Huliao Zhongcun

About the village

Zhongcun is a hamlet in the old county town of Huliao (湖寮), the seat of Dabu County in Meizhou, north-east Guangdong. It sits in the historic core of the town, beside Gucheng village (古城村), on the upper reaches of the Meitan River. This is the oldest settled ground in Dabu. A county seat was first placed here in 413, when the Eastern Jin established Yizhao County, and again under the Sui, who renamed it Wanchuan in 607. When Dabu County was formed in 1526 the seat moved to Chayang, and it did not return to Huliao until 1961. The town also keeps its older name, Tongren (同仁). Gucheng village holds the Ming dynasty Liangyun ancestral hall, and Longgang village beside it is home to Tai'an Lou, a rare square stone tulou built in 1764 and now a national key cultural relic. Dabu is above all a county of emigrants: nearly 500,000 people of Dabu descent live overseas, outnumbering the county's 320,000 residents, and the Dabu association in Singapore, Char Yong (Dabu) Association, dates from 1858 and still serves the community. The Wu clan (吳) is long established in Huliao. The county's Wu record traces the line to Nianwu Lang, styled Deyuan, who moved from Changzhi village in Dabu and settled at Huliao Gucheng, and counts around 2,400 Wu across the town's villages, the largest single group in the old town itself. The migration runs back through Changzhi and Shibi in Ninghua county, Fujian, to Jiangxi. The clan published its own lineage book, the Guangdong Dabu Huliao Wu Lineage Record, in 2013.