Wuyuan County, Jiangxi

Where it sits. Wuyuan is a rural county in the far north-eastern corner of Jiangxi, wedged against the Zhejiang border to the east and the Anhui border to the north, and administered from the prefecture-level city of Shangrao. It is hill country rather than mountain country: folded ridges of a few hundred metres, tea terraces cut into the slopes, camphor trees at the village entrances, and streams that run clear enough to see the stones. The county town, Rancheng, is small and unremarkable; the reason to come is the roughly one hundred and fifty old villages scattered across the surrounding valleys, most reached on winding two-lane roads that take far longer than the map distance suggests.

Huizhou by another name. Although Wuyuan is administratively part of Jiangxi, culturally it is not. The county was established in 740, during the Tang, and for almost all of its history it belonged to Huizhou prefecture in Anhui; the transfer to Jiangxi happened only in the twentieth century and never took hold in local identity. The dialect is a Hui variety, the cooking is Huizhou cooking, and the architecture is the same whitewashed, black-tiled, horse-head-gabled tradition you find at Xidi and Hongcun over the provincial line. Wuyuan also claims the Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi, born in 1130, as an ancestral son — his clan seat was here — and the Hu family of Xidi trace their line back to a Wuyuan branch. What distinguishes Wuyuan from the famous Anhui pair is scale: this is not one preserved village behind a ticket gate but an entire working landscape of them.

The villages worth the drive. Likeng is the classic postcard, a single stream running down the middle of the settlement with houses on both banks and small stone bridges every few dozen metres. Xiaoqi is quieter and better preserved, with a Qing merchant hall and a stand of ancient camphors. Jiangwan is the tidiest and most restored, and correspondingly the busiest. Sixi Yancun, above the reservoir, is the one photographers favour for morning fog. Qinghua holds the Rainbow Bridge, a covered timber-and-stone span first built in the Song period, its piers shaped like boat prows to split the current. Huangling, on a ridge above the valley, is the village where households rack red chillies, orange persimmons and yellow maize on circular bamboo trays across their upper storeys each autumn — the practice called shai qiu, sun-drying the harvest, which has become the single most reproduced image of rural China.

On screen and in the frame. Wuyuan's relationship with the camera is less about specific productions than about supply. It is the countryside that Chinese period television and advertising reach for when a scene needs Huizhou fields rather than a Huizhou street, and provincial crews work here through the spring bloom every year. Its bigger cultural role is photographic: since the early 2000s Wuyuan has been the standing pilgrimage for Chinese landscape photographers, and the terraced rapeseed at Jiangling — bands of yellow curving around the contour lines with white-walled hamlets set into them — is among the most photographed agricultural scenes in the country. The county has leaned into this, formalising viewing platforms above the best terraces and timing a flower festival to the bloom. If you want the Huizhou tradition on film rather than in a still, Hongcun over the border in Anhui is where Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon actually shot; Wuyuan is where the surrounding landscape lives.

Timing is everything here. The bloom is short. Rapeseed opens roughly in the middle of March and holds for two to three weeks, and during that window the roads to Jiangling and Huangling can back up for hours. Autumn, from late October into November, is the second season, cooler and clearer, when the drying racks go up and the maples at Shicheng and Changxi turn. Summer is hot, humid and green, with far fewer visitors and the best water in the streams for swimming. Winter brings mist and occasional snow on the tiles, which some photographers prefer to everything else. Rain is frequent in spring and the granite paving becomes slick.

Getting there and practicalities. Wuyuan has its own station on the Hefei–Fuzhou high-speed line, which puts it within about ninety minutes of Huangshan North and roughly three hours of Shanghai, and this rail link is what turned the county from an obscure backwater into a weekend destination. From the station, the villages need a car: shuttle buses run to the main clusters, but a hired driver for a day is the practical way to cover an east loop and a north loop. Tickets are sold as a multi-village pass valid over several days rather than singly. Accommodation ranges from village homestays to a small number of restored courtyard hotels. Village lanes are cobbled, steep in places and full of raised thresholds.