Qingshan Little Bull Loop

Start indoors. 融设计图书馆 occupies the restored 东坞礼堂, the village hall that once seated everyone for meetings and films, and PINWU reopened it in 2015 as a working archive of Chinese materials: bamboo split to its fibres, paper, wood joints, silk, lacquer, the hardware of rural craft taken apart and laid out so designers can read it. This is not a museum of finished objects. It is a reference library whose shelves happen to be made of technique, with a residency programme behind it and a cafe counter at the back. Give it thirty-five minutes at minimum and an hour if the current exhibition is one you care about. It is free, normally needs no booking, and shuts on Mondays.

Out of the door the loop follows 230 县道 and its side lanes north-east, past the runners' station, a purpose-built stop for the trail series that keeps water and bag storage for people running the longer lines, and on toward 青山自然学校. This is the part that is a village rather than a route: houses with new facades and old footprints, a design studio in what used to be a workshop, and 美好咖啡馆 inside the Nature School. AMap puts 279 m between the library and the cafe, a five-minute walk that takes fifteen once you start looking at what has been done to the buildings.

The lane opens onto 青山村大草坪, the flat ground that serves as car park, market square and race start; the 2025 New Year trail race began and finished here, which tells you what the hills around the village are capable of even though this loop does not attempt them. Alongside it the 青山生态绿地 holds the 青山之弦 installation cluster, structures placed across a sloping meadow for the village's art seasons and left in place afterwards. They read as sculpture and work as seating and viewing decks. The dependable toilets are here rather than further out, so this is the last comfortable stop.

East of the lawn the village thins and the lane climbs gently toward the catchment, a little over a kilometre of hard surface with woodland above it and the water appearing and disappearing through the trees. The stop named 龙坞水库 sits on this stretch, which is why people arrive looking for a lake and find a shelter with a timetable. Two things are worth holding as you walk. Everything downhill of you drains into water the city drinks, which explains the absence of a picnic culture at the bank. And the surface, gradient and exact line the village signs as 小牛线 are not documented anywhere, so treat the lane as the reliable option and paths off it as judgement calls.

The dam of 龙坞水库 is the destination and the reason the walk exists. In 2014 the Nature Conservancy began working the catchment with the village rather than around it, and the 善水基金 trust that followed put money toward farmers who stopped polluting: 2,600 mu of catchment, water that moved from class III or IV up to class I, and villagers re-employed as the people who watch over it. The painted band along the crest, 漫漫青山路, is the art-season layer on top of that, which is a fair description of the village's whole method. Whether the crest is open under the protection rules is a question this page could not settle, so read the fencing before assuming you can cross.

Return the way you came, or cut down through 燕子坞水库 if the gates allow, and accept that you are walking a corridor rather than a surveyed ring. The published route is 4 km, and the district's description says the track, drawn on a map, looks like a young bull. No track of this line has been published or retrieved, so the map's outline is a dashed line joining places that definitely exist along the lane. What you can hold it to is the arithmetic: five real anchors between library and dam add up to 3.37 km of road, which leaves room for a signed 4 km loop and slightly overshoots the 3 km that visitor posts describe.