Historical development and characteristics of folk houses in southern Anhui

Southern Anhui is a local traditional residential building with distinctive style. It is an ancient village located in the Yangtze River valley of Anhui Province, represented by Xidi and Hongcun, and represented by Huizhou (now Huangshan City, Jixi County and Wuyuan County of Jiangxi Province) and Huaiyang style. Huizhou-style folk houses have strong Huizhou-style cultural characteristics, while other folk houses in southern Anhui deeply highlight their cultural transition zone style characteristics, which are very different from Jiangbei and northern Anhui. Today, these styles are also imitated in northern Anhui.

Residential history

Huizhou, a mountainous area in southern Anhui, has a long history and profound cultural accumulation, and has preserved a large number of traditional buildings and villages with similar forms and distinctive features. The ancient villages in southern Anhui are not only ingeniously combined with topography, landforms and mountains and rivers, but also with the strong economic strength of Huizhou merchants in Ming and Qing Dynasties, culture and education are increasingly prosperous. After returning home, those Huizhou merchants conceived to build houses with elegant, cultured, lofty and detached mentality, which enriched the cultural environment of ancient villages and made the village landscape more prominent.

Unique place

The biggest difference between the location of ancient villages in southern Anhui and other villages is that the construction and development of ancient villages in southern Anhui have been separated from the dependence on agriculture to a considerable extent. The consciousness, lifestyle and taste of residents in ancient villages have greatly surpassed the ideology of farmers and the ordinary citizen class, and pursued the same taste of life as the literati class, so they have a strong cultural atmosphere. On the basis of the basic pattern, ancient villages in southern Anhui adopted different decorative techniques, such as building small courtyards, digging pools, arranging leaky windows, skillfully setting bonsai, carving beams and painting buildings, and creating elegant living environment, which all reflected the extremely high cultural quality and artistic accomplishment of local residents.

Village site selection

The site selection and construction of ancient villages in southern Anhui followed the geomantic theory of Zhouyi, which has a history of more than 2000 years. It emphasizes that man and nature live in harmony and fully respect the ideal realm of the natural environment. Paying attention to material and spirit is a dual demand, with scientific basis and high aesthetic concept. The architectural features of ancient villages in southern Anhui developed with the prosperity of Huizhou merchants in Ming and Qing Dynasties, which can reflect their exquisite thoughts and superb skills to the greatest extent in limited architectural space. This is really a clever architectural form. Later, Huizhou merchants gradually declined, but this Huizhou-style residential building retained its architectural characteristics because it was attached to ancient residential villages, so it has important historical and architectural value.