The beautiful mountains and rivers of ancient Huizhou once gave birth to many wealthy merchants and powerful families and created a flourishing culture that developed into the unique Xin'an culture. Bound by the special geographical conditions and feudal ethics, people of Huizhou have maintained their distinctive folkways and customs. Just as is recorded in the earliest Xin'an Annals. Isolated by high mountains, people are not influenced by the customs of other places .The mountaineers's style of dress remain unchanged for hundreds of years. As late as the Ming and Qing Dynasties they lived in compact clans without one single outsider, their living style closest to that of ancient times. However, it has been the common practice of the Huizhou people to work hard but live frugally, to engage in studies while doing farm work, to respect the elders and to care for the young. From generation to generation they have held a high regard for etiquette.

When you tour around the villages and towns of Huangshan Municipality and stay with the folks, you will, through the talks over the drinks, find in them a special unsophistication. You will see a custom which retains, to varying degrees, traces left from the Ming and Qing Dynasties, or even from the Tang and Song Dynasties. Such traces are ubiquitous--in their daily life, funerals, weddings, baby birth celebrations, or in their couplets, festivities, temple fairs, or sports and recreations. And what is more, customs and dialects vary from place to place. As is described, one sees different folkways every ten miles and hears different lilts every five.

The word salt, for instance, is pronounced yan in Tunxi, and ya in Wan'an about two miles away, and cuozi in Xiuning Town not more than ten miles away. And the dialects contain a lot of image words. A butterfly is called cloth wings , an inkslab "ink tile" and an eel ''snake" fish. Sometimes the folks talk in an elegant style and use words that are often found in a classical drama. To cite a few examples, they say platform instead of table, grand instead of rich, outstanding instead of pretty, spouse instead of wife, raise water instead of fetch water. Some expressions bear a classical literary style. They would say a pleasure all over instead of comfortable. Such embellishments lend great fun to the daily speech.

The Huizhou people are very much concerned about festivals and solar terms. On the day of lixia (Beginning of Summer, sowing time for farmers), for example, folks indulge themselves in eating, believing it signifies a bumper harvest and a full stomach for the next year. Early in the morning they boil eggs and smash them on the threshold as sacrifice to the door god. And they have for breakfast fried rice with eggs and Chinese chives, for in Chinese chive is a homonym of ever-lasting, believing the meal to be the token of permanent happiness. For lunch they have meat to develop muscle so as to keep fit. With benedictive wishes they exchange cakes made of lettuce mixed in glutinous rice powder. They also eat "mildewed" toufu. In Chinese mildew is related to ill luck, so by swallowing mildewed toufu they think they are eating up all ill luck. The mildewed toufu is actually a traditional local dish also known as hairy toufu. It is as thick and large as two fingers together, covered with a coat of white down and smelling a bit moldy after natural fermentation. It is fried in seed-oil till it turns yellowish, then they dress it with sauce, pepper, chopped green onion and smashed garlic. It smells and tastes delicious.

Speaking of food, Huizhou cuisine is one of the eight representative local cuisines of China and is known for its special delicacies from land and water. In Shanghai alone, there were more than 130 Huizhou food restaurants in the 1940's. Huizhou food has more than 200 varieties made mostly through braising, stewing and steaming rather than saut¡§¦ing or frying. The cooks are particular about ingredients and fire control, putting in thick starchy sauce and much oil and trying to keep the natural juice and taste. Among the 20 ~ 30 famous traditional dishes are Stewed Ham and Turtle, Braised Racoon Dog, Steamed Chukar, Salted Fresh Perch, Mushroom and Chestnut, Stewed Chicken with Tremella, etc. The local people have a story to tell about the Salted Fresh Perch. In the old days, the perch was not available locally. Fish-mongers used to shoulder the fish and walk a long way to Huizhou. Once a fish-monger found on his way his two buckets of fish were becoming smelly and he hit upon a way of preserving it. He scaled and gutted the fish and spread salt on it. When he got to Huizhou, the fish was cooked in the local way--braised on slow fire with strong condiments. The highly seasoned salted fish turned out very tender and tasty. The way was then taken up and gradually developed into the famous Salted Fresh Perch. The dish is also referred to as smelly fish , but to the local folks it is pleasantly so rather than offensively.

