The ancient province of Huizhou 徽州 is a mountainous enclave in southern Anhui province, at the foot of the Yellow Mountains (Huangshan). The province is made up of six districts, Xiuning, Qimen, Shexian, Yixian, Jixi and Wuyuan, plus the town of Tunxi. The River Xin’an flows through it. This major waterway was quickly made navigable and allowed the inhabitants of Huizhou to grow rich through trade and develop a refined culture despite their rural location. Builders and patrons, the erudite neo-Confucian merchants of Huizhou (the Huishang 徽商) encouraged education and craftsmanship. Today, the region is reduced in size, but dozens of picture-postcard villages, well preserved despite the ravages of the cultural revolution and modernisation, bear witness to Huizhou’s illustrious past.
Ancestral tablets in the Hu clan temple in Longchuan
The literati merchants
Trade expanded rapidly in Huizhou during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), and flourished until the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864). The merchants initially left because it was necessary for survival. They made their fortune progressively, first by selling local raw materials (wood, bamboo and tea), then taking advantage of the salt monopoly granted by the Emperor in exchange for services rendered. Some took on the role of bankers or pawnbrokers. They established leagues in all of China’s main cities and formed alliances with the mandarins. Their wealth was such that in the middle of the Qing dynasty, it was often said that “there is no town without a Hui merchant” 无徽不成镇. These rich “émigrés”, having made their fortune, lived away from their families. They left their wives and children behind in their home villages, where they built splendid residences to house them. They returned there in their twilight years to spend their retirement, like “leaves fallen at the foot of the tree” 落叶归根, surrounded by splendour and respect, and acting as patrons and philanthropists in order to improve the destiny of their less enterprising neighbours.
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| Houses in Guanlu |
A vernacular architecture
The architecture of the mansions of Huizhou is very distinctive. They have high, whitewashed brick facades which are rarely pierced by windows, roofs covered in flat, fish-scale tiles in a beautiful blue-grey colour, and horse-head gable walls. They are looked after through the scanty means of the impoverished descendants who still live there and who have often kept the woodwork and some ornaments exactly as they were. They are starting to be better preserved, sometimes purchased by well-off Chinese people, or even moved, beam by beam, to a different location.
The first builders of Huizhou were aristocrats from the North fleeing the wars. Their houses, built from a structure of wooden pillars between which dry mud walls were erected, have not stood the test of time. Over time, the use of clay for walls, then brick and stone, has allowed houses to survive the centuries better. And even if only a handful of Yuan dwellings remain in Huizhou today, Ming and particularly Qing or houses from the years of the Republic are found in their thousands.
The houses had two storeys, or even three during the Ming dynasty. They were set out in a fairly “archetypical” manner. There was a grand reception room at the entrance, behind a small courtyard open to the sky. On either side of the reception room, there were two smaller rooms for the wife and concubine. At the back were the quarters for the elderly. The young people were often housed upstairs, on a mezzanine level. The kitchens and servants’ quarters were to the side, along with the “shuyuan”, private libraries where the live-in private tutors taught.
One of the characteristics of these sombre and inward-facing houses was the lighting from above thanks to sky wells (天井) which let in the light, and meant that breezes could be enjoyed and heat let out, and allowed rainwater to be collected for the house. A fear of fire meant that there was always a jar on hand for storing water, or other sources such as octagonal wells. Comfort was also provided by excellent water circuits in the form of pipe-work and storage tanks under the house, areas set aside for household rubbish and rounded corners on the outside walls in order to facilitate traffic circulation in the narrow streets.
A classroom in the South Lake school (Nanhushuyuan) in Hongcun
Reflecting the Confucian value system
The architecture was strongly influenced by the neo-Confucian value system, which was patriarchal and focused on clans. This is shown by the “dui lian” which hang in the grand reception room; they are wood panels on which a pair of maxims was written, displaying the favourite moral precepts of the master of the house, for example “Good should be done so that our descendants may be happy”, “Much should be read in order to know how to write”, or “A fortune is made by spending a great deal of time on the details”.
Neo-Confucian values were not only expressed in the decoration but also in the layout of the rooms. The master of each house separated the men from the women and girls who were not allowed to leave the house. The design of the buildings respected a strict hierarchy. For example, the front of the house was superior to the back, the right superior to the left, and the ground floor superior to the upper floor.
In the literati merchants’ choice of decoration, the finely sculpted wood panels, the importance of the symbolism evoked by the homophony of various characters cannot be underestimated. The majority of sounds in the Chinese language have several corresponding ideograms, each with a completely different meaning. This enabled not only numerous plays on words but also pearls of aesthetic creativity based on analogical thought. By choosing a fruit, animal, decoration or story and playing with the main meaning, literati merchants asked their talented craftsmen to express their wishes for happiness, prosperity, success or fertility in metaphors, whilst demonstrating their mastery of culture and classics.
In the village of Wan an, the compasses necessary for fengshui masters are still made
Villages influenced by fengshui
It was customary for the inhabitants of Huizhou to live in clans, grouped together in villages where most of the inhabitants shared – and still share – the same patronymic, the same important ancestor and the same genealogy.
