Duanfen, Taishan: The Emigrant Town That Built a School

In the first decade of the twentieth century, when most of the able-bodied men of inland Taishan were already leaving for the Americas, one township put the money they sent home into classrooms before it put it into anything else. The town was Duanfen (端芬镇, Duānfēn Zhèn), a qiaoxiang (侨乡, qiáoxiāng) — an emigrant homeland — named for its two landmarks: Duan Mountain (Duanshan) and the Fen stream (Fenshui). In 1909 its emigrants opened a graded modern school before they had finished building their own houses, and by the time the county’s school-building frenzy ended, Taishan counted 91 schools raised by overseas Chinese and Hong Kong–Macau compatriots between 1912 and 1949. Duanfen’s part in that number was won the way a great many things in qiaoxiang history were won: by rivalry between two lineages, the Wu (伍, Wǔ) and the Mei (梅, Méi), each of which built a school the way other towns built towers — as a permanent, public claim to standing.

The first of those schools was not a charity project. It was an answer to a sentence written in 1905, and the sentence is still legible today.

The County’s First School

Chengwu School (成务学校, Chéngwù Xuéxiào) stands at Chengwu Market, the market village the Wu lineage itself had built, between the Xize and Shangze villages. The subscription for it began in 1905, when fundraisers travelled through the overseas Wu-surname associations of several countries asking kinsmen to subscribe. One of them, Wu Shuzhi of Meiliang village, wrote the appeal that survives — and it is the plainest statement of the article’s whole subject. It opens with the old formula (“the strength of a nation rests on its talent; the production of talent rests on education”), then lands on the reason that actually moved people:

“Our Wu lineage lives crowded in Shangze, its households dense, its people numbering in the thousands — and yet alone among them we have no school. Is this not a matter for deep shame? Therefore in the second month of this year, in a gathering at the ancestral hall, we resolved to open Chengwu high-and-lower primary school…”

The decision was taken as a jici huiyi — “a gathering at the ancestral hall” — and it was framed as shame-avoidance, not charity. Wu Yuzhi, described in the sources as lü-Mei (“overseas in America”), toured North and South America collecting subscriptions; Wu Limen initiated the project. The subscription eventually gathered over 100,000 silver dollars from more than five hundred Wu kinsmen overseas. Building ran from 1906 to 1908, and the school opened on 24 February 1909 with the county magistrate, Qin Shoukun, present.

What the money bought was a genuine break, not a bigger sishu (私塾, sīshú) — an old-style tutorial school. Chengwu opened as a graded two-tier primary school — gaochu liangdeng xiaoxuetang, “high and lower primary” — teaching guowen (the national-language subject), mathematics and science, English, hygiene and drawing of the post-1905 fei keju, xing xuetang reform — “abolish the examinations, establish the schools” — the same year the imperial examination system was abolished. Its 872 square metres of classrooms replaced the one-room tutor’s school. Its own 110th-anniversary banner calls it “China’s first overseas-Chinese-funded rural school”, while the county government more cautiously calls it Taishan’s first such school, and press accounts settle on “one of China’s earliest modern rural schools.” The dated fact is certain; the superlative is claimed, and the three claims have never been merged into one.

Chengwu is still a working public primary school. In the 2026 county school register it appears at Xize Chengwu Market, one of four public schools left in the township — 117 years old and still holding classes.

The Answer Next Door

The same year Chengwu opened, the Mei lineage — Duanfen’s other great surname — funded a school of its own, the Mengyang school (蒙养, Méngyǎng). What happened next is the article’s engine, and it is recorded without any sentimentality by a Jiangmen newspaper history: “After the Duanfen Wu, the great surname families of Taishan began in succession to raise funds and build their own schools… education became one of the chief fields of competition between the lineages.” Within two years a neighbouring township’s Li family copied the model, opening Tanzhou Primary in 1907.

The Mei school’s own history is where caution is required. The newspaper records a Mei-funded Mengyang Primary School (Mengyang Xiaoxue) opened in reply to Chengwu. The published history of Duanfen Middle School (端芬中学, Duānfēn Zhōngxué) separately records that it began in 1909 as Mengyang Xuetang, was renamed Peigen Xuetang in 1912, became Duanfen Higher Primary in 1925, was re-sited and renamed Duanfen Junior Middle School in 1932, and eventually grew into the township’s secondary school. Whether those two Mengyang institutions are the same place is not confirmed by the sources in this dossier — so the two facts stand side by side: a Mei-funded Mengyang school answered Chengwu, and Duanfen Middle School’s own record begins with a Mengyang school in 1909. What is not in doubt is the result: the rivalry did not leave two faded primary schools. It left the township a secondary school.

