On the Protection and Restoration of Traditional Villages

Ancient villages in southern Anhui refer to ancient villages located from the Yangtze River to Nanshan District in Anhui Province, represented by Xidi and Hongcun. They are historical and traditional villages with the same regional cultural background and rich Huizhou cultural characteristics.

The mountainous area in southern Anhui has a long history and profound cultural accumulation, and a large number of traditional buildings and their villages with similar forms and distinctive features have been preserved. 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.

The biggest difference between 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.

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.