Mountain Villages near Songyang

In the last post I tried to give a feel for Yinyuan Village as we felt the people there were so welcoming and personable.

In the following days we visited several other villages, all different but with many similarities of architecture and layout. (warning, there are a LOT of photos here!)

Here we saw how the wall was being repaired with local clay and ndara grass. The clay in the whole area was that mustard colour with a little more of a reddish tinge in some places, so that the buildings all reflected the colour of the nearest clay deposits.

Baskets, sieves, covers were woven from the same ndara grass which grew on all the hillsides. The fronds are long, tough and razor sharp as we discovered when we waded along a narrow patch to inspect an orchard.

The villages are built up the sides of hills, all with water running through, and all with venerable and extremely beautiful feng shui trees which often had shrines at the base. 

Some villages were smaller, some much larger, some more dilapidated where the conservation works on old buildings were only beginning, and others where several of the old buildings had already been reworked into boutique hotels and guest rooms. 

Two of the villages were so overrun and crowded with local tourists that we became part of the 'sights' and that was quite uncomfortable. In all it was the residents who were the lovely people, showing us their vegetable drying and explaining that they were making traditional pickles, finding other locals to give us a lift between villages, making us simple, fresh amazing supper... always the kindness of the local people.

Sitting on the balcony of local tea gardens, community spaces and cafes whilst drinking local green tea was delightful, and I mean local, each village had their own green tea, and in some places they only charged for coffee and food and I was given green tea for free. (Apparently its an old man's drink, je me demande did I flummox them?)

Everywhere tea terraces, and endless vistas:

Songzhuang, Yangjiatang, Maoyuan, Yinyuan, and many others. Of the nearly 400 hundred villages which have been identified as culturally important about 80 are in the throes of conservation. Some houses have disintegrated beyond repair, others have much work to be done but are still salvageable, others have been repaired in desperation with such a haphazard mix of modern materials that carvings and traditional features have been lost, much like the youngest generation who have drifted away.

Many houses are still lived in despite their dilapidation. Its a difficult, uncompromising subsistence life in the mountains, bitterly cold in the winter, fairly warm in the summer, not for the fainthearted. Some of the villages are being bought up and taken over as boutique hotels and homestays, retaining and preserving their architectural heritage but losing their village life, although giving jobs to younger people with all the tourism they are bringing in.

It is a microcosm of the difficulties of preserving and sustaining traditional places and peoples, the world over, not just in Songyang. To say it was interesting is an understatement.