A visit to canal town or water village (literally called 水乡 in Chinese) is a must when one visit the Shanghai/HangZhou/SuZhou region of China. So, I decided to visit one of them in second day. Most of the water village are outside of Shanghai City, which may take one day to visit. I decided to pay a visit to a not so popular water village, Xin Chang Ancient Town (新场古镇).
This town is one hour away from Shanghai City Long Yang Station. When I reach Long Yang, I need to take a bus to go there, I still remember the bus fair is around RMB5. It is not very well known, those people in my youth hostel information counter can not really tell me where it is because they don’t even heard of it. However, they helped me locate the position of this place in google.
Dating back to the Song Dynasty is perhaps Shanghai's best and most authentic water village, sensitively restored by one of the city's leading preservationists and as yet undiscovered by the tourist hordes.
Xinchang has been largely overshadowed by better known tourist traps like ZhuJiaJiao and Zhou Zhung, which are offered as standard fare on most bus tours to Shanghai's outskirts. But this is a good thing and long may it remain so. Unlike the city's other water villages, XinChang's resident still live in the houses that their ancestors built. Trust me, the house is so so so small, and you can see those inner structure easily when one passing by the houses.
When I reach there, this quiet amostpheric ancient town gives an overall feeling of light green, very refreshing. You can see canal cutting across the village with many small bridge over the river and connecting the whole village. Very few people and I will say not commercialised and you can see the old town struggling to be anew.
p/s: please visit http://oneyearplan.net/Andrew
No comments:
Post a Comment