Guanlu was established by the Wang family during the Song Dynasty and ticked along quietly until the middle of Qing Dynasty when the Wang family made fortunes in trade and commerce along the nearby Yangtze River (on which you can cruise and enjoy the wonderful landscape along the banks during your Yangtze River tour). Once they had made their fortunes the merchants return home to live out their retirement, spending a significant proportion of their wealth on housing and infrastructure for the village, hiring the best craftsmen from the area to construct elaborately decorated houses and consequently completely changing the appearance and architecture of the village.
As with many of the other merchant villages in the region, Guanlu’s fortunes suffered a downturn with demise of Imperial China, and during the 1960s the Red Guards were charged with destroying symbols of the “Four Olds”, including ancient architecture and antiquities, and many of the village’s more ostentatious carvings and antiques were lost.
Nowadays we can find over 100 well-preserved Ming and Qing residences in the village, and although unfortunately the ancestral temples that were once part of daily life here have not stood the test of time, you can still find numerous study rooms that testify the importance of education to the Wang clan.
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