Just 40km north of Shantou on the banks of the Han River,
CHAOZHOU is one of Guangdong's most culturally significant towns, yet manages to be overlooked by tourist itineraries and government projects alike - principally through having had its limelight stolen last century by its noisy southern sister. In response, Chaozhou has become staunchly traditional, proudly preserving the architecture, superstitions and local character which Shantou, a recent, foreign creation, never had, making it a far nicer place to spend some time.
Founded back in mythology, by the Ming dynasty Chaozhou had reached its zenith as a place of culture and refinement, and the originals of many of the town's monuments date back to this time. A spate of tragedies followed, however. After an anti-Manchu uprising in 1656, only Chaozhou's monks and their temples were spared the imperial wrath and it's said that the ashes of the hundred thousand slaughtered citizens formed several fair-sized hills. The town managed to recover somehow, but was brought down in the nineteenth century by famine and the Opium Wars, which culminated in Shantou's foundation. Half a million desperately impoverished locals fled Chaozhou and eastern Guangdong through the new port, many of them emigrating to European colonies all over Southeast Asia, where their descendants comprise a large proportion of Chinese communities in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Humiliatingly, Shantou's rising importance saw Chaozhou placed under its administration until becoming an independent municipality in 1983, and there's still real rivalry between the two.
For the visitor, Chaozhou is a splendid place. Among some of the most active and comfortably scaled street life in southern China, there are some fine historic monuments to tour, excellent shopping for local handicrafts , and a nostalgically dated small-town ambiance to soak up. Chinese speakers might also note that Chaozhou's language is related to Fujian's minnan dialect, radically different from both Mandarin and Cantonese, though both of these are widely understood.
The Town
Chaozhou's old centre has none of Shantou's decrepitude. Instead you'll find an endlessly engaging warren of narrow flagstoned lanes packed with a well-maintained mixture of colonial and traditional buildings. In the quieter residential back lanes, look for old buildings, Ming-dynasty stone archways, and century-old family mansions, protected from the outside world by thick walls and heavy wooden doors, and guarded by mouldings of gods and good luck symbols. If you need a target, there's a decaying
mansion guarded by stone lions worth checking out on Zhongshan Lu, with a wonderful antique memorial archway and
Confucian academy - now a
museum full of prewar photos of town - one block south. Out on the main streets, motorbikes and cycle-rickshaws weave among the shoppers, who are forced off the pavement and into the roads by the piles of goods stacked up outside stores. For a less frustrating time, head up to the spacious and shady hills of
Xihu Park , actually just north of the old town across a "moat" on Huangcheng Bei Lu, where there's an ornamental pagoda and some unrestored sections of the town walls.
If you bother with only one sight, however, make it Kaiyuan Si (daily 8am-6pm; ¥2) at the eastern end of Kaiyuan Lu. A lively Buddhist temple founded in 738 AD, three sets of solid wooden doors open into courtyards planted with figs and red-flowered phoenix trees, where a pair of Tang-era stone pillars , topped with lotus buds, symbolically support the sky. The various halls are pleasantly proportioned, with sweeping, low-tiled roofs with brightly coloured lions, fish and dragons sporting along ridges. Off to the west side is a Guanyin pavilion with a dozen or more statues of this popular Bodhisattva in all her forms. Another room on the east side is full of bearded Taoist saints holding a yin-yang wheel, while the interior of the main hall boasts a very intricate vaulted wooden ceiling and huge brocade banners almost obscuring a golden Buddhist trinity.
About 100m east past the temple down Kaiyuan Lu you run up against the old town walls . Seven metres high and almost as thick, these were only ever breached twice in Chaozhou's history, and more than 1.5km still stand in good condition, though sometimes obscured by warehouses and homes built up against them. Kaiyuan Lu runs under the Guangji Gate , where there's a set of steps up to a rickety guard tower and a walking track along the top of the wall. Pass through the gate and you're standing by the river next to the five-hundred-metre-wide Xiangzi Qiao , a bridge whose piles were sunk in the twelfth century. Until the 1950s the central section was spanned by a row of wooden punts, now replaced by an ordinary concrete construction, closed to heavy traffic and popular with hawkers selling cheap clothes. Crossing over, you can see the shrub-covered shell of the tall Fenghuang Pagoda , a couple of kilometres downstream, while on the far bank a short street bears left to the gate of Hanwen Gong (¥2), a temple complex built in 999 in memory of the official Han Yu , a Confucian scholar who had denounced Buddha as a barbarian and cleared the river of troublesome crocodiles a century earlier. A flight of broad, steep granite stairs leads up to three terraces, each with a hall. The top one has numerous ancient stone proclamation tablets and a painted statue of Han Yu.
Adherence to the past has made Chaozhou a centre for traditional arts and crafts , and a great place to buy souvenirs. For something a bit unusual, the hardware market , just inside the Guangji Gate along Shangdong Ping Lu, has razor-sharp cleavers, kitchenware and old-style brass door rings. Temple trinkets , from banners to brass bells, ceramic statues - another local speciality - and massive iron incense burners, are sold at numerous stores in the vicinity of Kaiyuan Si on Kaiyuan Lu, also a good area to find ceramic tea sets and silk embroideries . The best place to buy lacework is at the large store on Huangcheng Xi Lu, opposite Xihu Park. While not dirt cheap, prices for all these things are very reasonable and the quality is high.
