Os muros de cabeça de cavalo refletem a essência pura de Huizhou

Every book's beginning has its own inevitability. Perhaps it is a sentence, a memory, or an emotion. Speaking of my connection with Huizhou, it was in truth a "forced" encounter, yet how could it not be seen as a form of destiny?

I remember it was a school study trip back then. Personally, I was usually reluctant to go—my own planned trips would be freer, allowing me to see more of what I actually wanted to see.

In truth, when I arrived in Huizhou with the school, the experience was not particularly breathtaking: the white-washed walls and black tiles, the village of imperial scholars, the octagonal memorial archways, the Old Hu Kaiwen Ink Factory, carving bamboo slips, picking tea leaves at the Xie Yuda Tea Garden, fields of canola flowers, fermented rice buns, the heavily commercialized and homogenized Tunxi Ancient Street, a theatrical performance I can no longer distinguish as Huangmei or Huizhou opera... and that bridge in Hongcun.

To ensure the students' safety, the school did not take us to climb Mount Huang. Despite the teachers' constant warnings not to provoke the dogs, someone still ended up teasing the local cats and dogs, sprained their ankle, and forced a teacher to stay behind at the hotel to care for them.

Meanwhile, my family members who had traveled to Mount Huang with me followed a sightseeing and feasting itinerary that made me green with envy. They bought and gorged on loquats in the villages, picked wild raspberries at the foot of Mount Qiyun—one of the four sacred mountains of Taoism—and visited a tr