Shengfang, a water town on the Dongdian that kept its fair calendar

Wumiao Qianjie, the street in front of the War God Temple, runs more than seven hundred metres through the old centre of Shengfang. At its southern end stands a memorial archway, its carved ornament dense, its eaves lifted on bracket sets. A century ago a temple to Guan Yu, the deified general, stood on the same street, temple to the south and arch to the north. The archway standing now was rebuilt from old photographs, so its carving reproduces a building that otherwise survives only as an image.

East of the arch is the Wenchang Pavilion, also called Kuixing Lou, the tower of the god of literature. It was first built in 1519, the fourteenth year of the Zhengde reign of the Ming, and rises three storeys to thirty-three chi, a little over ten metres.

At the far end, where the street meets Zhongshan Street, stand two buildings of a different sort. One is the old theatre, Jiucheng Lou, first put up in the Qianlong period, sitting south and facing north up the street. The other is the Wang family compound, begun in 1880, the sixth year of the Guangxu reign. Its rooms set Byzantine ornament beside Chinese roofs of hip-and-gable profile and details the sources call African. Nothing in the record explains the mixture; the house simply holds it.

These three are what the town calls its treasures: theatre, archway, pavilion. They are, respectively, a stage, a memorial gateway, and a tower of learning.

Shengfang stands on the north bank of the Dongdian, the shallow wetland east of Baiyangdian and the second of Hebei's lowland waters by area, at roughly 350 square kilometres. The two are joined by one water, and the town sits near the lower end of nine rivers, a phrase meaning that the drainage of a wide plain passes this way before it reaches the sea.

Before the 1960s the Dongdian was still a working lake, yielding Dongdian crab and the reeds that went into mats. Trade, fishing and reed weaving were the town's three livelihoods for centuries. Streets ran out from a channel cut through the middle of the old town, four ways, narrow and tangled as a web, with houses built along the water, so that walking the lanes felt like entering a maze. The town grew from a fishing village. After the early Ming resettlement its population rose fast, shops followed the people, and by the early Qing it was rich.

A county gazetteer, the Wen'an xianzhi, records the result: sails like a forest on the water, carts and horses loud on land, goods of every kind set out, merchants gathering. It lists Shengfang among the six great towns of Zhili, the province that surrounded the capital. A proverb put it shorter: south of the capital, Suzhou and Hangzhou; north of it, Shengfang.

Once the Yuan dynasty's northern canal section was open, the town became a wharf between water and road. Central Hebei's earliest finance businesses and western Tianjin's earliest postal service are said to have begun here. The nickname that stuck was Little Tianjin.

What holds the town together now is less the buildings than the calendar. In the early or middle years of the Qianlong reign, Shengfang's street blocks each formed a music association; at least twelve existed, and the South Music Association ranked first because it alone led the rite called the Glazed Buddha. That rite was an ice-lantern gathering. In the early Qing it carved twenty-three ice Buddhas and later added other figures, opening on the tenth day of the first lunar month and closing on the eighteenth, with the association playing under a mat shelter while monks or lay believers recited sutras. Cold decided whether it could be held at all, so it did not come every year. The associations stopped during the Cultural Revolution; six or seven, the South among them, restarted afterwards, and the others did not.

The fifteenth of the first month still brings the lantern festival. Wang Sheng, a primary-school teacher and folk-custom researcher, says the way into the town's long continuity runs through that festival and through the seventy-two flower fairs, the town's own performance associations.

Transmission has moved into classrooms. At four in the afternoon, when Dongfeng Primary School finishes, children go to lessons taught by older performers: the South Music Association, stilt walking, martial arts, rammed-earth work songs, cross-drums. The town now promotes the lantern festival, dragon-boat races at Duanwu, the fire-god sacrifice and the Yulanpen rites. It receives on average more than a thousand visitors a day, nearly three in ten from Beijing and Tianjin, with the share from Xiong'an rising.