Cuiheng Village: Sun Yat-sen's Birthplace, Funded by Hawaii

A village with no land, and one export

On the western shore of the Pearl River estuary, roughly thirty kilometres north of Macau, sits a village that never had enough ground to feed itself. Cuiheng Village (翠亨村, Cuìhēng Cūn) held about sixty households and around ten surnames in the 1860s. The soil was thin and sandy, with almost no arable depth. What the village had instead of farmland was a horizon, and two generations of its sons went out through it.

That kind of place has a name, and the name is this article’s frame. A qiaoxiang (侨乡, qiáoxiāng) is an emigrant-sending homeland — a village or district whose houses, schools, family budgets and marriage patterns were reorganised by money earned elsewhere. Its migration history and five-county baseline are covered in this site’s Wuyi diaspora heritage and five counties of Guangdong articles. Xiangshan (香山县, Xiāngshān) County — the territory that is today’s Zhongshan (中山市, Zhōngshān) plus Zhuhai and Macau — sat east of those counties rather than among them, and it emigrated on a distinguishable profile: broadly and comparatively more merchants, brokers and compradors, and far more of the Hawaiian pipeline. Exceptions ran both ways, and none of this is a rule about who left.

Cuiheng is that county’s smallest and most consequential case: sixty households with ten surnames, a scale a family historian can hold in their head, that produced a revolutionary leader, a martyr, and a remittance economy reaching five continents. This article is about the village and its emigrant networks: who left, where they went, what their money built at home, and how it financed the overthrow of the Qing. The man born here has biographies — several of them, starting with his roots — and his life story lives in them; the village has had none. The county-level companion piece, covering the wider qiaoxiang landscape and how to travel it, is the Zhongshan county guide.

Cuiheng sits in Nanlang (南朗, Nánlǎng) on the estuary’s western bank, with Hong Kong across the water; Macau, a short run downriver, functioned as the near port and intermediary for this coast, and for decades as a funnel through which labourers, traders and students moved both ways. A village that could not feed its children was thirty kilometres from an exit and a day’s sail from an ocean.

A restored village lane in Cuiheng, Zhongshan, with traditional brick houses

Why a village empties: departure as arithmetic

The pressures that emptied Cuiheng were not unusual in the delta: land hunger, the disruption of the Opium War era and the decades after it, and the pull of overseas labour from the 1840s to the 1940s. That broader wave — the indentured “piglet” traffic, the gold rushes, the plantations, the chain migration that followed — belongs to the region’s own articles, including why so many Taishanese families ended up overseas and the five counties’ diaspora legacy.

Sixty households, some ten surnames, no more than six of them Sun families, roughly two hundred people: that profile comes from local and municipal accounts of the mid-nineteenth-century village, and it is a local figure, not a census return. The village was not an ancient cradle but a Qing-era reassembly. In its recorded tradition, and in the museum studies built on it, the site was first known as Cai Keng (蔡坑, Cài Kēng) and took its later name from the green hills above it. Local accounts give the founding households as the Feng (冯) and Mai (麦) families, joined later by the Yang (杨) and Lu (陆) families, the Lus becoming the most numerous: a settlement reassembling itself across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rather than a lineage village of great age. Those accounts record no surviving Cai descendants.

A stele from the repair of the village’s Beiji shrine in 1828 preserves the donor roll: twenty-five Yang donors, sixteen Lu, thirteen Feng, six Sun, six He, with management duties rotating by surname among named men. What the record shows is a multi-surname village running its own affairs through subscription — an apparatus that existed before anyone left, as did corporate lineage land (蒸尝田, zhēngchángtián; 祖尝, zǔcháng), the jointly held estate that paid for ancestral rites and appears in county gazetteers as early as the sixteenth century. Remittance money arriving decades later could use that apparatus rather than invent one, though “could use” is the strongest claim the surviving accounts support.

What the village did add was a customs calendar built around absence: home-visit obligations tied to fixed dates — the fourteenth of the seventh month (担十四, dān shísì), the winter solstice (担冬, dān dōng), the fifteenth night of the eighth month (追月, zhuī yuè) — and a lantern rite (开灯, kāidēng) at which newborn sons were written into the lineage’s rolls, women’s inclusion being limited or indirect in the registers local studies describe. These customs record a community organised around men who were away.

That is the arithmetic of a qiaoxiang, and it is not a decorative preface to this story. People were the crop. Sixty households with almost no arable land did not send their sons abroad as an adventure; they sent them because the alternative was to watch the same small harvest fail in front of everyone at once.

