Siping Village四坪村

Siping Village sits below Jiufeng Mountain in Xiling township, Pingnan county, Fujian, at roughly 800m elevation — officially listed as a Chinese Traditional Village in 2023. Back in 2016 the village was falling apart: working-age residents had left almost entirely, leaving fewer than twenty elderly people behind. Starting in 2017, a mix of returning locals and newcomers began systematically restoring the old earthen-and-timber houses — keeping the traditional structure intact while making them genuinely livable — which drew a wave of young artists, mostly born in the 1990s, from all over China to settle here. In November 2020, the Pingnan Rural Revitalization Institute opened in the village, headed by the well-known rural-affairs scholar Wen Tiejun. Today it's built what's billed as China's first "four-type villager" model — old residents, new residents, "cloud" (remote/online) residents and honorary residents co-governing the place — and has gone from a collapsing hamlet to an "art village" with its own public art-education center, gallery and concert hall. It sits far from the well-trodden tourist circuit, but it's a genuine case study in how a Chinese village can rebuild itself from the inside.

Reviving old houses

What got restored isn't a showpiece — it's homes artists actually live in

• Since 2017, a batch of old houses has been systematically restored, keeping their traditional timber-and-earth structure while making them comfortably livable
• The restorations drew mostly-1990s-born artists from across China to relocate here and set up studios
• The village built a public art-education center, a gallery and a concert hall — shared spaces for residents and visitors alike
• The Pingnan Rural Revitalization Institute opened here in 2020, led by scholar Wen Tiejun, treating Sipingcun as a long-term case study in rural revival

Flavors of the Pingnan hills

Taro dumplings with a bowl of home-brewed rice wine

• Taro dumplings, mugwort rice cakes, guobianhu (rice-paste soup), rice-wine braised rabbit and fenkou (starch jelly) are the local go-to dishes
• The village grows rice, seedless persimmons, peaches, apples and chestnuts
• Neighboring Beiqian village is the "home of yellow rice wine" — its red-yeast brewing craft is a national-level intangible heritage
• Longtan village's Siping Opera is likewise national-level intangible heritage, with its own museum just 4km away

Everyday life

Old residents, new residents and "cloud" residents all sit on the same village roster

• The "four-type villager" model folds old residents, new residents (incoming artists), "cloud" residents (remote participants) and honorary residents into one governance framework
• Amenities remain village-scale — a café here, a pottery studio there, individually run guesthouses — not a built-out commercial strip
• It reads less like a scenic area and more like a working artist community that happens to welcome visitors
• Phone signal and internet in the hills are genuinely patchy — that's the real infrastructure level, not a marketing gloss