Duanfen Middle School and the Full Secondary Grades

The man who turned the Mei school into a real institution was Mei Zhibin, a returned emigrant who in 1927 came home, was elected chairman of the Duanfen self-government committee, built the Duanfen Bridge and the Shandi Market street of Runan Road, and then “raised funds among the overseas Mei kinsmen to build Duanfen Middle School, completed in 1933.” He became its first chairman of the board, and is remembered as its founder.

The money for the 1930s buildings came with a name attached. The Chicago Mei clan association (芝城梅氏公所, Zhīchéng Méi Shì Gōngsuǒ) — the oldest and largest Chinese association in Chicago — raised a large sum and sent one man, Mei Zongyao, home with it to run the third phase of construction. The county record itemises what he built: in the winter of 1935, a two-storey classroom block, an L-shaped dormitory (Quchi Lou), a red building, a pavilion and a dining hall; in the winter of 1937, a second dormitory (Sifang Chi). The pavilion was named Mingkui Ting — after Mei Mingkui (梅命夔, Méi Mìngkuí), the 17th-century compiler of the Duanfen Mei genealogy. To name a school pavilion after the man who wrote the family’s ancestor record is to fuse the lineage’s two oldest functions in brick, decades before anyone thought to do it on a festival programme.

In 1956, according to the school’s own published record, it added senior-secondary grades and became the county’s first rural complete middle school (wanquan zhongxue) — a “complete middle school” with both junior and senior secondary levels. Before that, a Duanfen child who wanted to continue past junior secondary had to leave the township. The building kept coming in waves, each one named: in the 1990s a returned emigrant named Mei Xiantian (梅贤添, Méi Xiántiān) toured America and collected more than three million yuan, carrying it home himself; Mei Guozhang gave a million toward a new teaching block. One detail is worth lingering on: a donor named Jiang Guohua — a Jiang, not a Mei — gave 200,000 yuan to a Mei-founded school. By then the town, not the clan, owned the institution.

How School Finance Actually Worked

A school is built once and paid for forever. Duanfen’s were underwritten by an endowment model whose clearest surviving document comes from a village inside the township. In 1926 Mei Zhezhi (梅哲之, Méi Zhézhī) — a Columbia University graduate and one of China’s early bankers — led the fundraising for Libi School (李壁学校, Lǐbì Xuéxiào) in Libi village, and in New York founded the Libi Overseas Chinese Promotion Association with a founding document that set out jianxiao and yangxiao — “build the school” and “keep the school” — as two separate obligations. Every overseas kinsman gave US$100; every village family contributed a load of building sand. The school opened in spring 1931.

The mechanism was repeated across the county. In 1932 the Duanfen Mei set up the Yuying School American Fundraising Association — a standing fundraising association in America that remitted money once every term to cover running costs. A neighbouring Huang family association went further and fixed the amount in its charter: 500 Straits dollars a year. The county had shown the way a decade earlier, when the overseas Ningyang Yuqing Hall in Victoria, Canada, raised nearly 250,000 Canadian dollars from close to ten thousand emigrants for the county middle school in 1920 — then sent a man home to run the works, exactly as Chicago would later do for Duanfen. The money moved through the same channels as household remittances — through the row of yinhao (银号, yínhào), the private remittance banks, on Xilong Street (西隆街, Xīlóng Jiē), the street at Haikou Port (海口埠, Hǎikǒu Bù) that locals called Yinhang Jie, “Bank Street.” Government records count six such banks on the street, among them Wanfeng and Juxin. The same silver that paid a family’s rice and a teacher’s salary travelled in the same envelope, and it is why the museum at Haikou Port treats the silver letter as the spine of the whole place — and why Haikou Port reads as the gateway in Taishan’s history of hidden departure ports.

That dependence cut both ways. When the yinxin (银信, yínxìn) — the remittance letter — channel broke, school budgets broke with it, in two stages. The 1930s Depression stalled the building programme, and the 1941 Japanese occupation of Hong Kong severed the Haikou Port-to-Hong-Kong-to-North-America route altogether. The human evidence is one returned emigrant’s sentence: Mei Xiantian remembered being too poor to attend school, and wrote simply that “after the war, with the remittance channel open again, I received the money my father sent and could go back to school.”

A County of 91 Schools

Duanfen’s schools sit inside a county-wide accounting — the same accounting that makes Taishan’s village architecture and heritage read as one continuous emigrant-built landscape. The scholar Mei Weiqiang tallied 82 primary and 9 middle schools built by Taishan’s overseas Chinese and Hong Kong–Macau compatriots between 1912 and 1949 — 91 in all — making Taishan Guangdong’s “education-strong county” of that era. The growth curve is steeper than the schoolhouses look: from 200 primary schools in the county before 1922, to 1,095 in 1929, to 1,277 in 1934. In some villages the school became the most prominent new building, outranking the ancestral hall as the tallest, best-finished structure.