As for where they went: no village-level emigrant register survives for Cuiheng — no roll, no 华侨志 entry naming its emigrant households and their destinations. Local history reporting records something narrower. From the middle of the Qing onward, more Cuiheng men left to make a living — domestically toward Shanghai, Qingdao, Yantai, Tangshan and Hankou, and in greater numbers overseas, “especially Honolulu.” By the early Republic, the same account says, more than a hundred Cuiheng households were farming, working or trading in Honolulu, close to the number of households left behind. Beyond Hawaii, Cuiheng’s destinations appear only at county level, in the Xiangshan profile as a whole; this article will not scale county figures down to make a village list. The names and dates here follow the village’s recorded tradition, and the emigration account rests on a single newspaper report: where the record is thin, this article says so.

The remittance house in Cuiheng Village: the building everyone photographs

The most photographed building in the village is a remittance house. The residence known as Sun Yat-sen’s former home (孙中山故居, Sūn Zhōngshān gùjū) was built in 1892, and it is commonly attributed to funds sent home by his elder brother from Honolulu. The memorial museum that administers it documents the dimensions: two storeys, roughly 500 square metres of floor area in a building footprint of about 340, a Chinese-classical brick outer wall, a Western-style interior. It sits east and faces west — against the village’s prevailing orientation, a detail the local record notes without explaining; it is not safe to read deliberate defiance into an orientation that may simply have followed the plot.

Inside, the plan reads like a family’s migration. The ground floor holds the parlour; his mother’s room; the room he shared with his wife Lu Muzhen (卢慕贞, Lú Mùzhēn); and a room kept for Sun Mei (孙眉, Sūn Méi) — the brother who paid for the house and lived in it least. Above is a low, hollow second storey under a god loft where the household shrine would have stood, and a study where the house’s owner wrote and met village contemporaries while plotting. The arrangement is ordinary qiaoxiang architecture of the period, which is the point: the village’s most famous building is a diaspora artifact of a standard type, not a monument designed as one.

Separately: the original birth house on this plot was dismantled by the family after 1913, leaving a well. The building visitors photograph is not the one he was born in; it is the one his brother’s earnings bought.

The general category is the remittance house (侨房, qiáofáng) — the returned-money house that gave qiaoxiang Guangdong its architectural fingerprint. Zhongshan’s version is comparatively modest: the county’s surviving watchtowers (碉楼, diāolóu) number near 510, fewer than any Wuyi county, and its remittance money went more into shops and arcade streets than towers — a comparison the Taishan watchtower villages carry in detail. Cuiheng is the smallest case in that family: a two-storey brick home facing the wrong way, built with wages from a Maui ranch.

Exterior of the two-storey 1892 former residence of Sun Yat-sen at Cuiheng Village

The Hawaii pipeline: one family, one model

The Sun family’s arc is the village’s migration model — one emigrant household among Cuiheng’s many, not the biography’s opening chapter.

Sun Mei (1854–1915), courtesy name Dezhang, sailed for Honolulu (檀香山, Tánxiāngshān) in 1871 as a labourer, then moved to Maui (茂宜岛, Màoyí Dǎo), where he opened a store, leased waste land and built up a farm and ranch recorded as the Kamaole farm (卡马奥力农场, Kǎmǎ’àolì nóngchǎng). Municipal and local biographies describe him as a large Maui planter known as “King of Maui” (茂宜岛王, Màoyí dǎo wáng) and as one of the island’s wealthiest Chinese residents. That title is a commemorative honourific, not an audited statement of net worth, and the acreage figures attached to his land are biographical; the exact scale of the operation and the size of his workforce are uncertain.

The best-documented source separates two dates often run together: in 1878 Sun Mei wrote home inviting his mother and younger brother to join him; the voyage came in 1879, the boy sailing for Honolulu aged thirteen. The museum quotes his line for that first passage — that he first saw the wonder of the steamship and the vastness of the ocean. The school fees were his brother’s: Iolani from September 1879, Punahou in 1882–83, then the College of Medicine for Chinese in Hong Kong — an educational ladder paid from Hawaii, which the early-life biography follows in full.

Before the failed Guangzhou rising of 1895 the movement’s Hawaiian finances were fragmentary: one account records only US$1,388 raised initially, alongside about HK$13,000 assembled in Honolulu, with Sun Mei reported to have converted cattle into cash at six or seven dollars a head. In 1899, the record reports his involvement in financing an uprising at Hankou; the amount and circumstances are uncertain, and the surviving accounts are single-source. The family fortune is described as declining as the movement’s demands continued, with documented property sales but no total of his revolutionary contributions. There is no dated figure for what the revolution cost Sun Mei personally — a gap that is itself a fact about the record: the family that bankrolled the pipeline left evidence of individual payments, and no ledger.

