岭南印象园

This guide to Lingnan Impression Park in Guangzhou starts with the Fok family's ancestral hall, maybe six hundred years old, and the wave of relocation that emptied Lianxi Village when a university campus rose on Xiaoguwei island in the early two thousands. You'll hear about Ho Ying-tung, known abroad as Henry Fok, the Hong Kong tycoon whose family hall could not simply vanish, and how planners folded it and seven other clan temples into a new park, then built dozens of houses to match. A television crew even used these streets to play a Qing dynasty lawyer's hometown in the drama Chen Mengji. Walk the lanes slowly and look at the oyster shell walls along the way.