Gaodao

About the village

Gaodao (高道村) is an administrative village in the south-west of Huliao Town, Dabu County, Meizhou, in north-east Guangdong. It stands where Huliao meets the towns of Dama and Gaopi, about 14 km from the county town, and covers roughly 10 square kilometres of hillside and valley. The village has 14 village groups, and the published records put it at about 380 households and 1,200 people. Rice and honey pomelo are the main crops, with fruit growing and fish ponds supplying most cash income. Dabu is a Hakka county of long administrative memory. A county seat was placed at Huliao in 413, under the name Yizhao, and again in 607 as Wanchuan; when Dabu County was formed in 1526 the seat moved to Chayang, returning only in 1961. Emigration has shaped the county more than any other force: nearly 500,000 people of Dabu descent live overseas, outnumbering its own residents, and the Dabu association in Singapore, Char Yong, dates from 1858. The Lan clan (蓝) is the old surname of Huliao, and its ancestral hall, the Lan family temple, stands in Gucheng village beside the county town. The county's surname record lists Huliao Gaodao among the clan's settlements, about 250 people who moved out from Gucheng thirteen generations ago. In Longgang village a few kilometres away the clan raised Tai'an Lou, a square stone tulou of 1763 that is now a national key cultural relic. Gaodao is also an old revolutionary base village: its hamlets of Shimen, Fuli and Yanyang produced some of the district's earliest party members, who joined the guerrilla forces in the 1920s and 1930s. Today its families farm pomelo and rice while younger generations work in the cities and overseas.