Vignettes of the World
I arrived at Huangyao in the late afternoon and I had not had any food since a very early breakfast. I decided to have a bowl of Guilin Mifen (rice noodles) before I did more touring of the ancient town. Photo: The West Gate of …
A leisurely walk within the ancient town of Huangyao will take some three hours or so. I began walking into the ancient town from Qianxing Square and came across the main street with all kinds of vendors and restaurants. The storefronts were all well-kept and …
At the Qianxing Square drop-off point I first came across the Ancient Stage. Built in the third year of the Jiaqing reign in Ming dynasty (1524), the Ancient Stage was the only building in Huangyao that served the purpose of cultural performances. When it was running, the dramatic works of Guangxi Opera and Huadiao featured prominently in its programs.
In terms of architecture, the Ancient Stage is a “single-eave, eight-pillar pavilion-type stage with gable-and hip-roof.” The stage consists of a the front stage and a rear wing room.
There is an entrance fee to enter the Huangyao Ancient Town. At the Tourist Information Center in Qianxing Guangchang (the Qianxing Square), I paid for my entrance fee. It was RMB 88 yuan.
There are guards at every gate of the ancient town checking your tickets. This is how it works: at the first entry you will present your purchased tickets. The guard will then scan your face. Once your face has been scanned, all entries into the ancient town will be verified with your face image. You simply place your face before the scanner and you will be admitted.
When I was on the coach to Huangyao, the lady that oversaw the bus told us that if you could wait till 5:30pm before going into Huangyao, then there is no need to pay the entrance fee because all the guards will be off duty then. I do not recommend this, as it takes a few hours to tour the ancient town and you do want to be able to take some pictures during the daylight hours. The commercial areas of the town are lit during the night hours, they are a different kind of beauty. But you would want to snap some good shots of the scenic spots, which are best presented with natural lighting. Even during the early dusk, when I started touring the ancient town, the scenic spots were wonderful.
Once arriving in Huangyao, I hurried up and checked in to my hostel for the night. I was staying at the Dayuan Culture Theme Hotel (Mojia Dayuan, meaning the mansion of the Mo’s). It lies on the southern edge of the ancient town. At this location, the three sub-streams of the Yao river converge.
The Dayuan Culture Theme Hotel is an antique building itself. Originally the building belonged to the Mo clan. In the old times, the villagers referred to it as Xianshan Study. During the times of New China, the government had used the building as a warehouse storage for food.
Photo: The Xianshan Ancestral Hall within the Dayuan Culture Theme Hotel. The Mo’s Mansion had once been known as Xianshan Study.
The house was built in the traditional style of siheyuan, which was a very popular building format, particularly in Beijing, for the thousands of years. Buildings are built on all four sides of a courtyard. This format was usually built to give home to large multigenerational households.
The building’s foundation was made of bluestones (limestones) and it took five years just to lay the foundation. In 2008, the government handed this building back to the Mo’s. In 2015, after careful restoration efforts, which included the fitting of materials that mimic an “aged look,” the hotel opened its doors to visitors.
I had a free upgrade to a larger room with a balcony, from which I saw a peak cluster afar. I was exceedingly thankful for that.
Dusk was befalling soon and so I hurried out to the ancient town. I would only have time that evening and very early the next morning in Huangyao, because the only bus to Yangshuo would depart at 8:40 am the next day.
On my way to the Dayuan Culture Theme Hotel, there were some other very beautiful historical monuments, namely the Sima Mansion and the Shouwang Tower.
The Sima Mansion is a very special building in Huangyao as well, it being a residence for a government official. It belonged to Mo Airan, who was a Qing dynasty official and known as Sima Mo. The building had the layout of three bays and three courtards. Its raised platform bore the good will for a government official, meaning “with each step the official rank rises up.”
Lying next to the Yao River is the Shouwang Tower. It is the gatehouse to enter and exit Huangyao on the east. “The gatehouse adopts the square plane structure, with complete facilities, such as watching windows, loopholes and fences.” There used to be guards stationing here as a security measure.
Sources
Descriptions on site at the Huangyao Ancient Town.
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I love visiting ancient towns in China. In this blog I have covered the Gankeng Ancient Hakka Townlet and the Dapeng Fortress in Shenzhen. Apparently, many tourists find ancient towns to be very attractive tourist sites, and China’s local governments and cultural heritage developers have caught on with this trend. A whole lot of ancient villages and towns are revitalized for the purpose of tourism, and so far I find these efforts to be laudable.
