A Disappearing World: Historic Villages beyond the Proximity to Metropolises

With a new wave of urbanisation and the call for building a new socialist countryside, rural areas of China have been undergoing a dramatic change. Rural areas in China have always been the major part of China’s vast territory, in which historic villages still comprise one of the main types of settlements even today. The Chinese ancient villages usually followed the philosophy of “Unity between Human and Nature”, pursuing the creation of harmony between humans and their environment. Admittedly, in the past a few years, China has achieved some success in historic village conservation; a typical case is “the Six Water Towns”. However, those villages enjoy a superior location advantage, adjacent to local metropolises. By developing tourism industry, these ancient villages have become backyards for centres such as Shanghai, Hangzhou and Nanjing. With such a large market, investments are flooding in, which provide a strong support for their conservation. But many more historic villages, which are even more ancient, typical and precious, disperse in much more rural and even mountainous areas, far away from large cities and not very easy to access