Portrait of Sun Mei (1854-1915), Sun Yat-sen's elder brother and a Hawaii planter — Portrait of Sun Mei (1854-1915), Sun Yat-sen’s elder brother and a Hawaii planter

Sixty households, four names: Cuiheng’s own revolutionary cohort

The four names known as the Four Heroes of Cuiheng (翠亨四杰, Cuìhēng sì jié) — Sun Yat-sen, Lu Haodong (陆皓东, Lù Hàodōng), Yang Heling (杨鹤龄, Yáng Hèlíng) and Yang Xinru (杨心如, Yáng Xīnrú) — were contemporaries from the same sixty households, moving in the same lanes at the same time.

Lu Haodong is the anchor. Born in Cuiheng in 1868, he was his neighbour’s boyhood friend and later his co-conspirator; he designed the flag of the coming republic, the Blue Sky with a White Sun (青天白日旗, Qīngtiān Báirì qí). He was executed after the failed Guangzhou uprising of 1895, aged twenty-seven. The label commonly attached to him — that he was the first person to die for the Chinese revolution — circulates widely, but no documented author or occasion for the phrase is in hand, so this article states the fact instead: a village man, aged twenty-seven, executed in 1895 for a rising that did not happen.

The village produced a second martyr generation, kept distinct from the first. Yang Yin (杨殷, Yáng Yīn, 1892–1929) was a Communist-era organiser and martyr from the same village, remembered separately; the Four Heroes are a 1890s list, and adding a 1920s figure to it flattens two generations into one convenient number. Yang Yin’s former residence is among the sites the memorial now manages alongside Lu Haodong’s.

Why would sixty households produce this? Partly the pipeline: a village where many families had someone abroad was plugged into the routes, ports and newspapers through which a republic was being imagined in 1890s Hong Kong and Honolulu. Partly remittance-funded schooling that sent village boys to mission schools and abroad. And partly because the county itself ran a revolution — a story told in how a region ended the Qing and in the Sun surname across the diaspora. The village’s Sun lineage has its own contested origin story — traced through Nanxiong’s Zhuji Lane and Dongguan to a founding ancestor who entered Cuiheng in 1774, while surname-series scholarship reaches differently. That debate is live and not this article’s to settle.

The revolution funded from abroad

The first revolutionary society of modern China was founded in the diaspora, by men from this county, in a city where Cuiheng households were living and working.

The Revive China Society (兴中会, Xīngzhōnghuì) was established in Honolulu on 24 November 1894, at the residence of He Kuan (何宽, Hé Kuān) — a city bank’s Chinese manager and, by origin, a Xiangshan man (1861–1931). The anchor a village reader can hold: the movement’s founding meeting convened in a home belonging to their own county’s emigrant community. Its articles set a five-dollar membership subscription (会底银, huìdǐ yín) and an oath to expel the Manchu rulers, restore China and found a federal republic. Membership is reported differently across accounts — some twenty men at the founding, growing to about 130 — with one account putting half the first attenders at Xiangshan origin; the county’s share of the whole is not securely quantified. Local accounts add that Cuiheng men joined in sequence — Sun Mei among them, with Yang Dechu, Lu Tansheng and Yang He.

The money moved through channels these communities already had: remittance houses, letter-and-money services (侨批, qiáopī), and the sworn-brotherhood network of the Hongmen (洪门, Hóngmén) and its American lodges, the Zhigongtang (致公堂, Zhìgōngtáng), whose membership overlapped almost entirely with the people asked to give. Sun Yat-sen joined Honolulu’s Zhigongtang in 1903 and received the rank of honggun (洪棍, hónggùn), the “marshal” grade — a credential that opened lodge treasuries. Honolulu’s Longji Bao (《隆记报》, Lóngjì Bào) became the society’s organ as 《檀山新报》 (Tánshān Xīnbào), where his son Sun Ke (孙科, Sūn Kē) worked as a translator. The chronicler of much of this, Feng Ziyou (冯自由, Féng Zìyóu), was born in Yokohama to a Nanhai family — not a Xiangshan figure.

