2025 Donna & Dana's China Trip : 06/23/25

Tour 2; Day 9

The plan:

Visit Donna's Ancestral Villages with Student Researchers

Yanhu / Nganwo (maternal grandmother - Situ / Seto / Soo Hoo village)
Long'Gang (paternal grandfather - Fong / Kuang village)

After our normal buffet breakfast we met with Liz, one of our student researchers, in the hotel lobby about 8 AM. She had scheduled a Didi (Uber) driver for the day and we were off, first to Yanhu, the village Donna's maternal great grandfather lived. As an aside, Donna had been communicating her cousin, Happy Louie, regarding their shared ancestors. Happy's grandfather was Donna's great grandfather's younger (by ~20 years) brother and also lived in Yanhu. Happy and her husband, John, happened to be in China when we were and we met with them at the entrance to the village. Although Donna had been talking/texting/emailing/zooming with Happy for over a year, this was the first time they had met in person (even though they live in the SF Bay area, a short Mooney flight away from us ...).

In an attempt to identify the folks we met in Yanhu and Donna's relationship with them, here is one of the four family trees our student researchers developed for Donna, with my notes regarding who's who and those we met outlined in green...

We were given an extensive tour of the home that Soo Hoo Doo, Donna's Great-grandfather, recently lived in by Bingshen's wife (and I'm sorry that although we met her, I don't recall her name. In my defense I think I recall that she did not speak English and we did not speak Chinese so all comm was through our student researcher/translator - I'm sure she told us, but I don't recall it...). In any event, the tour was fascinating. An eclectic combination of old and new with some very nice art work and amazing examples of ingenuity.

The entrance to Yanhu. Most villages had an arch-like entry like this. Right to left: Happy, John, Donna, Donna's cousins Yanhua and Bingshen's wife, Weijie (Bingshen's son), Yanhua's husband, and cousin Cao

Yanhu Village - every village we visited faced a communal pond

Into the village we go...

The entrance to Donna's Great Grandfather's (Soo Hoo Doo) house

Inside the Soo Hoo home - it had been lived in by Bingshen's wife until about a year ago...

Happy and Donna compare notes...

This side of the home was two-stories - upstairs we saw this ancestral altar with candles and incense, which turned out to be common to almost every home we went into.

Upstairs was quite spartanly furnished, perhaps reflecting the gradual moving out of this home...

View looking back from upstairs balcony (back being away from the pond). Note the electrical wiring (lower right, blue and white wires), definitely added long after the homes were built ...

... and looking forward towards the pond.

Interesting feature - a grated vent hole in the floor perhaps reflecting that the home was built over 100 years ago, before electricity, plumbing and certainly air conditioning...

Back downstairs, the cooking area...

... and the adjacent sink area. Note the plumbing for the sink...

... and the wiring for the lights, etc. The red strings are pull switches.


Half of the home appeared to have been remodeled recently. In this picture you can see the difference between the floor of the kitchen area (through the door) to that of the washroom area, separated by a very substantial, lockable door. This side of the house (with the pink tile floor) had several rooms and a separate entrance.

The remodeled side of the home had some exotic living room furniture and art - a comfy chair, a fan and a motorcycle...

... with a shop in the adjacent room. Add a fridge for beer and I'd be ready to move in...

The remodeled side had three stories, the stairs had stainless steel handrails. And, although I didn't take a picture of it, this side of the house had the ultimate upgrade - a sit-down, flushing toilet.

After touring the Soo Hoo Doo home we went over to the Situ Wendi home where Happy's grandparents lived.

Entrance to the Situ Wendi home. Stainless steel clad doors were fairly common in all the villages we visited.

Although nicely furnished with some amazing artwork, it appeared that no one had lived here for some time...

Portraits of Happy's grandparents

Views from the 2nd floor balcony of the Sito Wendi home...

Looking down the stairwell, the lockable grate doors between rooms were interesting. I think back when these homes were built there was concern about "bandits" entering your home. Just a guess...

We saw this mixture of old (antique pots) and new (electric cook-pot) almost everywhere we went in China

Wood fire cooking area

The back door. I have to think these stainless steel doors came long after the original build - who'd need indoor lockable grate doors with these? You'd need a battering ram to get through these!

Although no one lived in the homes we toured, a (very) few people still lived in the village as witnessed by the well kept fruit-bearing trees and chickens (although I think some of the chickens were not long for this world...).

This well-kept, newish sign in the town square. We think it is called a stille board that listed donations by name (and possibly amount) to the village. It seemed that something like this was in most of the villages we visited.

After touring the two homes we drove down the road a bit for lunch.

After lunch our Didi driver took Donna, Liz and I to Long'Gang, Donna's paternal grandfather's ancestral village. This was one of the "failed" efforts that Prof. Selia Tan pointed out in her initial lecture (see Day 17; Jiangmen) and our visit there would provide little argument. Our researchers were unable to find any evidence of Donna's father's father having lived there and although the village was basically deserted we were able to talk to one person there who was the village caretaker (or something along that line). He told us that there were no "old" people there who might have some memory of who lived in what homes. This village seems to have suffered what is of great concern (to some) in China, that being the abandonment of the old villages for life in the newer, nicer cities. Some of the villages have some minimal population (like Yanhu), some, like this one, seem to have a caretaker of sorts, others are just falling into disrepair. We spent a little time with the caretaker but the visit, while still interesting, was essentially a bust in terms of "finding your roots"...

There are signs of life in Long'Gang - a well tended garden for instance. But we only saw two men - one who told us to talk to his brother, who was apparently the village's caretaker.

Liz tries to talk with the village caretaker regarding the family tree printout she had brought. The man looking at his phone was our Didi driver who turned out to be essential to our quest. Not only did he figure out how to get to these small villages (Google maps is no bueno in China, I think he used Tianditu..) he also happened to speak the Chinese dialect that the caretaker spoke. It was most interesting watching the Didi driver talk to the caretaker in one language, then to Liz in essentially another (as Liz did not understand the caretaker), then Liz re-translate to Donna that basically "He doesn't know, or know of, your ancestors here".

Even though the visit to Long'Gang was a bust from a genealogical sense, the town itself was quite interesting. You only get a sense of it here but the houses were very precisely organized in row/column order while Yanhu was much less ordered, almost willy-nilly ...