Liukeng stands in Le'an county, ringed by hills, with the Niutian River running past it from the south-east towards the north-west. Xu Xiake came through in the seventeenth century and recorded that the place was crisscrossed with market streets, a town of ten thousand households, where the Dong clan was the great family and had the Wugui Fang, the archway of the Five Cassias. The observation is worth holding on to, because it tells you what kind of place this was: a market with a settlement attached, not a village that happened to have old houses in it.
From the journal
A market of a thousand households
Liukeng was a working market town, not a museum, and the streets still work as streets.
In the same city · Fuzhou ↗What the traveller wrote
Nineteen Ming houses and two hundred and fifty Qing ones
The village today has 1,280 households and about 5,600 people, with 3,572 mu of cultivated land, 53,400 mu of mountain and a built-up area of 3.61 square kilometres. It keeps nineteen Ming buildings, including their sites, and more than two hundred and fifty Qing buildings. The Jiangxi provincial government made it a protected historic area in August 1997; it was listed as a national key protected relic in June 2001 and named one of the first historic villages of China in October 2003.
Why it is not a set
Three separate listings in six years could easily have turned this into a preserved stage set. What keeps it a town is that the river, the market street and the families are still there, and the protected buildings are embedded in a settlement that goes on using them. The number that matters is 1,280 households. A village of that size with two hundred and fifty Qing buildings in it tells you more about how Chinese commerce was organised than any single monument could.