Hong Cun is a village from the Qing and Ming Dynasties- over 800 years old and was listed as a World heritage Site in 2002.
With our limited Chinese we finally found the new modern bus station on the outskirts of Huang Shan City- we missed it as it looked like a supermarket and had no signs in English but the local bus driver was very helpful and let us return on the bus and get off at the right stop for no extra charge. We get the staff in the hostels who speak English to write messages for us like " Can we have 2 bus tickets to .... , or Can you take me to ..." So armed with one of these we were able to buy a local bus ticket to Hong Cun.
The small bus passed through many villages and fields of bright yellow coloured rape plants and hillsides of tea bushes, taking us and other Chinese tourists to Hong Cun.
Once we arrived at Hong Cun we met dozens of tour buses full of Chinese tourists on their 4 day holidays-out came the flags and loud hailers and they trooped off to check out the village.
It is really like a 'living museum'. Many of the village meeting halls are still intact
with beautiful wooden carvings.
The village sits around a lake that from the air looks like a buffalo. We wandered the narrow lane ways through the village and we were a tourist attraction too as many people stopped to take photos of us and with us. Sometimes they would just use sign language and at other times they would carefully construct a sentence in English asking us permission.
There were dozens of students from a university in Huangzhou painting and drawing the village so at every turn there were students sketching and painting the bridges, lanes and old houses.
Of course the streets were full of locals selling food, crafts, and drying tea leaves in their doorways. However there were other locals carrying on as though the tourists weren't there at all and taking their afternoon siestas or washing their vegetables in the lake.
