The view from the mountains of Cuandixia, a rual village outside of Beijing
This weekend, on a whim, Brian and I decided to go for a night to visit a small, rural village in the mountains just outside of Beijing called Cuandixia. It was a great escape from crowded, polluted Beijing and reminded me more of home than anything.
To get to the village, we took a Beijing public bus ($2.60) route that travels out here. The ride itself was interesting as the factories and urban sprawl of Beijing gradually faded in favor of the streams and mountains of the countryside. We also met a Chinese couple about our age on the ride out there who spoke English very well and ended up spending the trip together, hiking, dining and rooming in a guesthouse with one another. (We also taught them how to play Texas hold ‘em poker at night!) The guesthouse where we stayed (for less than $2 per person per night) was the home of what seemed to be a family of a mother, her (several?) daughters, her grandson and both her parents and her in-laws. They were all very welcoming to us and they had a great front porch! The room consisted of one giant bed that the four of us shared (a little awkward at first but kind of fun), which is apparently how many families in the countryside do it.
It’s interesting to see villages like this and remember that not everyone in China is being consumed by the seemingly nonstop development. It seems this town prefers to remain this way, as it’s now actually a popular tourist destination, with many of the families who live there having transformed their homes into restaurants and/or guesthouses. (Of course, the one thing noticably missing from this town is young people. It seems everyone here is either old and retired or a baby. I’d surmise that most of the younger people have fled for more opportunities in the cities.)
But pictures are worth a thousand words, so check out our photos from the visit (my full Flickr album of Cuandixia photos here):
Real manual labor: moving bricks up the mountains by hand and donkey
Some old communist slogan about Mao Zedong
Views of the homes from the top: Most homes in the village consist of four small buildings situated in a square and an open-air courtyard in the middle
The guesthouse where we stayed (great front porch!)
The village's main store
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I am heading to Cuandixia tomorrow. Thanks for posting your experiences. It is a valuable point to examine the fact that this village which has ostensibly been left out of the rapid development and modernization of urban Beijing has begun to attract more numbers of tourists for precisely this reason. It would be a bizarre turn of events if the future held a kind of marketed-as-rural-getaway trip to the hutongs inside Dongcheng. As the rest of the city bulges, and the majority of the Old City is demolished, the remaining alleys that are preserved, and not inhabited by hipsters and expats, as the lao beijing slowly get evicted, if the area were to be turned into a tourist attraction. I hope to avoid some of the crowds since I am going a few days after Qingming Jie. Wish me luck.