For 1911 itself, Cantonese-origin overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and the Americas are recorded as donating in excess of two million — an aggregate for the whole Cantonese emigration, not a Zhongshan figure and not a running total, with its currency unpinned in the source. For the April 1911 Huanghuagang rising (黄花岗, Huánghuāgǎng) in Guangzhou, Vancouver’s Chinese daily 《大汉日报》 alone is reported to have raised roughly HK$70,000 — one newspaper, not a campaign total. The rising’s commemorated roll counts seventy-two martyrs, thirty-one of them overseas Chinese: twelve workers, nineteen small traders, with other lists in circulation. Hongmen-affiliated fundraising machinery operated from San Francisco that year, its formal name, dates and receipts unsettled in the sources at hand. After the revolution came consolidation: the National Protection Society (民国维持总会, Mínguó Wéichí Zǒnghuì), founded in 1914 under the party’s Americas organisation, had received US$200,000 by the end of 1916, while Canadian Cantonese subscribed Guangdong’s military-government bonds (军债票, jūnzhàipiào) — Victoria’s Chinese Benevolent Association (中华会馆, Zhōnghuá Huìguǎn) and Vancouver’s Zhigongtang together remitted nearly $40,000 by the end of 1912, again in a dollar figure not fully pinned.

No single total is asserted, because the surviving totals do not agree: roughly HK$7–8 million for the revolutionary year, and a cumulative HK$10 million for 1894–1912, measuring different periods. Naming the conflict is the honest use of them.

Small money sits beside large. Guan Tang, a water carrier in Saigon, gave three thousand yuan — half a working life at a cent a bucket. Huang Jingnan, a bean-sprout vendor in Vietnam, gave three thousand. Li Zhuofeng burned his revolutionary bond rather than accept repayment. These are commemorative cases, not typical donation sizes: the merchant record is far denser, while the martyr rolls are dominated by workers and small traders.

Where was Xiangshan in this map? No Xiangshan-specific donation total exists in the record consulted here. What is documentable is that the founders of the four great department stores (四大百货, sìdà bǎihuò) — Ma Yingbiao (马应彪, Mǎ Yìngbiāo) of Sincere (先施, Xiānshī) and the Guo brothers of Wing On (永安, Yǒng’ān) — had Xiangshan origins, and that some ran remittance businesses of their own: Ma Yingbiao operated a Gold-Mountain remittance house (金山庄, jīnshānzhuāng) and was appointed a fundraising commissioner in 1917. Founders, not all capital, staff or operations; and merchant giving is not the same thing as an emigrant community’s giving.

His own accounting is plainer than the phrase usually attached to him. Writing retrospectively in 1923, he ranked the contributors plainly: it was overseas Chinese above all who gave generously to fund the army; the warm propagandists were students; the men who charged the enemy were soldiers and sworn-society men. Words quoted by the Chinese government in 2011, and reported as an inscription for a Philippine party branch in 1922, make the same point at length: that comrades abroad stood with the cause through more than ten years of hardship, giving money and taking up arms, which is why the history of the revolution has no page without the words “overseas Chinese.” (The 1922 occasion rests on a single secondary source, so it is reported, not asserted.) The phrase most often attributed to him — 华侨为革命之母, “overseas Chinese are the mother of the revolution” — is not a documented sentence of his: scholarship finds the idea expressed on five occasions between 1916 and 1923 — not at the time of the revolution — and the calligraphy that circulates as a motto is a later collage from his handwriting. Say that he said something very like it, repeatedly, in later years — not that he said the sentence.

Fundraising documents and bonds issued by overseas Chinese revolutionary organisations

The loop comes home: what the money built

Remittance money came back into the villages as buildings, and Cuiheng’s restored lanes are the clearest small example: the houses now shown to visitors are the returned-money houses of families who left. The county’s larger returns — the arcade streets, the schools, the commercial districts — are the subject of the Zhongshan county guide, and this section keeps to two episodes that show the diaspora building a home for its own money.

The first is a town. In 1908–09, a commercial port project (香洲商埠, Xiāngzhōu shāngbù) was launched on the coast near today’s Zhuhai by Wang Shen with Wu Yuzheng (伍于政, Wǔ Yúzhèng), an emigrant returned from America, financed by share subscription (集股, jígǔ). Its aims were to give returning overseas Chinese somewhere to settle and to draw merchants away from Macau. Local newspaper reports describe roughly a thousand shops opening within a year, across twenty-five streets with about 125 arcade buildings — approximate, secondary figures, reported here as such. It declined quickly: the clearest attempt in this county to build a Chinese town with returned capital, and it did not hold.

The second is a newspaper. Xiangshan’s own ten-day news sheet (《香山旬报》, Xiāngshān Xúnbào) was founded in 1908 at the county seat, Shiqi (石岐, Shíqí), by Tongmenghui members Zheng Bi’an and Li Lian’an; it ran 123 issues, was renamed in early 1911, and ceased publication that November. Local and archival sources describe it as an early county-level diaspora newsletter (侨刊, qiáokān) — a paper published for and partly by an emigrant readership. One caution matters for anyone repeating the claim: the epithet “founding ancestor of the revolutionary party’s organ press” belongs to Hong Kong’s 《中国日报》 (Zhōngguó Rìbào), founded in 1900, and should not be transferred to the Xiangshan paper. The verifiable version is strong enough — a county in the delta produced one of Guangdong’s earliest diaspora newsletters, at a moment when its emigrants were financing a revolution.

