A Journey into Rural China

一

On my first morning in Fujian, I woke up at dawn to the sound of rushing water. Rising from bed, I slid open one of the old wooden windows of my room, which was situated within a 180-year-old mountain dwelling in southeastern China. I dressed quickly and descended a narrow staircase of dark cypress, entering the first of the structure’s several interlocking stone courtyards.

I had arrived under the cover of night, and the view now as I stepped into the main courtyard was astonishing — like entering into a painting. Traditional earthen-brick buildings known as “tulou” rose up against a backdrop of lush emerald-green hills ridged with oolong tea plantations and persimmon trees, all hung in mist. The doorways were marked with faded Chinese calligraphy, remnants of its time as a traditional family home during the latter half of the Qing dynasty. I walked through the courtyard and stepped out the front gate into the 600-year-old village of Taxia. A stream rushed by my feet, the sound of water now so loud it drowned out even the morning birdsong.

It was hard to believe I was really here, that such a world was even accessible to a foreign visitor like me. And until recently, for the most part, it wasn’t. Tourism to the People’s Republic of China has been building rapidly in the several decades since the nation began to open up, growing from about 230,000 foreign tourists in 1978 to 59.27 million in 2016. The vast majority of this influx has concentrated in the cities, where infrastructure was more quickly developed. And yet, while the foreign media continues to report on China’s breakneck-speed urbanization, its countryside has been developing at a speed and scale unseen in the West. Drawn by the promise of boundless opportunity, architects and artists — as well as capital flow — have been converging in rural areas across the country.

It’s against this backdrop that billionaire venture capitalist Wang Gongquan, who is famous in China not only as a businessman but as a liberal advocate and sometime poet, launched Tsingpu Retreats in 2017, hoping to serve a growing desire for slowness, silence, rural heritage, and communion with nature and oneself. Each retreat is the work of a different architect, who incorporates contemporary design into the understanding of local history, environment, and traditions. This sensibility pertains not only to the architecture: Guests are offered an immersive program of cultural activities, from bamboo foraging in the hills around Tsingpu Tulou Retreat in Fujian, to Ming dynasty-style fan-folding at Tsingpu Yangzhou Retreat, a remarkable hyper-modern construction that, since its opening in 2018, quickly made its way into the headlines of global design publications like Dezeen and ArchDaily. Four retreats are open at the time of writing, with a total of 10 slated by the end of 2019.

二

To get to any of the Tsingpu retreats, foreign visitors fly into one of China’s main international hubs — typically Beijing, Shanghai, or Hong Kong — where they will inevitably get a first-hand feel for the urban crowding and congestion that characterizes much of the country. China’s notoriously poor air quality has improved in recent years, due largely to a government crackdown on pollution. So I was surprised to exit Beijing airport into a noxious, gray-colored smog. There are still bad days apparently, but I decided to be optimistic — a few days wouldn’t hurt, would they? And as I sat in the back of a taxi, watching hundreds of masked motorcyclists and rickshaw drivers weaving in and out of the narrow hutong alleyways in the shadows of high-rise towers, I couldn’t help but admit the smog lent the city a woozy Blade Runner-esque kind of lyricism.

The next day was as maximalist and dreamlike as they come. We woke up and drove two hours to the well-preserved Mutianyu stretch of the Great Wall, which snakes dragon-like and solitary along an electrifying landscape of misty undulating terrain. Built over millennia and fortified during the Ming dynasty, the ancient 5,500-mile Wall was meant to keep out northern invaders and protect Silk Road trade as China developed from a chaotic topography of warring forces into a great imperial power, bringing the arts, philosophy, and sciences to unprecedented heights. Standing atop the Wall, I had the strange sensation of seeing history from above — as if I were floating outside of time.

