2026 AUGUST 29 - SEPTEMBER 5
2026 SEPTEMBER 12 - SEPTEMBER 19
Packages from $1800
HERITAGE IMMERSION TREK - ANHUI, CHINA
Huizhou
修
The Experience of Xiū
to repair · to cultivate · to practice
Huizhou 徽州 is a historical region of modern day Anhui province.
In this region, the word 修 (xiū) carries multiple meanings: to repair a building, to cultivate oneself, and to practice a discipline.
However, these were never separate acts. This trip is built around that idea — that mending structures, bettering self, and honoring a lineage are the same gesture: patient, thoughtful transformation.
Huizhou is a living paradox — a resource poor, mountain-locked valley that produced some of China’s wealthiest merchants and most storied scholars. Because the land could not feed its people, young men left to trade salt, tea and timber across the empire and sent the money home.
But Confucian China looked down on merchants, so that wealth was spent building respectability — ancestral halls, archways, libraries, the education of sons, the patronage of art. Every carved beam, every ink-stick, every opera stage is merchant wealth converted into Confucian virtue.
That conversion is 修.
Heritage Immersion Trek
屋 ENGAGE A HISTORIC HOUSEWork alongside conservation experts at Zheng Mansion, a Huizhou heritage building under restoration.
Your participation is not symbolic: every trip makes a direct financial contribution to the Zheng Mansion restoration fund, supporting traditional methods, site documentation and the ongoing repair of this historic house.
村 SUPPORTING A LIVING VILLAGELiving in a working Huizhou village keeps value in the place itself.
Your visit supports local hosts and village services — while also helping fund the restoration of Zheng Mansion and subsequent structures, the project’s central heritage site.
迹 LEAVE A LASTING RECORDYou do not simply pass through.
Each group helps observe, record and document Zheng Mansion and the village around it. These materials become part of a growing archive for the site, supporting future restoration, education and public understanding.
You leave knowing that your visit has added something lasting: direct funding for the repair work, and records that help the place be remembered, understood and protected.
A Two Part Journey
TWO OPTIONS · Join the full 8-day trek—or just the 5-day conservation experience.
I · FOUNDATIONS (D1-3)A beautiful first taste of old China — ancient streets, master crafts, hidden villages. Complete this as a short trip, or the start of a deeper trek.
Beginning in Shexian, our journey sets its intellectual compass.
Through architectural history, field methodology, and story-driven orientation, guests learn how to read Huizhou’s buildings, streets, and figures through a discerning lens.
This builds the vocabulary, context, and curiosity required to engage heritage experiences with richer context and sharper eyes.
II · CONSERVATION (D4-8)What no ordinary China journey can offer: living in an ancient village, engaging directly with cultural custodians, and getting hands-on with a 400 year old building.
Based in two historical villages, this module brings guests into the front lines of conservation.
Working around structures under active restoration, visitors encounter the craft, constraints, and care behind active projects while immersing themselves in the daily practices of rural life.
The experience explores tensions between memory, modernization, revitalization, and responsibility as it shapes how heritage will evolve.
Meet the Experts
Matthew Hu Xinyu
HERITAGE PROTECTIONHow can historic buildings be preserved without separating them from the communities, stories, and ways of life that give them meaning?
Matthew has spent much of his career exploring this question. He is a board member of the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center and co-founder of the Courtyard Institute, where he works at the intersection of heritage conservation, public education, and cultural exchange.
Matthew previously served as China Representative of The Prince’s Foundation, contributing to major international heritage initiatives including the creation of Beijing’s Shijia Hutong Museum and a landmark exhibition on Dunhuang presented in London in 2017.
During the journey, Matthew will draw on his experience working across China and the United Kingdom to offer an insider’s perspective on how historic places are documented, interpreted, restored, and brought back into contemporary life.
HUIZHOU CONSERVATIONISTZhang Jian Ping
Beginning his career as a photographer and historian of ancient buildings and landscapes, Mr. Zhang is the leading heritage conservation expert in Anhui Province.
