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…
In 1883, I was abruptly withdrawn from my studies at Iolani College in Hawaii and sent back to my ancestral home in Cuiheng Village. My brother, Sun Mei, made this decision after I tore down an image of Guan Yu—a revered deity among Chinese laborers abroad. This act was not merely vandalism but stemmed from…
When I was born on November 12, 1866, the Qing Dynasty had just extinguished the last embers of the Taiping Rebellion . The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) was one of the deadliest civil wars in history, led by Hong Xiuquan , a failed scholar who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ. He sought…