Hey everyone, welcome to World Heritage Journey.
For today's video, we're at the Ancient Villages of Anhui Province in southern China.
This world heritage site covers a pair of ancient villages in the south of Anhui province,
in eastern China.
For our visit, we decided to focus on just one of the villages: Hongcun.
Although referred to as "ancient", it's actually only about 900 years old.
But certainly Hongcun is a great example of a pre-modern Chinese village, and walking
around really gives you the impression of being in a small medieval town.
The centrepiece of Hongcun is the large Moon Pond in the middle of town, a peaceful spot
surrounded by buildings where reflections play across the water.
The village is also surrounded by a sort of lake slash moat thing, covered in lotus flowers
and surrounded by weeping willow trees, crossed by a single arched bridge.
The village itself is a great inspiration to painters and artists, and even on the day
we visited, there were hundreds and hundreds of China's next generation of artists scattered
around the village, sketching and painting.
We also really enjoyed visiting the various temples, meeting houses, academies, and other
residences.
Many of them are open to the public and have superb detailing to see, which was really nice.
It was also quite cool to spot several locations from the classic film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.