From there, we headed into central Beijing and joined the great masses of people making their way through the red-walled Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City, a sprawling 15th-century palace complex used by the imperial family. We walked the old imperial road to the Gate of Heavenly Peace, or Tiananmen, which is crowned with a massive portrait of Mao Zedong, the founding father of the People’s Republic of China, who ruled the country as the Chairman of the Communist Party from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976. We could look south from there onto Tiananmen Square, where Mao declared the founding of the People’s Republic but which is best known in the West for the student-led pro-democracy protests that took place there in 1989.

Wang Gongquan, then a student, was one of the protesters arrested that day, and in a similar contrast between the external and internal depictions of China, he is perhaps best known in the West for his activism. He’s been imprisoned twice — once in the Tiananmen crackdown and again in 2013 in connection with his involvement in the New Citizens’ Movement. Yet in China, his celebrity derives mostly from his tremendous business success and unique biography. Mr. Wang grew up in the northeastern province of Jilin, where he worked for the government before quitting to co-found Vantone Holdings in 1991, one of the country’s leading real estate developers. In the 2000s he ran several venture capital and private equity funds, with which he amassed a fortune, in China but also abroad in Silicon Valley.

“I consider Tsingpu the last work of my career — my masterpiece,” said Mr. Wang through a translator, when I met with him at the company’s headquarters the next morning. Looking at his own career and the rapidly developing Chinese market, he saw an opening for a series of sophisticated, culturally engaged rural retreats that would cater to booming Chinese wealth and interest from abroad. “I’m trying to create a place, a site, for people to feel the beauty of poetry, their inner heart, their artistic spirit.” This has become harder and harder to find in the cities, he said, and after 48 hours in Beijing, I was inclined to agree. The project requires intense cooperation with the government, but Mr. Wang said that his past brushes with controversy have not caused him any problems. “On the contrary, I think that most of the officials respect me because of my work to help people,” he said. And in many ways, his reputation has been beneficial: “Everyone knows I will never pay a bribe.”

Tsingpu also connects with Mr. Wang’s love for classical Chinese poetry, which is rooted in Confucianism and takes pastoral beauty and the contemplation of nature as enduring themes. As a way to explain what he hoped Tsingpu Retreats would accomplish, he quoted Xin Qiji, a 12th-century poet who is one of his favorites. “ ‘Oh, how lovely the green mountains look to me! Do I look the same in the eyes of the trees and flowers?’ ” Mr. Wang paused. “So that’s the concept,” he said, looking at me with laughing eyes. “I think I get it,” I told him. But to be honest, I wasn’t sure.

三

In any case, by the time we said goodbye to Mr. Wang and boarded a plane due southeast, I was ready for the country. A couple of hours later we landed in Xiamen, a city of some 4 million people in southeastern Fujian. Its airport, the closest to Tsingpu Tulou, is situated on an island in the Taiwan Strait. I let the warm, semitropical air stream in the windows as we drove for hours in the dark, seeing the occasional flash of banana trees, until we eventually arrived at Tsingpu Tulou. Two members of the young staff — all locals of the village — brought us tea and fruit and showed us to our rooms, but it wasn’t until that next misty morning that I got a sense of the property.

The three main buildings of Tsingpu Tulou Retreat date back more than 180 years, when they were the home of the wealthy Zhang family (nearly all the inhabitants of Taxia village are related to this same family). The father lived in one building, his three wives lived in another, and their 11 children lived in the third. Polygamy was a marker of affluence among the Hakka people, an ethnic group that spread from central China into the southeast around 1,000 years ago, fleeing unrest and invasions. The threat of bandits and marauders contributed to the unique Hakka building style known as “tulou,” fortified earthen dwellings that sealed off the living space from the outside.