I found online sources describing Huangyao to be “one of the most low-key ancient cities in China.” I was intrigued. Certainly, the photographs show the many features of old towns for which I have a soft spot. The stone laid streets, mud-covered brick houses, old temples and maybe a stream or two running through the village — a poetic scenery murmuring an enduring pride from centuries of hardships and survival. I was determined to go.
Perhaps exactly because of its relative low profile in the tourism scene, Huangyao was not easy to get to. It being the first leg of my journey in Guilin, Huangyao presented the most difficulty out of the three ancient cities in this trip. The closest High Speed Rail (HSR) station is Hezhou.
From the Hezhou station I followed the way for “bus station” and walked a good 20 minutes before I arrived at the long haul bus station quite some ways from the train station. Follow signs, they are clear.
Once arriving at the bus station in Hezhou, I saw the bus to Huangyao. I boarded the bus and with this began the most frustrating part out of this whole trip. The bus driver told me that it would take 1.5 hours before getting to Huangyao, but 2 hours later, we were still winding through the provincial areas and not getting to the ancient town.
Eventually, the big coach dropped us off at an unknown spot in the backstretches of Hezhou and we then headed over to a smaller (and therefore slightly faster) car to finally arrive at Huangyao. The whole journey took me 2.5 hours.
Looking out the window while I was on the train, I noticed how the scenery changed as the train approached the Guangxi Province. Ranges after ranges of distinct mountains appear afar hugging all kinds of human settlements—farms, towns, cities—as we moved into the Guilin area. One cannot miss this change of character in the scenery, as these mountains, or hills, are distinctly Guilin. Each of these hills stand alone with its own clear contour, and they appear to be rolling and rolling endlessly, one distinct hill after another, as the speed train proceeds. This is described as “karst peak clusters.”
Photo: View at a Gas Station in Hezhou
The scenery indicates a way of life that is different from what I am accustomed to in Hong Kong, which is also enveloped by mountains, but their presence much less pronounced. Living in Guilin, one comes face to face with the magnificence of Guilin’s nature. As one develops the appreciation for hovering mountains all around, a human being feels like being dwarfed, infinitely and intimately so. One must also live with, and get around, the myriad waterways that branch out of the Lijiang (Li River). Here is a river, there is a river, with them comes the many bridges that one must cross — and they are all part of the Li River waterway.
Throughout the whole bus ride in Hezhou I kept thinking to myself that time is a cheap commodity in this part of China. The driver told me that the ride took 1.5 hours. An hour, an hour and a half, two hours… I was still not making it to Huangyao. The big bus was making its rounds all through Hezhou. As it did so, I could not help but to note some observations.
The views outside seems to confirm my grumbles about time being cheap there. Hezhou strikes me as a part of China that was left behind and forgotten in the nation’s stellar record of development. It was worlds apart from the vibrance and sophistication of China’s big cities like Beijing, Shanghai or even Nanjing. At the same time there were not the primitive, raw and untouched landscapes that make one’s heart drop, like in Xinjiang or Tibet. Other than the Guilin mountains being its saving grace, Hezhou was simply provincial, with a lot of vacant big buildings. Life seemed to go slowly and listlessly, and I sensed a hollowness and powerlessness in the air. On an afternoon of a weekday many shops were closed.
Despite the abundance of the Pearl River waterways the town was filled with billows of dusts, the dirt that got kicked up by vehicles seemingly running on diesel and belonging to a different era in time. People dressed in humble clothing. Although they looked a whole lot better off than the peasants that I saw some two decades ago in my China trips, their appearance was still quite a bit humbler than the well-dressed city-traveling crowd that I met on the train.
Perhaps it would be fair for me to call the sights of Hezhou a little desperate.
The lady that oversaw the bus ride was dropping off packages at different locations, causing delays. And one could only imagine how people in this part of China tried to make a business out of every ounce of their resources.
Finally at a little before 4pm I was dropped off at the Qianxing Square in Huangyao. This bus ride took me a total of 2.5 hours. I came to the first beautiful sight of the day, the Ancient Stage of Huangyao. At this sight a mixed emotion welled within me. I was at once sad and excited. Hezhou and Huangyao are both old but in wildly different ways. Hezhou is old in the sense that it is outdated. Huangyao is old in the sense that it is antique.
