Wuzhen

A settlement grew here where the waterways of the delta met, and the town takes its recorded history from the Tang period, when the name Wuzhen came into use; local accounts trace habitation back much further. For centuries a boundary ran through the middle of it, dividing the town between two counties and even two prefectures, which is why it developed as four quarters — east, west, south and north — around the crossing of its canals.

The Grand Canal, completed under the Sui and repeatedly rebuilt, carried grain, salt and silk past the town and made it a market of some consequence. Wuzhen grew rich on silk and cotton cloth, on indigo-dyed calico printed with paper stencils, on rice wine distilling and on the rice trade, and its merchants built the timber houses that stand on stone piles directly over the water. It produced scholars in the imperial examinations and, in the 20th century, the novelist Mao Dun, who was born here in 1896 and used the delta towns as settings; the painter and writer Mu Xin was born here in 1927 and died here in 2011.

Like most water towns, Wuzhen declined in the 20th century as road and rail replaced the canals; its houses decayed and its workshops closed. Restoration began in the late 1990s, first at Dongzha and then on a much larger scale at Xizha, where buildings were repaired, wiring buried, and residents moved out so the quarter could be run as a hotel and cultural district. The theatre festival began in 2013 and the World Internet Conference the following year, giving the town a second identity as a venue.

Wuzhen belongs to the Wu-speaking delta, where the local speech is close to that of Jiaxing and Hangzhou and unintelligible to Mandarin speakers from the north, though Mandarin is universal among the young. The town's older culture is that of the Jiangnan market settlement: craft workshops, guild temples, an opera stage facing a temple square, and folk performances at festivals.

Crafts define its image. Blue calico, cotton cloth dyed with indigo through cut paper stencils, is hung out to dry in tall lengths in a dye-house courtyard that has become the town's most photographed corner. Other workshops show woodcarving, distilling and the making of carved beds. Shadow-puppet plays and huagu opera are performed for visitors in small theatres, and the year keeps a calendar of temple fairs and new-year customs.

Its modern culture is deliberately constructed. The theatre festival brings Chinese and international productions into small venues and out onto the water each autumn, the Mu Xin Art Museum gives the town a serious collection, and contemporary art exhibitions are installed in disused buildings. Residents and commentators debate how much of the result is a living town and how much a stage set; what is not in doubt is that Wuzhen set the pattern other Chinese heritage towns have followed.

Wuzhen counts about 60,000 people in all, of whom some 12,000 are permanent residents, while Tongxiang, the county-level city it belongs to, had just over a million at the 2020 census. Most people live outside the scenic gates in the modern streets and surrounding villages, in flats and farmhouses among mulberry fields and greenhouses, and commute into Tongxiang or Jiaxing for work.

Tourism dominates the local economy. The scenic areas are run by a single company, and a large share of jobs are in hotels, restaurants, boats, ticketing and maintenance, alongside the conference business that arrives with the internet conference each year. Outside that, the district lives on silk and textiles, leather, chemical works and agriculture, including the white chrysanthemums grown for tea and the mulberries that fed the old silk trade.

The daily rhythm is set by opening times. Coaches arrive through the morning, the lanes fill by midday, and the day quarter empties in the late afternoon, leaving the overnight guests to the lit canals. Residents fish, cycle and dry washing along the outer waterways where the tickets do not reach, and the older generation still keeps the small habits of the delta: an early market, tea in the afternoon and mahjong in the evening.

Wuzhen eats the cooking of the northern Zhejiang plain: freshwater fish and river shrimp, soy-braised meat, bamboo shoots, greens and rice, sweeter and lighter than food further north. The best-known local dish is red-braised lamb, made with the local sheep and cooked slowly with soy, rock sugar and rice wine, a winter dish sold at early-morning stalls across Tongxiang and Jiaxing.

The town is also a drinking town. Sanbai wine, a clear rice spirit, has been distilled here for generations and is sold from a workshop where the jars stand in rows in the open air; rice wine of the softer Shaoxing kind is served warm with meals. With it come pickles and the savoury salted-bean tea of the delta, a drink of dried orange peel, sesame and salted beans in hot water rather than a tea in the usual sense.

Snacks fill the canal streets: dingsheng cakes of pink and white glutinous rice, sticky rice wrapped in reed leaves, dried bean curd, sesame sweets and rice-flour dumplings. Seasonal specialities follow the delta calendar — hairy crab and osmanthus in autumn, spring bamboo shoots, and chrysanthemum tea from the fields around the town at any time of year.