with the nearby village of Hongcun, Xidi was declared a part of the ‘Ancient Villages of Southern Anhui’ World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2000 for its well-preserved examples of Hui Architecture from Ming and Qing dynasties and its picture-postcard Chinese landscape scenery.

There are 320 Ming and Qing dynasty residences remaining in the village, 124 of which are still in good condition, and visitors have the chance to enter some of the more well-restored homes and public buildings as part of the ‘assigned housing programme’ the village operates. There is a 80 yuan entrance fee to the village, a proportion of which goes directly to the residents who open their houses to the public.

The village is designed in the shape of a ship as advised by a fengshui master when it was built over 1000 years ago. It is a maze of long, narrow alleys, upturned copings and white-washed walls. Xidi has one main road which runs from east to west flanked by two parallel streets, all joined together by side streets and alleyways. Small pockets of open space are confined to areas immediately in front of public buildings, and the streets are usually bustling with vendors selling snacks, wooden carvings and other assorted touristic trinkets. Xidi is also extremely popular with art students, who set up their easels all over town to sketch village scene, stone streets and the rapeseed flowers in bloom.

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Famous Historical Spots to See in Central Anhui

When you travel to central Anhui, you should not miss the following spots for your China vacation deals.

Hegemon Ancestral Hall
Xiang Yu (King of West Chu) was the most mourned defeated hero in Chinese history. During the Chu-Han Contention period, Xiang Yu was defeated and committed suicide in Wu River. The Han general cut his remains into pieces. The locals buried his remains and clothes as his tomb ‘Clothes Tomb’. Afterwards, people built the ‘Clothes Pavilion’ in his tomb. In the beginning of Tang Dynasty, the ancestral hall was built. The noted calligrapher, Li Yangbing inscribed ‘The Ancestral Hall of The Hegemon - King of Western Chu’ in 762. People come to visit it constantly since Tang Dynasty. The original hall was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and the current hall was rebuilt one.

Mifu Memorial Hall
Mifu was a famous Chinese painter in the Song Dynasty. He was an honest and caring officer in Wuwei County from 1104 to 1107. After his death, people built the Mifu Memorial Hall in his old house in memory of him. Mifu was well known for paintings and collecting inscribed stones. His original collections were destroyed. The current 150 collections in the Mifu Memorial Hall are the famous inscribed stones which were done since Jin and Tang Dynasties. The Jiangsu governor, Liu Bingzhang in the Qing Dynasty brought those collections to Wuwei County.

Luoshi Park
The Poet, Liu Yuxi, wrote the famous poem ‘Luoshi Ming’ when he was an officer if He Prefecture. The content of Luoshi Ming is ‘A mountain doesn’t need to be tall to be famous. It will be famous if there is a deity in the mountain. A river doesn’t need to be deep to be spiritual. It will be famous if there is a dragon in the river’.

Luoshi Park covers an area of 50 acres and water area cover 10 acres. The front door is arch style. There is a ‘Half-Moon Pond’ built in the Ming Dynasty and the ‘Linliu Pavilion’ on the east of the pond built in the Qing Dynasty.

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Learn the history of Nanping in Anhui

Naping has a history of over 1,000 years, first appearing during the Yuan Dynasty as a small village backing onto the nearby Nanping Mountain (a famous travel destination in Anhui for China vacation deals) which gave the village its name. When translated Nanping literally mean ‘southern screen’. Near the end of the Yuan, the village was settled by the Ye clan who moved from nearby Qimen, and during the Ming two other clans with long and wealthy history also came to live in the village - the Cheng and the Li. During imperial times 3 clans living together in the same village was quite a novelty, and many believe that it was the inter-clan competitiveness fostered by this cohabitation that caused the village to develop rapidly, with many of Nanping’s residents going on to become important merchants, scholars or officials.

The village continue to proper in the Qing, and between 1862 and 1909 20 families from Nanping were given the nickname ‘the 10,000 silver purses’ due to their prosperity, which grew even greater in the second half of the Qing as member of each clan branched out into different area of trade and government. As with many of the other trading villages of Huizhou, Nanping fell on hard times once the imperial regime collapsed, but fortunately most of the houses were spared from war, revolution and looting and remained intact and in good condition.

In modern day Nanping there are around 1000 inhabitants living in 400 houses, 300 of which date back to the Ming and Qing dynasties and are all in doo to reasonable condition, along with 8 ancestral, branch and family temples. Around 80% of the population still belong to Ye clan, with the remainder made up from the minority Li and Cheng clans, along with one or two other local families or officials who have moved into the village to look after dwellings or take advantage of tourist trade. The village has been open to the general public for about 7 to 8 years following the opening of Xidi and Hongcun in 1990s.

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