Songkou Ancient Town

About the village

Songkou is a historic riverside town on the Mei River in Meixian District, Meizhou, in the Hakka heartland of eastern Guangdong. One of the four great ancient towns of Lingnan, it was once the second-largest inland river port in Guangdong, with hundreds of boats mooring daily at its peak. From the late Ming and through the Qing era it was the first staging point for Hakka from Jiangxi, Fujian and the Meizhou area leaving for Southeast Asia; emigrants boarded river boats here for Shantou, where they transferred to ocean-going ships. Its old fire-boat wharf marks where they embarked. Songkou remains a symbolic homeland for overseas Hakka. In 2013 UNESCO established the China (Meizhou) Immigration Memorial Square in the town, China's only UNESCO immigration memorial project, with a monument shaped like a banyan tree holding up the globe. Visitors can walk the old street of Chinese and Western style arcade buildings, see the fire-boat wharf, the century-old Songjiang Hotel that once lodged emigrants, and the Yuankui Pagoda, over 380 years old, which departing Hakka watched until it vanished from view.