The town and the paper are the same instinct — build institutions at home that returning money and returning politics could use — and they carry the record’s central asymmetry: the names in the gazetteers and subscription lists are overwhelmingly merchants, while the names on the Huanghuagang roll are water carriers and vegetable sellers. Both financed the same movement, and the archive remembers them unevenly.

Restored emigrant households open as an exhibition area in Cuiheng Village

The village now, and the honest close

The village the remittances built has no Sun descendants left in it. The families emigrated, followed the movement, or left for Taiwan and overseas; the lanes they built are now a heritage landscape administered for everyone else.

The Sun Yat-sen Former Residence Memorial (孙中山故居纪念馆, Sūn Zhōngshān Gùjū Jìniànguǎn) reported more than five million visitors in 2024 — 5.1 million on the provincial museum-development report’s count, third among Guangdong’s museums, with a single-day record of 84,000 in July 2024 after the Shenzhen–Zhongshan link opened. Part of that spike is access, not pilgrimage. The “about one and a half million a year” repeated about this village is a 2010 figure — the museum’s 1,500,000th visitor — since overtaken by an order of magnitude. That count covers the memorial and its sites, not the whole 5A-rated scenic area.

The memorial, established in 1956 and a national key cultural relic since 1986, now manages more than twenty heritage sites in the village, including the former residences of Lu Haodong and Yang Yin. The village was listed among China’s historical and cultural villages in 2007; Cuiheng Station (翠亨站, Cuìhēng Zhàn) opened on the Guangzhou–Zhuhai intercity line (广珠城际, Guǎngzhū chéngjì) on 10 January 2024, about 1.5 kilometres from the lanes. In December 2024 the village gained its own gazetteer archive (方志馆, fāngzhìguǎn), the first at village level in Zhongshan — not an emigrant register, but the closest thing to one.

For the diaspora archive proper, the county built a museum: the Zhongshan Overseas Chinese History Museum (中山华侨历史博物馆) opened on 18 May 2022, its flagship exhibition taking its title from that first voyage’s language, 《沧海之阔》 (Cānghǎi zhī kuò, “the vastness of the ocean”) — six themed sections, five hundred-plus artifacts, and a database still a work in progress. A reader researching a Xiangshan family can start there and with the guide to finding an ancestral village, a blueprint for a roots trip and how to read a Chinese zupu; this article points, it does not plan.

One structural fact, stated without drama: preservation and out-migration arrived together. By one local study’s count, eighty-seven old houses were held by just seven households, villagers having moved to newer housing. Preservation and depopulation are not the same process; they are concurrent facts about a heritage village whose owners live elsewhere.

That is what remains of the loop. A village with almost no arable land exported two generations of its people, and what came back was a house with a Honolulu address in its accounts, a study where a flag was drawn, a movement founded in an emigrant city, and a treasury assembled from counting houses and water carriers across five continents. A diaspora reader takes from it something more specific than a name they already knew: how one emigrant village, and the overseas money it sent home, helped remake China — and what is left of that loop today, which is a set of lanes, a museum, a station, and no Sun family living in the houses the remittances paid for.

Zhongshan Overseas Chinese History Museum and Cuiheng Station on the Guangzhou-Zhuhai intercity line

Continue Reading

Stay Connected

Follow RootsOfChina on Facebook and Instagram for new article updates, behind-the-scenes from the qiaoxiang, and stories from the Chinese diaspora.

Sources

Chinese-language primary sources consulted in research — 《中山市华侨志》 (Zhongshan Overseas Chinese Gazetteer, 2013); 黄健敏《翠亨村：中国历史文化名村》 (2021); 黄鸿钊《辛亥革命时期的香山社会》 (2011) and 《动荡年代：辛亥革命前后的香山与澳门》 (2015); 张应龙《海外华侨与辛亥革命》 (2011); 冯自由《革命逸史》; 胡波《香山买办与近代中国》 (2007); 邹佩丛《孙中山家世研究与辨析》 (2008); the 1828 北极殿 stele donor roll as transcribed in the village literature — are listed in the research dossier for this article.

Cuiheng Village: Sun Yat-sen’s Birthplace and the Diaspora That Funded a Revolution