Wuyuan, the Yellow Fields of Huizhou

Wuyuan is farmland with an unusually good address. Historically part of Huizhou — the merchant heartland now mostly across the border in Anhui — the county kept the architecture that mercantile wealth paid for: whitewashed walls, black tile roofs and stepped horse-head gables built to stop fires jumping between houses, all of it set in a bowl of tea hills and terraced fields in northeast Jiangxi. Wuyuan was also the ancestral home of the Song philosopher Zhu Xi, and the county has never stopped trading on the connection.

The season everyone chases is late March and early April, when the rapeseed comes into flower and the terraces at Jiangling stack into bands of yellow above the morning mist. The villages reward slower visits. Likeng threads a stream between two rows of houses and stone footbridges; Xiaoqi keeps Qing merchant mansions with carved brick doorways; Wangkou curls along a river bend around the Yu Family Ancestral Hall and its celebrated woodcarving; Sixi Yancun is quieter and darker inside, all timber and courtyards. At Qinghua, the Song-dynasty Rainbow Bridge rests covered wooden pavilions on four stone piers across the water.

Autumn brings the other image of Wuyuan: Huangling, a hillside village where households rack chillies, corn and chrysanthemum on round bamboo trays outside upper windows — the shaiqiu, or autumn sunning, now a photographers' pilgrimage. Between villages, ancient camphor trees shade the lanes, Wuyuan green tea grows on the slopes, and Longwei inkstones are still carved by hand. Eat steamed pond fish, preserved-vegetable pork and clay-pot dishes. It pairs naturally with Huangshan and Jingdezhen on a route through eastern China.