Huangcheng Xiangfu: Two Compounds in One

The road from Jincheng to Yangcheng runs through the Changhe valley, and the estate shows before it is reached: a wall along the top of Phoenix Hill with a cluster of roofs behind it. Huangcheng Xiangfu stands in Huangcheng village, Beiliu town, Yangcheng county, in the south-east of Shanxi, and the English account measures the walled property at ten hectares on the hill above the valley. It has a second name, Wuting Mountain Village, taken from a plaque the Kangxi emperor gave the family. The approach from the village is uphill, and it is the right way to arrive: the walls first, the courtyards after.

What reads as one fortress is two builds. The inner city was begun in 1632, the fifth year of the Chongzhen era, at the end of the Ming, when a family of officials in a rich river valley had reason to want walls; the English account dates the fortification of the site to Chen Changyan in 1633, and the defences as a whole to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Inside, the estate holds sixteen courtyards and 640 rooms over 36,580 square metres, divided between the inner and the outer city. The upper town is the older and harder part: the walls that make the place read as a fortress belong to the first campaign of building, and the mansion came afterwards, below and around them.

The outer city is the mansion, and it belongs to one official. Chen Tingjing was a Grand Secretary of the Wenyuan Pavilion in the Kangxi reign, tutor to the emperor and an editor of the Kangxi Dictionary, and the outer city was finished in 1703, the forty-second year of that reign. His family had been building on the hill since the 1440s, and across the Ming and Qing the Chens counted sixty-six mandarins, thirty-three poets and nine first-place winners in the provincial examinations. The plaque the emperor gave hangs with its couplet, which reads: spring comes back to the old trees and their deep shade; autumn reaches the yellow flowers, fragrant in their late season.

The estate photographs well because the whole property reads as one walled silhouette above the valley: the wall at the top, the roofs behind it, nothing taller in the frame. The image has been helped by money: a restoration costing thirty million yuan began in 1998, and in 2011 the China National Tourism Administration rated the property an AAAAA tourist attraction. The story told to visitors is older. Tradition, which the English account records as unverified, says the finished grandeur of the complex drew charges of disloyalty and of imperial pretension, and that Chen Tingjing answered them by saying he had built it for his mother, too frail to make the journey to Beijing.