The Water System Planning of the Buffalo-Shaped Hong Village

Hong Village is one of the Huizhou villages with the most representative residential architectures and landscape planning. Besides all the shared features of traditional Huizhou architecture, Hong Village distinguished itself among its neighbors by its unique buffalo-shaped village and water system planning. Its water system planning took advantage of its hilly landscape, and combined the existing waterway with the man-excavated ponds and waterways. This smartly planned water system has been providing every household in the village clean, fresh running water since 500 years ago, a time long before the modern tap water system was invented. Due to its unique water system planning, Hong Village was enlisted as the UNESCO World Heritage in 2000.

The village’s history can date back to as early as 1190 A.D. It was a family village owned by the Wang family. Originally, the only waterway near the village was the XiXi River, which ran from the northwest side of the village to the southeast. The direction of watercourse changed greatly at around 1276 due to a huge mountain flood. This mountain flood caused the river flows from the northwest to the south, which is also the direction today. In the 15th century, the Wang family’s social and economical status remarkably rose due to their success in business. As a result, the family started to put more attention on the fengshui of their family village because they believe that an auspicious planning can bring good luck to the family. They hired the most famous fengshui planner at the time to reshape their village. The fengshui planner came up with a comprehensive plan which dealt with the issues of the using water, drainage system, fireproof methods and irrigation.

What is more interesting, the village formed a crounching buffalo-like shape with the mountain and river around it. The Mount Leigang at the north side of the village is the head of the buffalo; the trees on the mountain are the horns of the buffalo; the dam controlling the water volume from the mountain is the mouth of the buffalo; hundreds of meandering streams are the intestines of the buffalo; the man-excavated Moon Pond at the center of the village is the stomach of the buffalo; the South Lake is the belly of the buffalo, since all waters finally converge to there; four bridges across the XiXi River are like the legs of the crouching buffalo. Overall, the Hong village is just like a relaxing buffalo crouching in the mid of the verdant mountain of Huizhou. The fengshui planner intentionally created this resemblance based on certain ecological, cultural implication. Buffalo is the major farming animal in Hong Village. The loyal, hard-working qualities of buffalo are what the Wang family valued and hope their offspring could pass down. Meanwhile, the villagers thought buffalo symbolized harvest and wealth, and they believed that by building their own village in this shape, it can bring them good luck. Despite the superstitious belief, building the village into a buffalo shape do has some ecological implications. Buffalos are famous for their unique digestive system, in which foods are fully digested through two stomach’s rumination. The Moon Pond and the South Lake can be viewed as the first and the second stomachs of the buffalo, where waters coming from hundreds of “intestines” (internal streams) were purified and precipitated first by the Moon Pond and then converge to the South Lake. Although not totally conform to a actual cow digestive system, the planning of Hong Village can be seen as one of the early exploration on bionics.

The existing landscape of the village was high at the north and low in the south. The planner took advantage of the elevation drop and used it to enhance the velocity of waterflow in the man-made streams in the villages. The average velocity of waterflow was as high as 21.6 meters per minute; this high velocity ensured the freshness and cleanness of the stream water. At the foot of the northern mountain, the fengshui planner designed several flood diversion channel, which can channel the mountain flood smoothly to the village. The most remarkable part of the Hong Village water system is its internal man-made water system. This system consists of a half-moon shaped Moon Pond at the center of the village and hundreds of winding streams that go alone every single streets and alleys of the village. These small streams measure 1260 m in total, 700m out of which are relatively wider streams and 500m out of which are the narrower streams. The wider streams are along the main streets of the village and therefore the water flows more rapidly in them, while the narrower streams are located in minor alleys and the water flows slower. The wider streams are seen as the large intestine of the buffalo while the narrower streams are the small intestine. Other components of the internal man-made water system are 8 wells and 22 fish ponds scattered in different residences. They connect the water system with underground water, which provides another source of water to the village. The underground water can also compensate for the river and stream water when they are dry. At the northwest of the village where the Yangzhan River and XiXi River meet, the planner designed a stone dame to separate the internal water system with the external, which can control the volume of water and ensure the smooth flow of the internal system even at the time when the external rivers has high volumes of water.

There were also many smartly planned gadgets in the waterway that maintain the cleanness and freshness of the water system. There were several water outlets at the south side of the South Lake. These outlets can channel water to the farmland in the south of the village to serve as irrigation water. Every internal stream has a wooden filter at the turns of the stream way that can block the trash in the river and prevent children from falling along the stream. Furthermore, the whole internal water system can be totally drained to clean the watercourse regularly. To drain the whole system actually doesn’t need to use any modern pump at all. All that need to do is to closed the dam at the northwest of the village and open the outlets in the south river. In this way the water is naturally drained up because the source is blocked and water converges to the South Lake and XiXi Lake following the gravity.

The village’s custom and water usage rules also played an important role in maintaining the cleanness of the water. There were unwritten rules among the villagers regarding fetching water, using water and disposing water. For example, the water before 8am can only be used for drinking because it is the cleanest water of the day after a night’s precipitation. After 8am, water is allowed to use for laundry and vegetable washing. Water is usually reused and recycled in this process: it is first used for rice and vegetable washing, and then used for watering plants and feeding stock, and then the remaining water goes to the notch in the skywell where it is filtered and transported to the outside water system. Dirty water is not allowed to be disposed to the stream since it requires longer time to filter and purify them. Instead, the villagers disposed dirty water to some clearings and let the soil to filter the water, and then finally became part of the underground water system. Furthermore, the Wang family values the preservation of trees a lot. Trees on Mount Leigang are not allowed to cut at all, and if there were people in the family were found cutting a tree, they will be expelled from family permanently.

I am deeply amazed by the cleverness of people in the 500 years ago after looking into the mechanism of Hong Village’s water system. I am so impressed by how they carefully studied the nature and came up with a series of methods that took the most advantage out of the existing environment without going against the rules and harmony of nature. I guess people in 500 years ago did this partly because they have no other choice—they didn’t have too much technology, and nature is all that they could rely on. They have the strong awareness of taking care of nature because they know if they didn’t do that they cannot live long. Contrary to that, the industrialization made us more and more neglect nature since we believe that technology can achieve anything. It may be no exaggeration to say that modernity made us lazier and more reliant to technology in some ways; we tend to solve a problem by turning to the machines for help without even thinking about if there’s easier natural way. By doing that, we overlooked the original meaning of technology, which is to simplify question rather than complicate it.
However, although the water system and living pattern in Hong Village is highly environmentally friendly, we still could not totally copy and apply it to our current design problems, because many mechanisms may not be applicable to our fast-paced, highly-efficient modern life. Therefore, I guess one inner question of sustainability we should look into today is how to avoid becoming too reliant on technology when we can save energy and do it by nature, while still ensure, or even improve the quality of our life. I believe the answer to this question lies in a better and deeper und