Lucun Village

Lucun is a traditional Huizhou village near the better-known Hongcun in the Huangshan region, best known for the extraordinary group of carved wood residences built by the Qing dynasty merchant Lu Bangxie, popularly known as Lu the Millionaire, for his household. The village is laid out along the conventions of a Huizhou clan settlement, with the Lu family at its core, and the craftsmanship of its carved wood architecture makes it one of the most rewarding single stops in the broader region for visitors with an interest in decorative art.

The centerpiece of the village is the group of wood-carved residences commissioned by Lu Bangxie for his wives and household, with lintels, screens, window frames, and structural beams carved over many years into extraordinarily dense scenes drawn from opera, mythology, daily life, and the natural world. The level of detail and the ambition of the carving place these residences among the finest surviving examples of Huizhou woodwork, and they are often discussed as a singular achievement within the broader regional tradition that produced the carving at Hongcun, Xidi, and elsewhere.

Walking through the village lanes, visitors encounter the carved residences alongside the older fabric of the broader settlement, with its small temples, ancestral halls, and the surrounding fields and bamboo groves that frame the built environment. The village has been used as a filming location for Chinese television and regional opera, which gives it an additional layer of cultural association for visitors familiar with those works.

For a Huangshan itinerary, Lucun is a natural addition to a visit to nearby Hongcun, easily combined into a half-day circuit focused on the villages of the broader area, and it is particularly rewarding for visitors with a serious interest in Chinese wood carving, vernacular architecture, or the domestic world of the Huizhou merchant elite. It tends to draw smaller crowds than its more famous neighbor, making it a good option for a slower, more detailed look at the regional tradition of decorative woodwork that the headline villages can only hint at.