Tsingpu Tulou Retreat was built over the course of a year, an ambitious $8 million adaptive-reuse project led by the Beijing-based studio Trace Architecture Office (TAO), which since its founding in 2009 by the architect Hua Li has become renowned for its site-responsive construction methods that honor cultural and environmental conditions. With the help of dozens of local artisans, craftspeople, and laborers, TAO knocked down walls to enlarge the rooms, raised ceilings, and restored original details and features, like ornate lotus-shaped interlocking wooden ceiling brackets known as “dougong,” using materials reclaimed from other tulou sites. They filled the rooms with furniture by Fnji (pronounced Fanji), a Chinese company that has helped reinvigorate the country’s design scene with its elegantly minimalist high-end ash and walnut wood furnishings. There are also refined in-room touches like earthenware tea sets with clay vessels of local black and wheat teas.

As we sat down to lunch in the restaurant, one of two new buildings TAO constructed for the project, I got to experience how this localism extends to the retreat’s cuisine. Waiters brought a feast of regional delicacies, like bone-in chicken soup (Fujian cuisine is known for its soups), razor clams served with hot Chinese watermelon, fresh bamboo root with pork belly, and a dessert of red bean paste with orange peel. Everything was delicious, and unlike other Chinese regional cuisines (Szechuan and Hunan being the most famous in the West), Fujian cuisine is neither spicy nor greasy, tending instead to sweet and sour tastes. I found the food quite accessible — barring the local breakfast, which was served alongside Western items like croissants and omelets. It consisted of congee, a glutinous rice porridge, topped with items like pork floss, fermented tofu, and “hundred-year eggs,” i.e. duck eggs preserved in a mixture of clay, ash, salt, quicklime, and rice hulls for many weeks until the yolk turns a creamy, piquant dark gray-green and the white becomes a salty, dark-brown, translucent jelly. I’m generally an adventurous eater, but I found myself, without a moment’s hesitation, reaching for the croissant.

After lunch, we walked through the village of Taxia, following the stream through its jungle-green hilly terrain. Centuries-old earthen and brick-wood village dwellings were stacked like Jenga blocks along the banks of the stream, which was crisscrossed by small wooden footbridges. Our guide, a 36-year-old local named Junhao Zhang, explained that the village is named for the taijitu, the Chinese term for what we call in English a yin-yang symbol. That’s how Taxia is shaped when viewed from above, bisected by a curving stream and punctuated by two circular tulou roofs. I asked how he felt, as a 20th-generation Taxia local, about this influx of foreign visitors. “We really love it,” he said, “for introducing tulou culture to the world. And as more tourists come, locals can have more chances to make money and improve things for their family.” We walked to the second-story tea room to get a good view of the mountains. “You should see it on a summer night,” said Junhao fondly, “when the hills fill with fireflies.” That evening, an instructor led us in a session of traditional Fujian wood-painting. We each received a flat piece of wood and a palette of paint and spent the evening slowly working away at our compositions as our cups were refilled with steaming green tea. After only a day in Fujian, my mindstate was altered, the clamor of the city already fading from memory.

The next day, we traveled to the nearby Gaobei Tulou Cluster, a kind of open-air museum where we were able to visit three massive Unesco-marked multi-story cylindrical tulou. The tulou were built to accommodate hundreds of families at once, and some of their descendants still live there, offering tours of the structures and selling tea and tobacco. After showing us around, one of these descendants, a 40-year-old mother of two named Renyan Zhu, brought us into her home for a tea ceremony, one of China’s most beloved and ubiquitous daily rituals. We sat around a table, and Renyan poured us cup after cup of steaming tea, black and oolong, and a “blooming” green tea made with marigold and globe amaranth that, when added to hot water, appeared to actually blossom before our eyes. With our guide as a translator we chatted about our lives, her husband and children, work on the tea plantation, my husband back in Berlin. I bought some tea from her, and as a thank you, she sang a song for us, one she learned as a child. It was traditionally sung on the tea plantations by wives to their husbands, wishing them health and well wishes when the men would leave to find paid work abroad. I listened to Renyan’s voice, pure and beautiful, fill the space between us.

