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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