Thanks richardn23, I hope you'd continue to enjoy my postings.
I have more uploads from my last trip to China, just a small corner of the country. This posting is all about Sun Yat-sen the Revolutionary's ancestral village.
I have been to Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Memorial Residence before. But I didn't spend long enough time there the last time. Dr. Sun's ancestral village is called 翠亨村 Chui Hang Chuen or Cuiheng Cun in official Mandarin. It is one of the best known place names for Chinese all over the world. The whole precinct is a very popular tourist attraction, especially so for overseas Chinese and Taiwanese. It is on level ground, much of the area is shaded by trees. I found the surrounds very pleasant.
Our county Chungshan or as it is now called Zhongshan City is name after Dr. Sun in 1925, the year of his death.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Yat-sen Sun Yat-sen is better known to the Chinese as Sun Chungshan 孫中山, Chungshan is one of his many names, a name he used when he was in Japan. He will always be the best known son of our county, we, natives of the county are always proud to proclaim we are from Chungshan. Our forefathers were among the early pioneers in the New World.
Here I am by the entrance, at a spot where most visitors like to have their photo taken. This is perhaps the best known quote from Dr. Sun. The World is for All in his handwriting. Equality for all is one of his driving ambitions. Cabramatta in Sydney's west where there is a large Indo-Chinese community, you'll find the gateway to John St. pedestrian mall is also embellished with the same quote. Just Google Cabramatta and see.
This is the family residence. It has a wide frontage. Visitors are no longer allowed to go closer inside. I think the house was built by Dr. Sun's older brother who had done well in Hawaii in the 19th. century. As a young teenager, Sun Yat-sen spent several years in Hawaii with his older brother. Dr. Sun gained his medical qualifications in what was the forerunner of the Hong Kong University's medical school. He had also lived in Japan for a lengthy period. Thus, he was fluent in English as well as Japanese.
One more replication of Dr.Sun's handwritten message. Reading right to left, it extols the importance of agriculture as the fundamentals of nation building. This is actually a line from a poem called Thousand Character Classic (TCC,) 千字文. The TCC is unique in that there are no two characters in the poem are the same.
history.cultural-china.com/en/173History581.html This is a good description of the poem. It is a foundation stone of Chinese language education of the old school. If I were born forty or fifty years earlier, and had a chance of a traditional education in the village, I would be expected to commit the poem to memory.
www.camcc.org/_media/reading-group/qianziwen-en.pdfThis is the poem in English. I am ashamed to say I have only a skin-deep knowledge of the poem. The poem holds enduring principles of how to live our lives. Many of the lines are often found in daily usage. That Dr. Sun quoted from the poem, was an indication he,too, had been through a traditional education, and could readily recall what he had learned in his childhood.
The following link shows other attractions on display. I also took photo of some of the same attractions, and I'll endeavour to provide commentary of my own to make sense of it all.
www.tripadvisor.com.au/Attraction_Review-g297417-d1864528-Reviews-Sun_Yat_Sen_s_Residence_Memorial_Museum-Zhongshan_Guangdong.htmlThe Memorial Residence compound also serves as a working rural village and provides a glimpse to what life was like a mere twenty or thirty years ago before mass industrialisation and urbanisation.
This is the entrance to the exhibition hall which holds an extensive display of Sun Yat-sen memorabilia and a chronology of his revolutionary movement and his family history. The ugly simplified characters spoiled the signage.
The paddy fields are real but not the cow and calf. This is a common sight in my childhood, a buffalo cow and calf. The calf is domesticated from birth. I loved the sight and smell of the buffaloes as a little boy, and still do. It is increasingly rare to find animal and man working together in the fields. In the background is a typical pigsty without pigs and farm implement and grain storage space.
The melons hanging from the vine are real, and each vegetable patch is signposted with the name of the plant in the field. Who'd have thought China, a land of farmers, its people now know not what is growing in the fields.
This is a typical village home, home of a peasant farmer, perhaps. The front living room opens to the street or small courtyard. Up in the loft is a shrine to honour the ancestors. Such a shrine is in every home except for those of more modern construction. There are no other cultures like the Chinese who venerate their ancestors the way we do.
Go to this pdf, which was posted on this Forum some weeks ago, to page 74 / 75. It says it all why ancestor worship is important to us. The early missionaries were only too ready to condemn this custom without finding out the deeper meaning.
archive.org/stream/villagetownlifei00lianrich#page/n10/mode/1up This is a more ornate home. It has tiled floor, and better redwood furnishing, similar to my own.
Cottage Industry, making sausage and salty-cured pork. Both are normally available and consume in cooler months. It is supposed to help fighting off the chill, and considered too rich for the warm months.
It was quite a treat to have either or both at meal time when I was small. I really loved them.
The cured pork in particular is ideally wind-dried by autumn breeze. My late uncle told me the retailers or porters used to carry the meat on shoulder poles and walk for two or three days to the market. In doing so, the wind and mild sun would combine to make the pork ready for market at exactly the right time. It tasted just heavenly, he would say. Uncle was a connoisseur and critic of common everyday food.
I often hear people say salami-making in Italy was brought back by Marco Polo from China. It is a contentious issue, Italians would certainly take exception to this. One story I heard was that when Marco Polo was in South China ( did he ever go to Sth. China?): he watched people making and airing the salty-cured pork to dry in the sun. He asked what it was. and the answer came back in Cantonese 曬腊味, sai lap mei, meaning sunning the cured meat.Thus salami got its name. I leave you to be the judge.
This is supposed to be a village bakery. It wasn't like so from memory. Ming, my village brother's family was the village baker, until Mao killed all private enterprise in 1958. His father and two uncles were the finest traditional Chinese bakers. Unfortunately, some of the trade secrets passed down from generation to generation are now lost.
This is a typical village fare for a celebratory dinner. It consists of nine dishes in round containers not unlike a big bowl 九大簋
I may yet go back for another visit later on this year if our Peruvian friend kaluosima alias Carlos does make the trip with me to China in October. I would not want him to miss this historical place.