The most perfectly preserved water town in China — 6,000-year-old canal settlement in northern Zhejiang, midnight blue cloth dyed with indigo, rice wine workshops over the water, and theatrical lighting that transforms the canals at night
Wuzhen is an ancient water town in Tongxiang City, Jiaxing Prefecture, northern Zhejiang Province — 130km west of Shanghai and 80km north of Hangzhou, at the junction of six rivers and bisected by north-south and east-west canals. The town has a continuous settlement history of 6,000 years (Neolithic archaeological layers beneath the existing settlement) and a documented town history of 1,300 years; the existing canal-side architecture (stone bridge arches, black-tiled white-walled Ming-Qing period merchant houses, canal-side wooden workshops and teahouses, the wooden walkways above the water…
Wuzhen sits on the Grand Canal trade route (the ancient Chinese north-south inland waterway, begun in the 5th century BCE, extended to its full 1,794km in the 7th century CE, connecting Beijing to Hangzhou via the Yangtze delta flatlands) and developed as a silk and rice trading settlement at the river junction. The town's most famous resident is the modern Chinese writer and essayist Mao Dun (1896-1981, author of Midnight and Spring Silkworms — canonical works of 20th-century Chinese literature, his novels set in the Wuzhen merchant community he grew up in; his childhood home is preserved as…