The delicacy is in the details

Since Huizhou is a mountainous area with few flat areas for farming, its people often left the region to do business at a young age. When they achieved success and wanted to build homes for their twilight years, lack of land meant they could not build bigger buildings and so instead, they resorted to luxurious decoration to display their hard-earned prosperity.

Wood carving is widely believed to be the most important among the "three carvings". "People often say, 'even if the walls collapse, Huizhou houses will not', because their wooden structures make use of sunmao (mortise-and-tenon) joints. That's why for interior decoration, the wooden beams and window lattices are the primary choices, and that's where wood carving comes into play," says Chen.

He further explains that brick carvings typically adorn the entrances of ancient residences to signify the owners' status, while stone carvings are commonly found on pillar bases and are more prevalent in ancestral temples and on paifang, memorial arches.