Keeping up appearances

And by inviting academics to speak there, the villagers will be able to join in discussions about reviving local culture and can contribute their ideas on how to develop the village.

Long underdeveloped, Xiadi village has thankfully bucked the trend for tearing down ramshackle old dwellings and building new houses over the past two decades.

Moreover, art critic Cheng Meixin and a group of volunteers have devoted their time over the past four years to reinforcing and renovating more than 60 dilapidated houses in the village. They have been busily dredging rivers, paving mountain roads and restoring vegetation.

Many of the old buildings in the village are still in regular use, from traditional ancestral halls to temples.

Cheng is impressed that the village has kept up the traditional aesthetics as a whole, rather than simply maintaining individual old buildings. New houses are built on both sides of the road and are kept far from the old houses. He thinks the key to carrying out his work for the village is to live there and become immersed in its culture.

Cheng says the destruction of old houses in the Chinese countryside since the 1990s is a sign of fading aesthetics and a regrettable downside of China's development.