During the Spring Festival, feasting without question makes up an important part of the celebration, but it is the folk recreations that play the major role. There are the dragon dance, lion dance, fish--lantern dance, lantern--boat dance, motion show, triumph drum dance and fireworks. The fish lantern is taken as a symbol of abundance, for in Chinese fish and abundance are homonymous. And the motion show is the most popular performance. As the name suggests, the stage is carried about by people. The actors and actresses are all little children who play various traditional roles. They sit on iron racks and then step on the small stage, carried around by grown-ups in villages and towns. Lit up by the candle light and firework, the lovely little ones are a real eye-catcher. The scene is especially fascinating with the ancient kings, mythological gods and legendary ghosts moving about in the contemporary world. The dragon dance performed in Huizhou differs from that of other places in that the Huizhou dragon is made up of benches. As it is inconvenient for the scattered inhabitants of the mountain region to get together to make and keep a public dragon, the bench dragon was invented by joining benches, each about six feet long, with a joint hole on either side and a handle fixed into a hole in the middle. Usually the benches are used domestically. On the occasion of a dragon dance, people from different households bring their benches together, pull off the legs and fix the handle. Men from every family take part in the show, one man holding one bench, so it is also a sign of unity and cooperation. Benches are joined and decorated with lanterns. Sometimes a dragon consists of more than a hundred benches. It is a grand scene when the dragon, gleaming with lanterns, is carried along the winding mountain path.

There are various customs in wedding ceremonies. Though they differ slightly from town to town, yet four procedures are indispensable--seeing the bride in, weeping goodbye, carrying the bride on back, and drinking three bowls of tea. On the wedding day, the groom' s people go to the bride s with a sedan chair. The bride's family shut up the house and keep them out. They will not be let in until the groom shows his generosity by offering the prearranged bride price and betrothal gifts. As soon as the bride puts on her wedding dress the mother and the daughter begin to weep in each other's arms, believing that the weeping will usher in good luck. The weep is not sorrowful but melodious, so it is called "Weeping Goodbye Song", most part of which expresses the deep love between mother and daughter and the mother's practical advice. After this the bride is carried in arms by a male member of her family to the sedan chair, for they believe this way she won' t take away the family luck. When the bridal sedan chair arrives, the groom carries her on his back into the bridal chamber so that if a bicker should take place later, she could ask if he doesn't love her why should he have brought her in so eagerly on his back! Before the homage ceremony, the bride is to drink three bowls of tea: one green symbolizing pure luck, one mixed with dates symbolizing a booming posterity and one mixed with honey symbolizing sweet love.

Though with a high regard for industry and thrift, the mountain people are particular about their dwelling place as well as their life style. Every house is decorated with calligraphy and painting. On some pillars still hang the couplet boards of the old times, bearing aphorisms such as: The world becomes large if you are tolerant toward everything. Business grows booming when you are generous to everybody. Heroes are those who can stand hardships. Fools aren't those who will bear losses. Filial piety and fraternal duty keep a family prosperous. Diligent learning and hard working make a man perfect. At the upper end of the central hall is usually a long narrow table, on which a bottle stands on the right and a mirror on the left, symbolizing peace and quietude, for in Chinese bottle and mirror are homonymous to peace and quietude respectively. In front of the long table is an old fashioned square table, and on either side of it stands an armchair. All appear antique.

Among the Huangshan family daily articles two things are indispensable--the heating stove and the bamboo tube. The bamboo tube is a food container. Some of them are carved with beautiful designs. The longer they are used the more smooth and polished they become. They can be compared favorably with artistic works. Heating stoves, on the other hand, are used to warm up people in winter. They vary in design and size. Some are shaped like a bucket and others like a box, each with a fire pot inside the frame. The bucket-shaped one, with an arc cover on the top, is for a single person, while the box-shaped one is usually used to warm up several people sitting around. There is also a basket-like heating stove. It is made of bamboo with an iron interior which is coated with clay. When filled with charcoal, this type is a portable stove. Children take these bamboo stoves to school, each keeping one under his lap or at his feet in class. This kind of stoves is so popular that they make up a special feature of the Huangshan district.

Huangshan boasts high mountains, dense forests and fertile land and abounds in natural resources and special local products such as tea, mushroom, glossy ganoderma, bamboo shoots, loquats, tangerines, pears, edible manna lichen, yangtao, dates, dried snakes, walnuts, lacqueware, bamboo weaves, carvings, chinaware as well as the four treasures of the study - writing brush, ink stick, inkslab and paper. Among them Qihong Black Tea, Tunlu Green Tea, Hui Ink Sticks and She Inkslabs are so famous that they have become synonyms of Huizhou. Hui Ink Sticks, formerly called Li Ink Sticks, were made by Xi Chao and Xi Tinggui, ink stick makers of the Tang Dynasty, who came from Yishui, Hebei. Their ink sticks were light in weight, nice in smell, and pure in color. They were so appreciated by Li Yu, an emperor of the Later Tang, that he bestowed Xi Tingsui the imperial surname Li and appointed him to the post of Court Ink Master. The ink sticks he made were thus called Li Ink Sticks. A saying had it at that time that It is easier to get gold than to get a Li Ink Stick.

