After hiking the trails in the tea plantations (read part one here), the next day I decided to visit the old village of Xiamei (下梅). Xiamei was an important hub during the Qing Dynasty where tea producers would bring their tea from the mountains to sell to traders from port cities like Fuzhou and Xiamen who would then export it to Europe.
The village is remarkably well preserved, and not only are the old residences still lived in, but the guildhall and temple are still the centes for village life, with ceremonies and gatherings taking place regularly.
Upon entering the village you have to buy a ticket, which gets you a free guide. Normally, I have no interest in having a tour guide, but this time I was pleasantly surprised, as she really went into detail about the culture and history of the village. I think this was mostly due to the fact that my wife was Chinese; if it was just me as a foreigner, the guide probably would have just given a really rough overview, assuming foreigners have no clue about Chinese culture.
The village is built around a stream, and on either side are many shops, some of them selling tourist junk, but a lot of them selling either tea or traditional handicrafts which you could see being made then and there. These shops were mostly wooden buildings and were fairly worn out looking. Most of the villagers just seemed to sit around playing cards of Mahjang. The residences of the wealthier people were back from the stream, hidden behind large stone walls.
These large residences were impressive buildings of local Fujianese style, and much of the interior was well preserved. Many still had family shrines in the main hall, and intricate woodwork decorating the walls. What I felt incredibly odd, was that the tour guide would just take us straight into somebody’s home, and grandma would be washing clothes or cooking while we just stood there listening to the tour guide. Apparently there was some kind of agreement, so the residents got a portion of the ticket fees. I did feel also that the residents were considerably poorer than whoever would have lived in the houses during the villages heyday. Despite the grandeur of the buildings themselves, there wasn’t much in the way of luxurious furniture; the people mostly had worn out stools, and piles of junk.
Still, I found that this village, possibly due to its distance from any large city, had more of an authenticity to it than the popular ones around Shanghai or Suzhou. People still went about their daily life, and besides us I didn’t see any other tourists.
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