Ancient Villages in Southern Anhui – Xidi and Hongcun

In the hills of southern Anhui, the villages of Xidi and Hongcun keep alive a picture of rural China that modernization erased almost everywhere else. Merchant wealth built their finely decorated houses, laid their flagstone lanes and engineered the channels and ponds that still carry water past every door. UNESCO inscribed the two ancient villages in 2000 as rare survivors of a vanished settlement tradition.