And later, ink stick making became a popular trade in Shezhou. After the place was renamed Huizhou, the ink sticks made here were often referred to as Hui Ink Sticks. With the improvement and innovation of technology, Hui Ink Sticks have been widely loved by painters and calligraphers for their special quality: they are hard but easy to be moistened, black with a beautiful sheen and not sticky to a writing brush or soaking to the paper. With a favorable fragrance a brush with Hui ink moves more smoothly on paper. Writings and paintings in this ink are pitch-dark, ever-lasting and true in color. The Globe Ink Sticks made in Hu Kaiwen Ink Workshop won a gold medal in Panama international Fair in 1915 and thereby became world famous. She Inkslabs, on the other hand, is one of the four most famous inkslabs, besides Guangdong's Duan Inkslab, Gansu's Tao Inkslab and Shanxi's Chengni Inkslab. She Inkslab is made out of the stone on the Dragon Tail Mountain, Zhuchi Mountain and Xianxia Mountain within the present-day Jiangxi Province and the surrounding areas. As Wuyuan belonged to Shezhou in the old days and as on the Dragon Tail Mountain there was a stream named She Stream, the inkslab made of the stone from these places was called She inkslab.

The best-known inkslab is cut out of the rock from the Dragon Tail Mountain, called Dragon Tail Inkslab. Investigations show that the geologic age of the Dragon Tail Mountain belongs to the Sinian Period, which was a billion years ago, so She inkslabs are pure-colored, fine-veined, heavy and smooth, and when rubbed with an ink stick, no sound is produced and the ink is as thick as oil. She Inkslab has its varieties--25 designs out of 5 classes. Among the most valuable are Brow-Veined, Net-Veined, Golden-Star, Silver-Star, Golden-Ring, Golden-Ribbon and Black-Gold inkslabs. Not only do they enjoy a high quality but also exquisite designs and a fine workmanship. The craftsmen usually carve the slabs into different designs according to the natural shapes and veins of the raw materials. Besides round, square, and natural shapes, the slabs are carved into the shapes of melons, fruits, fish and dragons as well as human figures, which are extremely lifelike. The Nine Dragon Inkslab , for example, has 9 dragons swimming in surging waves, with 18 shining eyes carved out of the 18 natural star-like spots on the stone. The carving is of superb craftsmanship excelling nature. It is thus regarded as a rare treasure. Furthermore, the caskets for She Inkslabs are just as exquisite. They are usually made of pearwood or toonwood, shaped according to the size of the slabs. Each slab fits well into its casket so that no sound is heard when the casket is shaken. Painted red, the caskets look elegant and antique. She Inkslabs were highly appraised by Oyang Xiu, Su Shi, Huang Tingjian, Mi Fu, and widely loved by inkslab collectors.

Huangshan is also a tea-producing area and most people of the district are tea drinkers. Besides Qihong Black Tea and Tunlu Green Tea, which are world famous, Taiping Houkui, Baiyue Huangya, Huangshan Maofeng, Lumudan, Songluo, Queshe, Lianxin, Dinggudafang and some other varieties rank first class. Besides being a refreshing drink, tea has its medical values, Songluo Tea, for example, helps to reduce blood pressure, and Dinggudafang reduces weight. Shimo Tea, produced on Yixian County's Shimo Mountain, is said to contain more than ten trace elements, which will help to prevent diseases and senility, and the longevity of the local people is believed to be related to the tea.

Tea drinking has become their daily routine. They have the morning tea, the noon tea and the evening tea. In the morning they drink the green tea to refresh themselves. It is said they would rather dispense with breakfast than with tea. At noon, after lunch, they have a strong tea to help digestion, and in the evening they sip a weak tea just to relax themselves. The Huangshan people are hospitable and whenever a guest comes they entertain him first of all with tea. They do not make tea in a teapot, instead they infuse it directly in a cup. Boiled water is added to it during the course of drinking, but the cup is never filled to the brim. The folks are particular about the way of drinking. They enjoy good tea by sipping and tasting it slowly. Nothing can bring them more pleasure than a cup of delicious tea, pure, fragrant and refreshing. Tea growing pursuit in Huizhou enjoys a history of more than 1,200 years. There are over 30 varieties of tea, among which Qihong Black Tea has gained a fame as the world's top tea, and Tunlu Green Tea is sold in more than 50 countries and regions. The girls are demonstrating the local way of serving tea with specially made bamboo tea-things.

Around Mt. Huangshan is a world of treasure and mystery. After your sightseeing tour, you may well make yourself a cup of tea and sip it leisurely. In the hour of delightful relaxation, thoughts may come welling up in your mind. And to your joy you will find that the mystical and mysterious wonderland is right here-dearly cherished in your heart!