Pangui Fang

About the village

Pangui Fang is a historic ward on the eastern edge of the old city of Meicheng in Meizhou, north-east Guangdong, on the bank of the Zhouxi river. In the imperial era the city had two such wards either side of the old town: Wangxing Fang upstream was known as the upper market (上市) and Pangui Fang downstream as the lower market (下市). The ward is best known for the mansions lined along it, including Zhangjia Wei and the Ronglu Di, Renjing Lu and Enyuan Di complex, which belonged to the late Qing poet, diplomat and reformer Huang Zunxian and is now a national key cultural relic site. Huang Zunxian's family lived in the ward for eight generations before him. The clan's ancestral round-dragon house, Lu Shan Tang, still stands beside the two-storey Dezan Lou, where he was born in 1848. In his preface to the Pangui Fang Huang genealogy he traced the family's first ancestor to Zhenping, present-day Jiaoling, and before that to Shibi in Ninghua county, Fujian. He returned here after the 1898 reforms failed, founded the Jiaying education society in 1903 and set up the East Mountain normal school, which grew into today's Dongshan Middle School.