Old walled town has vibrant heart(2)

While we were in the park, people in white garments came out of the East Gate. They burned colorful paper houses as tall as 2 meters for their dead relatives. The red paper houses with golden decorations and flowers turned to ashes in an instant. The relatives kowtowed toward the East Gate.

Leaving the park, we headed toward the center of the town, where we found some small shops, a market and a cinema from the 1970s. There were several halls in memory of locals' ancestors. It's said there are over 100 ancestral temples in the old city, and among them, the hall of Wang's family is the most impressive.

The front gate of Wang's ancestral temple is elaborately decorated with golden couplets carved on stone gate frame. Entering the gate, we see paintings of two traditional door gods on another door to the inside of the temple. There is a list of all the ancestor's names and pictures of recent generations on the wall.

On the other side of the wall, we saw a series of 10 stone carvings telling the story of how the family immigrated to Chongwu.

Their ancestors, three brothers surnamed Wang, came from Henan Province in central China on horseback during the late Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907), a time of social unrest. They led an army and unified Fujian Province in 885.

In Chongwu Old City, Wang is still a big, prosperous family with three large groups settling in the north, south and east of the city. Covering an area of 400 square meters, Wang's ancestral temple is one of the largest ancestral temples in Chongwu.

There are over 100 such large families in the city and each has an ancestral temple, a local resident told us.

Just beside Wang's temple, we saw another temple with numerous couplets beside the door, some in red and some in black. In front of the open gate there were two white lanterns.

We entered and saw a funeral was going on, with a mourning hall inside with a paper structure in black and white. People in black clothes surrounded a young woman in the middle. The woman's husband had been killed in an accident at age 36.

We saw a piece of paper on the wall in a corner, detailing the income and expenditure of the family temple in the past year.

It listed how many babies were born and how many family members died during the time. When a baby is born, the ancestral temple customarily receives money from family members, and when a man dies the temple spends money on the funeral service. Last year, the family temple had a balance of around 60,000 yuan (US$9,808).

Leaving Chongwu Old City, we looked back at the stone wall in the golden light of the sunset. Soon we were enveloped by busy buses, loud music, colorful billboards and throngs of people. Chongwu will stick in my mind as much more than a relic, but a livable and dynamic town of ancient stone walls with a heart that is beating in the marriages, mourning, values and family traditions we saw.

How to get there:

There are direct flights from Shanghai to Quanzhou City which takes about 1.5 hours. And to go from Quanzhou to Chongwu town, you can go to Quanzhou Passenger Transport Center at the crossing of Pingshan Road and Quanxiu Road. The trip takes about one hour and a ticket of 20 yuan (US$3.20). It takes 15 minutes to walk or three minutes via taxi to go from Chongwu bus station to Chongwu Old City.

Where to stay:

It's easy to make a day trip to Chongwu town from Quanzhou, which serves a good base with all types of hotels and restaurants. However, if you want to dig deeper, motorbikes can take you to the seaside villages where you can find the famous Hui'an women still wearing traditional costumes and residents enjoying fresh seafood. Since those villages are not commercial travel destinations, only a few fishing families offer B&B service and the conditions can't be compared to standard hotels.

What to eat:

As a town so close to the sea, seafood is usually the first choice. One of the snacks you can find everywhere on the street is Chongwu fish roll, which is made of minced fish meat. It can be fried or cooked in soup.

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