[LINK] "Legacy of emigration in Chinese countryside reminiscent of Ireland"

[rfmcdonald]

The Irish Times' Clifford Coonan writes about an unexpected legacy of generations of emigration from Guangdong's Taishan district: a superabundance of Western-style architecture.

Scores of Tuscan castles with elegant Rococo styling or Spanish adobes are not what you expect when travelling through southern Chinese countryside, but then, the area around Taishan is no ordinary Chinese countryside.

The odd sight of medieval battlements and Romanesque arches bears testament to Taishan’s history as an emigration centre for hundreds of years, as Taishanese left to go to the Europe, the United States and Canada, setting up restaurants, building railroads and panning for gold in the expanding New World.

These days the people of Taishan are leaving in droves to study in the universities and work in the software companies in the West, and the government is worried about a “brain drain” that could stifle much-needed innovation as China emerges as an economic powerhouse. The region’s history is startlingly familiar to Irish visitors.

Approaching one building, you see a narrow, heavily fortified entrance. The windows are small and barred, but heavily ornate, and so are clearly a difficult proposition for an early 20th century bandit, keen to steal the booty of a returned emigrant flush with cash from building the railroads of the American West. At the top are turrets and Romanesque arches.

Some of the buildings are more than 400 years old, but most of these edifices were built by returned emigrants in the early 20th century, who needed a way to protect their money from robbers during the period of lawlessness which characterised the dying days of the Qing dynasty, which ended in 1911, and the early Republican period of Chinese history.

[. . .]

In China, a combination of the rush to modernity and poor construction has seen many significant buildings destroyed, but the area around Taishan is full of wonderful examples of Chinese takes on the great architectural styles of the West. There are whole streets with covered arcades similar to the style seen in northern Italian cities such as Bologna, and family homes modelled on the Romanesque Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Others are built in Spanish adobe style, and there are also dwellings with strong elements of southeast Asian architecture.