{A glimpse into China’s traditional villages--perspective from a small place in south China} If googling keywords like “Folk village & Chinese countryside”, there are thousands of photos depicting idyllic and tranquil scenery. However, considering that China’s rural areas are heterogeneous with vast geographical and cultural diversity, such images could be deceiving and stereotyped. In the Lian River basin, a 500-km2-large small floodplain located in the east part of Guangdong Province, the layout of a village could be spectacular (see image A). The Lian River plain is chopped up into three administrative—Puning, Chaoyang and Chao’nan—and accommodates a population of 4 million, which make it one of the most densely populated areas in China. You may not have heard any of them, but they are one of the major centers of the textiles and clothing industry in the world, especially underwear production. Besides, a town named Guiyu was once Chian’s e-waste town notorious for its role in “low-end globalization”. The area is a mosaic of meandering waterways and large-seized traditional settlements(see Image B). At first glance, the villages here sprawl in an untrimmed way on the plain, but a closer look reveals a fascinating sense of order. Resemblance to a checkerboard, a typical village consists of tens of hundreds of smaller blocks. Every block is a residential compound for one or two households, comprising two or three rows of one-story buildings and one or two tiny yards. Generally, the whole village is arranged by patriarchal lineage and shares a common ancestor. As a result, almost every resident is a close or distant relative to his or her neighbors. In fact, these villages may be the largest worldwide in the categories of traditional rural settlements. One interesting fact worth noting here is that most of them were built less than half a century ago but the theory of constructing villages in such a pattern dates back to a thousand years ago.