At the heart of the very design of the Huizhou villages is fengshui, which had an exceptional impact in the region, even if this influence has more or less disappeared over the last few decades. To create a village, the first task was to find suitable location. To select the right location, the fengshui masters used a specific compass (luopan), still made in Wan’an. A good site needed to take the river’s meanders and the position of the mountains into account. It was recommended that the village be at the foot of a mountain and look out over flowing water or a stretch of water. When this wasn’t possible naturally, the elders didn’t hesitate to transform the environment artificially, as was the case at Hongcun for example, where a small, crescent-shaped lake was dug, for village life to take place around it.
Entrance to the clan temple of Wankou in Wuyuan
Clan temples
Their merchant life took the men of Huizhou on the road right from adolescence. The sacrifice was particularly great because family was at the centre of their social system, beliefs and rituals. Nothing shows the importance of ancestor worship in Han China (92% of Chinese people today are officially considered to be Han) better than a visit to Huizhou. The abundance of clan temples despite the many destructions of the 20th century, the omnipresence of family trees which have often been kept up to date despite the upheavals, and the intensity of rituals relating to the ancestors bear witness to the fundamental nature of the veneration of lineage and filial piety. Paradoxically, the large amount of travelling and the distance between the merchants and their families actually helped them to maintain very strong formal links within the clan. The task of scrupulously keeping the family tree up to date was one of the duties of filial piety, as well as showing solidarity with the clan, showing generosity towards it, perpetuating the lineage by producing sons and paying tribute to previous generations. Throughout the history of the literati merchants, these duties were considered to be the basis of good social relationships, and a condition for preserving social harmony.
Every Huizhou village houses at least one ancestral temple. During the Cultural Revolution, many were transformed into warehouses, granaries or factories. On the walls, there are still large characters written, reminding us of Confucian virtues: obedience ( jie 节), filial piety (xiao 孝) , the honesty and integrity of the civil servant (lian 廉) and faithfulness and loyalty (zhong 忠) . There are also ancestral portraits and tablets, which are often at the back of the temple, and the family rules which defined each member’s duties.
These large temples had several purposes. They were not only used to commemorate the ancestors and introduce them to the younger generations but also to house clan tribunals for judging – and punishing – disobedient descendants. Important decisions were made there. The selection interviews to decide who would be the candidate to take the Imperial Examination in the name of the clan thus took place in the temple. It was also the place where funerals and marriages were celebrated, and was the reception room for notable guests.
Since the communists came to power, the temples are no longer used for family purposes. They have been systematically nationalised and often transformed into small museums, without the original families being able to regain possession and use them. However it may be the case that descendants of the original family are used as caretakers.
“Opening up the face” (kalian). A girl from Pingshan puts on makeup
in a traditional style before her wedding in 2000
Conserving this heritage
Huizhou is not a museum. There are living people there, often descendants of the Huishang, today obliged to open their doors to tourists in exchange for money. They enable us to understand the upheavalsof the 20th century: the crumbling of the Imperial system, the disorder of the Republic and then the Kuomingtang years, the destruction carried out during the Maoist revolutions and those caused today by the uncoordinated and sometimes destructive return of tourism and development.
As to the future, the study of this small “Han” corner of southern Anhui - one which has best preserved its architectural heritage, as confirmed to the rest of the world when the villages of Xidi and Hongcun were declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 2000 - has enabled the question of protecting China’s heritage to be asked in a concrete manner. This is an important question with high stakes in a China which is becoming more and more proud of its national identity.
Because finally, in Huizhou, there is something universal in the air, which concerns everyone. There, as in Europe, there are questions as to the fate of the countryside after the rural exodus, and of the villages which are in decline because the only permanent inhabitats are the elderly, while city dwellers only return in search of their roots. A need for knowing where we come from which is as European as it is Chinese.
These great grandchildren of the literati merchants, acting as caretakers in houses they have never left, can more or less remember past splendours. They are unfortunately sometimes in the process of being turned into “exhibits” in “museum villages” with entry tickets, by a policy with a strong desire to promote local tourism, led by municipal officers who are keen to capitalise on tourism resources. But there are also Chinese people who are passionate about their region and who want to preserve it in a respectful and dynamic manner.
Anne Garrigue is a journalist and writer who lived in North Asia for 17 years (eight years in Japan, three in South Korea and five in China). She is currently editor of Connexions, a Franco-Chinese bilingual online economics magazine published in Beijing at http://www.connexions.ccifc.org/. Her latest publication, “De pierres et d’encre, chine au pays des marchands lettres” (Of Stones and Ink: China and the country of the literati merchants), has just been published by Editions Philippe Picquier. She has also published several works on Japan (“Japonaises la révolution douce” and “Japon, la fin d’une économie” (Japanese women: a soft revolution and Japan: the end of an economy) ) , and on the impact of Asian culture in France (“ l‘Asie en nous” (The Asia in us) )
Photos: Zhang Jianping
http://www.connexions.ccifc.org/
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30/12/14
