XinHui, Guangdong | 新会广东
Day 8 | 第八天
After staying the night in Guangzhou, we began our journey towards the Pearl River Delta region and drove southwest to a town called Shigouling in western Xinhui | 新会 Guangdong | 广东. We were headed to the tomb of Lee Dong located in the Heishan Mountains | 黑山. Lee Dong is considered to be the first Lee who migrated to the Pearl River Delta region during the Northern Song dynasty (960 CE - 1279 CE).
Along the way, we stopped by a restaurant for lunch, and one of the first things I noticed was the familiar sounds of Toishanva. This restaurant had containers of live fish and poultry and fresh produce as one entered where your dishes could be selected— literally farm-to-table.
Visiting Lee Dong’s tomb was off the beaten path. It’s not a place one would find on a typical travel itinerary. Our trip organizer Henry Tom placed special emphasis on this location because it was a unique genealogical opportunity. I wasn’t familiar with Lee Dong, and, prior to arriving at his tomb, I thought it would be located within a mausoleum with a visitor center, etc.— in other words, something like an ancestral hall or a museum.
The burial ground was located in the Heishan Mountains | 黑山 just outside of Shigouling. The road leading up to the burial site hiking trail was too narrow for our bus, so we had to park the bus by a rosewood furniture factory and make the rest of the way by foot along the outskirts of the town. We walked by single story homes and smaller furniture factories where piles of wood were stored outside. We came across tangerine peels drying in the sun, followed by the fruit in piles along the road. There was greenery all around us as we hiked to the foot of the hill.
Finding the pathway wasn’t easy. Fortunately, Stony, our guide, visited a few weeks earlier to locate the site. He’s from Guangzhou, and had never been to Shigouling. All he had to work from was a photo of the hills with large red circles indicating where the burial site was located. Stony was resourceful; he located the burial site by asking locals and wandering around the approximate location until he found the gravesite a few weeks before our arrival.
I only realized later that visiting Lee Dong’s tomb was my first visit to an ancestor and served as a precursor for my village visits the following weekend. When I returned home, I received a lineage report based on my paternal ZUPU | 族谱 (clan genealogy book) of Lees in Toishan | 台山 county. The report traced my paternal lineage back twenty-six generations (1200s CE) to Lee Dong, who is considered to be the first Lee ancestor in Toishan.
I had visited the most distant relative on my paternal side dating back eight hundred years.
And just like at Zhujixiang, I recognized a familiar sign 李 .
In the evening, we settled into our hotel in Jiangmen (Kongmoon) | 江门 and were greeted with an elaborate light display from the buildings across the street.
This was a very different China from my memories of twenty-five years earlier. ■