For the past 30 years, Mr. Zhang has been on the frontlines of persevering material culture in Huizhou, driving efforts ranging from policy advocacy and public education to technical advisory and aesthetic guidance.
Outside of his work in preserving and restoring built structures, Mr. Zhang is also an outspoken stalwart of intangible heritage, serving on the boards for Keemun black tea and Huizhou gastronomy.
His sessions will invite participants to look beyond architectural beauty and consider the deeper choices involved in conservation: what should be protected, whose stories should be told, and how heritage can remain relevant to the future.
HUIZHOU CONSERVATIONISTZhang Junxi
Zhang Junxi has spent much of his life pursuing this question across the villages of Huizhou. A council member of the Huizhou Merchants Research Association and Secretary-General of Friends of Huizhou, Zhang is a writer, researcher, and long-term advocate for Huizhou’s cultural heritage.
Since childhood, he has accompanied his father on visits to Huizhou villages, recording local stories, interviewing residents, and observing the region’s historic buildings and ways of life. In 2009, he began systematically collecting Huizhou historical documents and oral-history materials, building a deep personal archive of the region’s cultural memory.
His work has led him to lecture for institutions including Tsinghua University, East China Normal University, the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center, CCTV, China National Geography, and the Shanghai Library. He has also provided historical research and ancient-building consultation for museums, publications, and cultural institutions in China and abroad, including the Peabody Essex Museum.
During the journey, Zhang will guide participants into Huizhou’s living historical landscape, helping them read old villages not as static monuments, but as places shaped by migration, memory, craft, family, and time.
Key Activities
Material Culture Documentation
Participants document Huizhou village life through close observation of buildings, courtyards, decorative elements, tools, furnishings, and everyday objects.
Their notes, photos, sketches, and spatial records contribute to a fuller map of the village’s structures and material stories.
Artifact Analysis
& Appraisal
Travelers learn to look beyond surface beauty, assessing objects for age, use, craftsmanship, condition, and provenance.
Through guided discussion, each artifact becomes evidence of family memory, regional taste, trade, repair, and the layered histories embedded in village life.
Living
Heritage Archive
Select photos, videos, interviews, sketches, and notes from the excursion will be added to the village’s growing heritage archive.
Together, these contributions preserve details of place, craft, and memory for future research, storytelling, and conservation work.
Itinerary
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Land in Shexian and wander a 1,000-year-old city most foreign travelers rarely reach — merchant lanes, the four-sided Xu Guo Archway, old clan houses.
WELCOME
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Two of China’s “Four Treasures of the Study” were born here.
Learn process of fine ink making, then press, gild and carve your own inkstone to take home — the first act of 修.
MAKE
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Learn to read a whole village the way you read a sentence: riverside lanes, a great ancestral hall, the geomancer’s compass that placed it all.
By evening the full group gathers in the tea country for a welcome banquet.
PART I CONCLUDES
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A slow, restorative day among the gardens that gave the world Keemun black tea.
Taste, fire fresh leaf in a wok, make a tea-soap or sachet — or simply let the pace drop before the real work ahead.
TEAMAKING
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Through old Qimen’s merchant mansions to a genuine Ming opera stage — where you don’t sit and watch but step inside a masked ritual drama, and learn the prayer-steps yourself.
IMMERSIVE THEATER
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The heart of the trip.
Hear how one Huizhou house was shipped across the Pacific and rebuilt inside a US museum, then take up the tools yourself: record, clean, and fit nail-less dougong brackets on a house under repair.
HANDS-ON CONSERVATION
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A ridge-top trek, a final session to finish your work — then the closing you’ll never forget: a lantern-lit feast in the ancestral hall and a bonfire party under the stars, where you’re given the record of what your hands gave to the house.
FEAST · BONFIRE
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A last slow morning in the lanes, a final look at the work your hands contributed, and the road home — taking with you new skills, a made object, and the habit of 修: patient, careful attention.
DEPARTURE