The stock has thinned since. Of 452 donated schools county-wide, 357 stood idle after the 1998 school-consolidation reorganisation, and the county now manages them as an asset class under a “three priorities” rule — education, culture and public welfare first — with some rented out and the rent split between an education fund and village upkeep. The century-long arc from xuetian (学田, xuétián), school-endowment land, to a rental ledger is the same institution wearing different clothes.

The Town the Same Money Built

The schools were only one of the things remittance built. Duanfen also owns eleven qiaoxu (侨圩, qiáoxū), emigrant-funded market towns — the most of any Taishan township — and a string of yanglou (洋楼, yánglóu), Western-style emigrant mansions, that scholars call “silver letters set in stone”: imported hongmaoni (红毛泥, hóngmáoní), Portland cement, steel reinforcing and huajiezhuan (花阶砖, huājiēzhuān), patterned floor tiles, brought in through Hong Kong and landed at Haikou Port.

The clearest example is at Miaobian village, where the Weng family built the Weng Family Mansions (翁家楼, Wēngjiālóu) between 1927 and 1931 — three three-storey Western villas plus two smaller blocks whose façades local residents read as the shapes of Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, the three sworn brothers of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Government and local accounts credit German design drawings, invited by the emigrant Weng Ruizheng. One villa has a red-brick body, a teak archway door set with stained glass; another carries a round window and a Western lookout pavilion. And Weng Ruizheng — the patron of the mansions — also founded the village school next door, Dade School, which opened in the 1920s with eight classrooms and a memorial hall, paid for by eight overseas Weng households who gave half a year’s wages each. In one village, one man’s money built the monument and the classroom in the same decade.

The qiaoxu themselves follow a rule the scholar Ye Kefei put plainly: unlike a traditional Chinese market, they were built by emigrants to a fixed plan, “imitating the layout of Western cities, taking the enclosed-square pattern,” shops and housing around a central open space. One of them, Wenyang village, in the township’s Tangtou area, was built in 1932 by a Nanyang emigrant named Cao Nanjie — Southeast Asian money, not American, and a legal fight won against a neighbouring village over the geomantic siting before the first wall went up.

The same town is where the Mei Family Courtyard (梅家大院, Méijiā Dàyuàn) stands — the celebrated 1931 compound that we have written about separately. What matters here is only that it sits at the western end of the Nanyue Ancient Post Road–Tingjiang Overseas-Chinese Cultural Corridor, a 7.5-kilometre heritage corridor that runs from Haikou Port in the east to the courtyard in the west, and that two of its published stops are schools in their own right — the Libi School site and the Miaobian School site. The corridor itself is curated as a schooling landscape.

Who Stayed and Kept the Ledger

The people who actually kept Duanfen running were the ones who never left. Some jinshanpo (金山婆, jīnshānpó) — “Gold Mountain wives”, the wives left behind when their husbands sailed for America, the same women at the centre of the wider Gold Mountain wives story — acted as site supervisors for the building projects their absent husbands funded, receiving the money and seeing the work through.

Fragmented ownership is a major documented reason so many of the mansions stand empty today: a single yanglou can have dozens of overseas heirs, each holding a share, and no one able to sell or restore the whole.

The grief is the same grief the schools were meant to answer. Donors who could not bring their own children to America funded the town school for the children who stayed — a substitution written into their fundraising letters. And the ordinary decades behind the institutions survive in one family’s archive: 86 letters written from Cuba beginning in 1905 by Li Yunhong (李云宏, Lǐ Yúnhóng), held by his great-grandson Li Bada (李柏达, Lǐ Bǎdá), who donated thousands of such letters to the museum at Haikou Port. It is a Taishan family archive — a reminder that for most of the people in this story, the school was the second-best future, the one they could actually reach.

The Overseas Trail, by Name

What Duanfen’s emigrants became can be told through one lineage, and it runs in four directions at once. Mei Zongzhou (梅宗周, Méi Zōngzhōu) reached Chicago in the 1870s, founded the city’s first Chinese restaurant, wrote home in 1878 urging his San Francisco kinsmen to join him, and by the 1920s had helped draw more than eight hundred Mei clansmen to the city’s Clark Street — the settlement that became Chicago’s Chinatown. One account recalls that Duanfen speech was so widely understood there that a saying circulated: you could do business without English as long as you spoke Duanfenhua, the Duanfen dialect.

