It's a good thing we had a guide, since at first glance it wasn't at all clear how to scale the village walls - effective for keeping out invaders and tourists alike!
Just as the kids
started to ask "are we there yet?" we came across an older woman
from the village who had stopped to rest on her way back from the local
market. 
One
of the kids asked what the "roller thing" was next to her, which
prompted a quick explanation of how corn is ground into flour. As luck
would have it, a nearby open-air room had a millstone still in working
condition, and the kids teamed up to give it a try.
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Jessica, Laura, Emily, Miranda and Sami were so enthusiastic about pushing the millstone around we thought they might apply for jobs in this corn-oriented town!
As we continued to climb through the narrow passageways that served as streets, we came across some interesting signs, courtesy of governments present and past. The one on the left is a contemporary example of "Chinglish," which we enjoy collecting via photos. The one of the right is a Cultural Revolution leftover exhorting the locals to follow "Mao Ze Dong thought (if you had to ask what it was, you weren't following it).
The Cultural Revolution slogan was actually painted on the side of a house. Village homes in China are built around inner courtyards, and the outside walls are intentionally left plain (so passersby can't easily look in and determine who is rich or poor).
The village is a sort of living history museum, with many private homes, still lived in, open to tourists. The first one we entered was set up as a museum, with photos and artifacts of daily life in Chuandixia.
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As we passed through handsome wooden doors, we noticed beautiful carvings at the base of the door jamb -- one of the many architectural details that give the village a feeling of being lost in time. |  |
The doors opened to reveal a little entryway leading directly into a wall, rather than into the courtyard itself. Traditional Chinese folklore holds that since evil spirits can only travel in a straight line, adding a 90 degree turn immediately inside the front door keeps the bad spirits at bay. This is why most Chinese restaurants, for example, have a fish tank, mirror or folding screen facing the front door. Murals painted on either side of the entryway clearly indicate that this home belonged to a wealthy family. |
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In this home, though, the murals were obscured by official-looking Chinese writing (you can see the a few brushstrokes of the mural underneath the text). Though I couldn't read the text, the date at the bottom stood out -- September 4, 1966 -- very close to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. It was an eerie, uncomfortable feeling to stand in front of such a stark example of the Cultural Revolution's trashing of so much traditional Chinese culture. Most such examples of destruction have been cleaned up since then, so it's rare to see one left intact like this. I couldn't begin to imagine how the residents of this home must have felt as they watched the sacrifice of their beautiful mural, or how they felt, ten years later, when the Cultural Revolution was finally exposed as Mao's insane last gasp. |
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