Gulangyu is a car-free island of piano houses and colonial villas lying five minutes across the water from Xiamen — a nineteenth- century international settlement frozen in garden walls and banyan shade, now a UNESCO World Heritage site. Fame has caught up with it: the day ferries disgorge crowds by mid-morning. The island gives it back at dawn and dusk, when the day-trippers leave and the lanes belong to residents, cats and pianos again.
