Lizhuang on the Yangtze: the village that telegrammed a university and kept its lanes

In the autumn of 1940 a village of a few thousand people on the upper Yangtze sent a telegram to a university it had never seen, offering to take it in. Lizhuang (李庄) sits about twenty kilometres downstream of Yibin in southern Sichuan, and it is still built to the scale of that offer: nine short lanes, low timber shopfronts, a stone landing where the river bends away.

The telegram, and what came after

Sixteen characters went out over the wire, and within months Tongji University had moved in. So had the Institute of History and Philology, the crated collections of the Central Museum, and the small architectural research society that Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin were then keeping alive on almost nothing. They stayed until 1946.

Tongji moves to Sichuan; Lizhuang welcomes it. Whatever is needed, the locality will supply.

The rooms are ordinary, and still there

The buildings that absorbed all of this were never grand. The Zhang family ancestral hall has window panels carved with cranes rather than the usual flowers; there is a temple hall that served as a store-room, and a farmhouse out at Yueliangtian where Liang worked by oil lamp. The plaques marking them now are small and set low, easy to walk past.

Tea in the mat-weavers' lane

Xizi Xiang (席子巷) is roughly a hundred metres of leaning eaves with a strip of sky between them. The teahouses in and around it are family rooms rather than businesses in the renovated sense: bamboo chairs, a gaiwan (盖碗) with the lid tipped back to hold the leaves, a long-spouted kettle that arrives without being asked.

竹椅、盖碗、长嘴壶，一坐就是一下午。

One dish, and a day that fits

Lizhuang bairou (白肉) is boiled pork belly cut so thin the plate shows through, then rolled and dipped in garlic and chilli oil. The cutting is the point — a wide blade, one long pass, slices the width of a forearm. Base yourself in Yibin, come out by car in the morning, and give the town a full day rather than an afternoon; the lanes are quietest before the lunch tables fill and again once the light goes off the water.