After my visit to Fenghuang Ancient City a few years ago, I was hooked and wanted to visit some of the other Chinese ancient cities. Xitang is located close to the Suzhou/Shanghai area, so we decided to make a day trip out of it. It was a gloomy day and upon arrival, and the first thing we noticed was this very proud advertisement of a 2 star hotel that gave us a few chuckles.
It was a gloomy day and upon arrival, we walked up to the admissions desk to find out that it would cost 100RMB to enter the town. This made no sense to me as I had previously read that it was free to enter. Besides, how could they charge us for entering a city? In the end, we couldn’t argue and just paid the fee. We had just made a 2 hours journey to Xitang, so we weren’t going to just turn around and leave without seeing it.
Once we entered the city, I found it to be completely different from Fenghuang. Aside from a couple of streets and the waterway, it really wasn’t quite as impressive as Fenghuang. In Fenghuang, the entire town had a very unique atmosphere, whereas Xitang appeared much more like a tourist place inside a city. It didn’t feel like a stand alone old city at all.
We soon reached a very typical tourist street selling a great deal of souvenirs and snacks. This was probably the most crowded area we saw in all of Xitang.
We soon realized that there were a few places within the town that required an admission ticket to enter. This turned out to the 100RMB that we had paid for, so in reality we really could have saved ourselves 100RMB as all of the places we visited with the ticket were not all that exciting.
After walking around for a little while longer, we grabbed a coffee and then headed back to Shanghai. We were a bit disappointed as it didn’t quite live up to our expectations.
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