Guilin was my first trip in 2024. The trip lasted four days and three nights, and I visited the ancient towns of Huangyao, Yangshuo and Xingping. Perhaps at a long-forgotten time I have visited Guilin proper with my parents. When I was growing up, Guilin …
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Yuen Chau Kok’s Old House of Wong Uk stands in an area of Shatin that has but long-retired from significance. I lived in Shatin some thirty-five years ago and even then, Yuen Chau Kok was not anything that was talked about even amongst the residents of Shatin.
Now tucked in the backstretches of a public housing estate and an old hotel, Wong Uk stands still in time as the sole witness to a part of Shatin that was once a thriving major courier station for traffic between the New Territories and Kowloon.
In a time of glory long bygone, Yuen Chau Kok of Shatin was a waterfront area with ocean access. Most of the south Shatin Sea (Tide Cove) was filled by the Hong Kong Government’s reclamation efforts during the 1970s, a time that I have no personal memory of.
Its name meaning “the House of the Wongs,” Wong Uk belonged to the Wong Clan, who came to Hong Kong during the Qianlong reign of the Qing dynasty (1736-1795) from Xingping in Guangdong. Wong Uk was once a village, like so many other walled villages of Hong Kong. The Old House of Wong Uk was built by the 19th generation of the ancestor Wong Tsing-wo circa 1911.
In its heyday, the Wong Uk Tsuen Village was bustling with visitors. Travelers and merchants carrying goods for trade often stopped in this part of Hong Kong as a rest stop enroute between Guangdong and Kowloon. The Wongs had once built a hotel next to the Old House of Wong Uk to provide accommodation, and it had booming business.
After the reclamation efforts of the late 1970s, the Hong Kong Government then began to resume the ponds and agricultural land for development in Shatin. With many of the villagers moving out as well, the Old House of Wong Uk became the only of what remains in the former Wong Uk Tsuen Village in Yuen Chau Kok now.
I think Wong Uk has been well-restored. The rear hall now houses a very simple exhibition (basically, four large posters) that explained the story of Wong Uk well with a good and simple narrative.
The Old House of Wong Uk has been a Declared Monument since 1989.
As a traditional Hakka structure meant for residency, Wong Uk comes with a common two-hall, one-courtyard and three bays layout. The old house was made of gray bricks and granite. The use of granite is somewhat uncommon for traditional village houses in Hong Kong, as it was a more expensive material than bricks.
The dressed granite blocks are what form the frame for the building’s main entrance, fitted with a traditional sliding timber grille door. The antique grille door is still being used today to lock the venue.
When one visits traditional Qing dynasty houses in Hong Kong, the roof is often a point of interest. Look up and you will see that the granite of the house supports “the pitched roofs of wooden rafters, purlins and Hakka-style tiles.”
Like other similar houses, the Old House of Wong Uk comes with extensive embellishments, including “exquisite mouldings, murals and a finely carved eave board” on the façade.
As with all traditional Hakka homes, the two halls in the main axis served purposes of receiving guests as communal space in the house. The kitchen, bathrooms and the bedrooms are at the bays.
The Wong Uk is special in that there are cocklofts above the ground floor of the bays.
Both the interior and the exterior of Wong Uk are well-restored, showing beautiful auspicious elements that typically adorn traditional Qing dynasty structures in Hong Kong. I found the adorned top beams on the roof in the rear hall to be particularly beautiful, and this is also an uncommon feature of the Old House of Wong Uk.
The Old House of Wong Uk lies across the street from the Regal Riverside Hotel on Yuen Chau Kok Road in the Wong Uk Garden.
Note that the walk from the closest MTR station, Shatin Wai, is quite far. Do look up bus options that will take you to the neighbouring residential estates, such as Greenfield Court (Route 170), or otherwise there is a bus stop right outside the Regal Riverside Hotel as well. Most buses stopping at that bus stop will return to the Shatin MTR station, and that was how I returned to Shatin station.
The Old House of Wong Uk is open daily between 9am and 1pm, closes for lunch between 1pm and 2pm, then reopens between 2pm and the 5pm. It closes on the major public holidays of Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year’s Day and the first three days of the Lunar New Year.
Descriptions on site at the Old House of Wong Uk.
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