Crop drying
Colourful trays on the roofs.
Leungcwd — CC BY-SA 4.0 · EditQ — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Maisie008 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · 江上清风1961 — CC BY 3.0 · EditQ — CC BY-SA 4.0 · 江上清风1961 — CC BY 3.0 · EditQ — CC BY-SA 4.0 · 沈澄心 — CC0
A Ming-era village whose houses step down a mountainside in Wuyuan County, with the white walls and grey roofs of Hui-style architecture; it is famous for the terraces of yellow rapeseed that cover the slopes in spring and for «shaiqiu», the autumn crop drying, when red chillies, yellow chrysanthemums and corn are laid out in round bamboo trays on window racks and rooftops, turning the village into a palette of colour. Its development for tourism began in 2009, when the villagers moved to a new village at the foot of the slope and the old village was restored with more than 120 Ming and Qing houses, twenty of them moved from elsewhere to save them; visitors reach it by two cable cars, UN Tourism named it one of the world's «Best Tourism Villages» in 2023, and it receives about one and a half million visitors a year. Tickets with the return cable car cost CNY 145, or 165 in busy periods such as the flower season and holidays, and the cable cars run from 7.30 am to 5.30 pm, per visitor guides. The rapeseed fields bloom from early March to mid-April.
Colourful trays on the roofs.
Spring gold.
On the mountainside.
Jiangwan town, Wuyuan County, north of Shangrao, Jiangxi
Early March to mid-April for the rapeseed flowers, and autumn for the colourful crop drying; come early to avoid the crowds in season and on holidays.
Choices are few in the villages and local cooking uses pork, so bring snacks and look in Wuyuan town for noodle restaurants run by Muslims under the halal sign.