THE VILLAGE

Xinhua Village

Where silver is part of the soundscape.

Xinhua Village lies in Heqing, between the historic cities of Dali and Lijiang, in a highland landscape of mountains, water and wetlands. Nearby Caohai spreads into open water and reed beds; within the village, white-walled Bai houses, tiled roofs, courtyards and narrow lanes create a very different rhythm of space. Local government sources identify Xinhua as a Bai village, while Heqing County itself remains majority Bai. 

But Xinhua is not a village understood from its landscape alone.

You hear it before you fully understand it.

The sound of metal meeting metal.

Small hammers, striking again and again behind storefronts, inside courtyards and deeper within family workshops.

A Village Built Around Making

In many places, craft is something preserved behind glass.

In Xinhua, it remains part of everyday life.

Local descriptions of the village use the phrase “家家有手艺，户户有作坊” — a place where craft belongs to households and workshops sit close to daily life. In recent years, a characteristic “shop in front, workshop behind” pattern has continued to shape the village economy. 

A visitor can move from a street lined with finished silverware to the quieter space behind it, where the object is still becoming itself.

Tea is poured.

Customers come and go.

A hammer resumes.

Someone is drawing wire, someone is chasing a pattern, someone is talking while working.

This is what makes Xinhua different from a heritage site frozen in the past.

Silver is not only displayed here.

It is worked, sold, discussed, inherited, argued over, adapted and lived with.

A Bai Village

The cultural life surrounding the workshops is Bai.

Architecture, family life, food, festivals, language, patterns and ways of living belong to a broader Bai world that extends across Dali and Heqing. Traditional houses in the region are known for white walls, dark tiled roofs, carved windows, courtyards and elaborate gateways; in Xinhua, these forms sit beside workshops, signs, tools and the practical additions of a village whose economy has grown around making.

Yet the silver of Xinhua has never belonged to only one cultural conversation.

Historically, Heqing stood along routes connecting western Yunnan with Tibetan regions and other parts of southwest China. Silversmiths travelled with small furnaces and tools, working from place to place and responding to the objects, motifs and needs of the communities they encountered. The Yunnan Provincial Museum describes this itinerant tradition as 走夷方 — craftsmen leaving home, working across regions, learning as they travelled, and bringing influences back with them. 

That movement helps explain why Heqing silver has long carried more than one visual vocabulary.

The village stayed rooted.

The craft travelled.

How Old Is the Tradition?

Stories in Heqing often carry the sound of the hammer far back into history.

Local cultural sources trace metalworking in the area to the Nanzhao period, and the phrase “小锤敲过一千年” — “a little hammer has sounded for a thousand years” has become part of the way the region speaks about its own craft identity. 

The documentary record becomes clearer in later centuries. The national intangible-cultural-heritage record cites local historical accounts describing metalworkers arriving and passing their skills into village life during the Ming period, and describes the Heqing tradition as having a documented history of more than five hundred years. 

For Asteria et Lune, the value of this history is not in forcing it into a single date.

It is in continuity.

Generations of people have continued to take metal in hand and work it into something useful, ceremonial, personal or beautiful.

A Living National Heritage

In 2014, Heqing Silverware Forging Technique — 银饰锻制技艺（鹤庆银器锻制技艺） was included in China’s fourth batch of national representative intangible cultural heritage projects. The official national record identifies Xinhua Village as the principal place where the tradition is practiced.

That recognition matters.

But it does not mean the village stopped changing.

Young makers have returned. New residents have arrived. E-commerce and tourism have opened new markets. Old workshops sit beside studios, livestream spaces and contemporary businesses. Yet the small hammer has not disappeared from the sound of the village. 

Heritage here is not simply what survives.

It is what continues to be used.

Not a Museum

Xinhua Village is easy to romanticize.

We would rather not.

It is not a stage built for the idea of tradition.

It is a real village where people make a living.

Where craft is livelihood as much as legacy.

Where one generation may teach the next, while the next may sell through a screen to someone thousands of miles away.

Where wetland, courtyard, workshop, shopfront and family life exist side by side.

That ordinary continuity is part of what makes the place extraordinary.

Asteria et Lune begins here not because Xinhua represents an imagined past, but because it remains alive in the present.

The village is not behind the object. It is part of the object’s story.