四

After two days in Fujian, we flew from Xiamen to Yangzhou, a city in China’s Jiangsu province that straddles the Grand Canal north of the Yangtze River. Once a major stop for the salt trade, it’s now known for its ancient shrines and traditional gardens. Again we drove in darkness until finally we reached Tsingpu Yangzhou Retreat. By night, the property’s mazelike gridded structure, which was inspired by the courtyard typology of vernacular Chinese architecture, was all dramatic shadow-cast geometrical angles, darkened to abstraction. It was spectacular, as was the sunken, rectangular reception room, where glass walls looked out on one of many shallow Tetris-shaped reflection pools.

Tsingpu Yangzhou Retreat, sometimes referred to as “The Walled,” is the work of Neri & Hu, an acclaimed architectural firm founded by partners Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu. They began with several existing structures, then expanded, using over 1.2 million reclaimed gray bricks they collected from Yangzhou and surrounding areas. “Every brick has a story,” said the concierge as he walked me through the retreat the next morning, pointing out centuries-old markings on some of the bricks — Chinese characters meaning “long life” or “be happy.” Neri & Hu designed the structure to interact with the changing daylight. Squares of light appear on the walls like framed pictures. Shadows stretch, contract, and move upward and downward as the hours progress.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the locals haven’t all embraced such an ambitious undertaking. Or as the concierge put it: “They think it looks unfinished.”

To get a better feel not only for the region but for the aesthetic traditions that inform the retreat, we went the next day to the oldest part of town, the 600-year-old Dingjiawan residential district. Like Tsingpu Yangzhou, the area has a mazelike, geometric quality. Light moves through openings and across walls. We stopped at Little Pangu Garden, a privately owned traditional walled garden and walked down its zigzagging pathways lined with a great variety of palms, orchids, and bamboo, around ornate pavilions and ponds set with craggy rockery pulled from the sea, all hemmed in by walls built to replicate the spine of a dragon. From there, we visited the ancient Daming Temple, which is known throughout the Buddhist world for one of its monks, Jianzhen, who helped to spread Buddhism to Japan in the 8th Century B.C. I watched pilgrims burn fistfuls of incense, bowing and wielding it over their heads, praying at the feet of statues depicting Buddha and his disciples. It was a Saturday, so the temple was thronged with visitors, among them several Japanese tour groups, who shuffled back and forth under the shade of a blossoming osmanthus tree, which filled the courtyard with its distinctive sweet-wine aroma. It was undeniable that the place had a spiritual aura, a sublime calm cultivated over millennia.

We returned to the retreat for a dinner of braised eel with pumpkin and garlic, hollowed-out dragon fruit filled with seared beef, mushroom, and peppers, and “flowers” made from jellyfish, carrot, and cucumber.

As I ate, it was as if I could actually taste the landscape. Like Fujian food, Jiangsu cuisine is mild, favoring sour and sweet to salt and spice. But the food at Yangzhou was even more refined than what we had at Tulou, which might have less to do with regional differences and more with the man in charge, Changzhu Gao, a third-generation Yangzhou chef whose grandfather cooked for Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of the Republic of China. After dinner, the retreat hosted a concert by a master of the guqin, a plucked seven-string instrument of the zither family said to date back more than 5,000 years. The master called each of us on stage to learn a few bars of a popular Cantonese song called “Laughing on the Blue Sea.” I slid my fingers across the strings and heard the melody take shape.

The next morning — my last in Yangzhou — I took a walk down the long bank of the nearby Slender West Lake, savoring these last solitary moments in nature. Weeping willows swayed in the wind, their pendulous branches grazing the surface of the water like fingers on silk. The guqin still played in my head, and the sun cast a pale glow, doubling a pagoda onto the water’s surface. I felt somehow part of it, but also separate, and I was suddenly reminded of the Xin Qiji poem Mr. Wang had quoted to me back in Beijing. “Oh, how lovely the green mountains look to me! Do I look the same in the eyes of the trees and flowers?” At the time, I’d found it hard to get my head around. But that morning in Yangzhou, it made perfect sense.