Huizhou Ancient City
Heritage SiteHuangshan, China
Visiting Huizhou Ancient City
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About Huizhou Ancient City
Huizhou Ancient City, set on the north bank of the Lianjiang River in what is now She County near Huangshan city, is the historic administrative seat of the broader Huizhou region whose merchants, architecture, and culture shaped so much of the character of southern Anhui. First established as a fortified settlement in the Qin dynasty and serving for many centuries as the seat of the Huizhou prefecture, the city preserves a concentration of official, religious, and residential architecture that complements the better-known villages scattered across the surrounding countryside.
The most striking single feature of the old city is its massive city gate and the surviving sections of the old city wall, alongside the imposing archways and the restored yamen, the administrative headquarters of the imperial prefecture, which together evoke the institutional weight of the old Huizhou prefectural seat. Walking into the lanes behind the gate, visitors pass between residential compounds, clan halls, and small temples whose scale and craftsmanship speak to the wealth of the Huizhou merchant families whose trading networks radiated out across the empire.
The city's identity is bound up with the broader literary and cultural legacy of the Huizhou region, and the line of a famous poem by the Ming dramatist Tang Xianzu, regretting that he had never reached Huizhou in his lifetime, has long attached itself to the city as an evocative marker of its allure. Modern exhibits within the old city trace this cultural history alongside the architectural and merchant traditions, giving visitors a multi-layered picture of the region's place in the imperial-era Chinese imagination.
For a Huangshan itinerary, Huizhou Ancient City is the natural anchor for exploring the broader Ancient Huizhou Cultural Tourism Zone and the nearby villages, archways, and residential compounds of She County. It rewards a half-day visit layered into a broader circuit of the Huangshan region's historic sites, and it offers the most concentrated dose of the prefectural-level institutional and architectural heritage that the individual villages, for all their charm, do not fully capture.
Cultural heritage
Huizhou Ancient City stands on the north bank of the Lian River in She County, Huangshan, founded in the Qin and serving from the Tang as the seat of the old Huizhou prefecture, one of the cradles of Hui culture. Within its walls are the "Eastern Arc de Triomphe"—the Xuguo Stone Archway, a rare Ming octagonal memorial gate—the Huizhou prefectural yamen and the Ming-Qing remnants of Doushan Street; the playwright Tang Xianzu's line, "All my life I longed for it, yet never dreamt I would reach Huizhou," still draws pilgrims. The city and its hinterland are the core home of the She inkstone craft.
Visiting: Passing through the city gate, one meets the octagonal Xuguo Archway, its four faces a masterwork of Huizhou stone carving that never fails to astonish; the flagstones and ancestral halls of the yamen and Doushan Street conjure the order and daily life of the old prefecture; and in the inkstone shops along the lane, craftsmen are carving famous She inkstones from local stone, where one may watch this thousand-year craft up close.
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