Huangdong

About the village

Huangdong (黃洞) is a Hakka village in the north-east of Fenggang town, Dongguan, Guangdong, on the Shenzhen edge of the Pearl River Delta. Longgang district lies to its east and Qingxi town to its north, and the village covers about 10.8 square kilometres. It was settled in the late Yuan or early Ming period, more than 600 years ago, and it is one of the places in Dongguan where Hakka families are most concentrated. Five hamlets make up the village: Lingnan (嶺南), Tianxin (田心), Rongshuxia (榕樹廈), Hongwu Wei (洪屋圍) and Nanmenshan (南門山). Huangdong is also a 僑鄉, a home village of overseas Chinese. From the nineteenth century its families left for Jamaica, Surinam and the rest of Latin America, and more than three hundred of its houses are 僑房, built by families who had gone abroad. The overseas families long outnumbered the people still living in the village. The province named it a historic and cultural village in 2012 and approved its conservation plan, covering 2021 to 2035, in June 2026. The protected core of about three hectares is the old walled settlement at Tianxin, in its two parts 新圍 and 舊圍, together with Lingnan. Beside it stands the largest group of Hakka row houses in Fenggang, the 田心村新圍排屋群: twelve terraces of thirty-eight houses covering about 10,000 square metres, the rows and their watchtowers built as one structure in the local 客僑 style, which mixes Hakka and overseas Chinese building. The village shrine, Huilong An (迴龍庵), holds twenty-three Qing stone inscriptions recording the surnames, lineages and migrations of the Fenggang district, and the village holds the former residence of Hong Quanfu, a cousin of Hong Xiuquan and a leader of the Triad movement.