The fullest single life is Mei Guangda (梅光达, Méi Guāngdá), born in 1850 at Longtengli in Duanfen, who left for the New South Wales gold diggings at the age of nine in 1859, was taken in by an English family, learned the language, and became an interpreter, a tea merchant, a Sydney restaurateur and a community advocate — the Qing court later granted him honours. The township gazetteer also records Mei Qiaolin, president of the Chicago branch of the revolutionary Tongmenghui and later a secretary in the provisional presidential office; Mei Jingzhou, minister to Cuba and Venezuela; and Mei Boxian, a merchant who served as acting consul at Portland. A lineage record — not an independent web source — traces the line back further, to Mei Yaoxuan, an early recorded departure for Penang in 1786. The institutions lasted as long as the men: the Chicago Mei association that funded the 1935 school buildings is the same one a 2002 council meeting voted to fund the school’s sports ground, and it is still courted by the Chinese consulate today. The destinations themselves — Chicago, Havana, Sydney, the New York and Boston immigration stations where Mei men worked as interpreters inside the exclusion state’s own offices — are the four corners of a map no other single Taishan village can match with one surname, and they are the human face of the county’s clans, brotherhoods and survival networks.

Coming Home

In November 2024 the world Mei clan convention — the kenqin dahui (“kinship reunion”) of the Shijie Mei Shi Zongqin Zonghui, the worldwide Mei lineage association — came home to Duanfen for the fifteenth time, and more than two thousand people gathered at the Mei Family Courtyard. The programme paired two events on the same afternoon: the groundbreaking for a rebuilt ancestral hall, and the unveiling of a new school sports ground. Ancestor record and school, one fundraising organisation, one afternoon — the same pairing the 1935 campus had already made in brick when it named a pavilion after the genealogy’s compiler.

The cycle is three-yearly; the 2019 convention drew about a thousand, and 2024 more than doubled it. And the century-old schools themselves have been given second lives, each with a named operator: the Tingjiang Shuyuan art-sketching base, which received 48 school groups and over 13,000 student visits in 2024; the Overseas-Chinese Culture Study Centre (Huaqiao Wenhua Yanxue Zhongxin) at Haikou Port; the Guangping School campus reopened as a guzheng music manor. The one school that never needed a second life is Chengwu, still a public primary school with an endowment foundation and results the county ranks near the top.

A community’s choice of what to do with its windfall reveals what it believes the future is. Duanfen’s emigrants — barred from bringing their families to America, sending their wages home through a row of six banks on a riverside street — put the first shared money into classrooms and the second into houses. The rivalry that began as shame, in a fundraising letter written in 1905, ended as a school that is still teaching. The people who left built for the people who stayed; that is the whole story, and it is still legible in the name on the pavilion.

Continue Reading

• The Meijia Courtyard of Duanfen, Taishan
• Taishan Villages: History, Architecture, Heritage
• Haikou Port Silver Letter Museum
• Guanghai: Taishan’s Historic Port Town

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Sources

Books

• 梅伟强、关泽锋 (Mei Weiqiang, Guan Zefeng), 《广东台山华侨史》 (A History of the Overseas Chinese of Taishan, Guangdong), 中国华侨出版社, 2010.
• 刘进、李文照 (Liu Jin, Li Wenzhao), 《银信与五邑侨乡社会》 (Silver Letters and Wuyi Qiaoxiang Society), 广东人民出版社, 2011.
• Madeline Y. Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882–1943, Stanford University Press, 2000.
• 江门市政协文化和文史资料委员会, 《百年侨校》 (A Century of Overseas-Chinese Schools), 中国文史出版社, 2025.
• 李柏达 (Li Bada), 《世界记忆遗产：台山银信档案及研究》 (Memory of the World: Taishan Silver-Letter Archives and Research), 暨南大学出版社, 2017.
• 梅命夔 (Mei Mingkui), 《新宁端芬梅氏族谱》 (Genealogy of the Mei Lineage of Duanfen, Xinning), 1673, with 1942/1947 continuations.

Web sources

• 台山市人民政府门户网站 — 台山姓氏·梅氏 (Taishan Municipal Government, the Mei surname record)
• 台山市人民政府门户网站 — 端芬镇概况 (town profile and 11 侨圩)
• 广东省侨务办公室 — 台山端芬中学教学楼落成剪彩 (Guangdong Overseas Chinese Affairs Office)
• 广东省侨务办公室 — 捐资兴学，侨校遍五邑 (the 91-school tally)
• 江门市人民政府门户网站 (jiangmen.gov.cn) — 翁家楼 and the 汀江华侨文化走廊 route.
• 国务院侨务办公室 (gqb.gov.cn) — the 2016 school-reuse inventory (452 donated schools, 357 idle).
• 江门日报, 南方+, 澎湃新闻 (The Paper), and 中新网 features on Duanfen’s schools and overseas-Chinese architecture, accessed 2026-09-15.