Sam Kok Ti

About the village

Sam Kok Ti (三角村) is the central village of Sanjiao Town (三角镇), Meijiang District, Meizhou, in the north-east of Guangdong. The town sits on the river plain south of the old city of Meicheng, and the village lies at its middle, beside the market ground known as Sanjiao Di. The name comes from that ground. Around the old tea pavilion the lanes left at an angle and formed a triangle, and the shape named the township as well as the village. Sam Kok Ti is the Hakka reading of the name; Sanjiao is the pinyin. The ground holds older evidence: in 1974 a Tang tomb group at Liao Bei Ling (寮背岭) yielded glazed ceramic tea wares, which pushed the city's tea drinking back to between 800 and 1000. The village's own monument is Zizheng Di (资政第), a Qing round-dragon house. Houses of its kind took their name from the rank a household had won, as Jinshi Di and Dafu Di did elsewhere in the region. The city listed Zizheng Di as a municipal heritage building in March 2017. Sanjiao is one of the documented bases of the Liang clan (梁) in Meizhou. The town's best preserved round-dragon house, Chengde Lou (承德楼), was built between 1885 and 1896 with money made in Siam, and the clan hall Yifu Tang (义孚堂) stands nearby. Meizhou's Liang families share the hall name Anding Tang (安定堂), taken from Anding in the north-west. They trace their arrival through Shibi in Ninghua county, Fujian, at the end of the Song. Large numbers left the basin from the late nineteenth century to work in Southeast Asia. The place-name record counts fourteen village groups, around 700 households and some 2,700 residents. They farm about 200 mu and earn from vegetables and fruit, catering, transport and building.