Kaiping

Kaiping City is a county-level city located in southern China in the Guangdong province. It located at the southwest part of the Pearl River delta and has been nicknamed “the pearl of south China.” It is around 110 kilometers east from Guangzhou City and adjacent to Hong Kong and Macao. Kaiping consists of three port cities: Changsha, Xinchang, and Dihai. It has an area of 1,659 square kilometers with thirteen townships and two sub-district offices with a total local population of 681,120 people. Kaiping is in a south-Asian tropical monsoon & oceanic climate zone, with yearly average temperature of 21.5Ð'Ñ" Celsius and yearly precipitation from 1700 millimeters to 2400 millimeters. The local people of the area speak a variation of the Taishan dialect. Kaiping County was founded in 1649 and Kaiping City was founded on January 5, 1993. Administratively speaking, Kaiping is under the jurisdiction of Jiangmen.. It is a famous tourist spot for sceneries and historic sites located in its villages, including the Liyuan garden and diaolou dwellings. Kaiping City is a famous homeland of the overseas Chinese, a famous land of construction, culture, gardens and art.

Kaiping is renowned nationwide as a native land to numerous overseas Chinese. It “was a major source of emigrants at the turn of the last century. As a result, a large number of early Chinese Canadian and Chinese American communities had people who originated from Kaiping and its neighboring counties of Taishan, Enping and Xinhui. It is said that there are more Kaipingnese people living abroad today than there are Kaipingnese in Kaiping. ” It is stated of being the hometown of more than 750,000 overseas Chinese residing in 67 countries and regions all over the world. One important historical event of Kaiping is when many Chinese from the area moved to the United States during the 1830s looking for income as farmers were not making money. In 1882, the United States adopted the Chinese Exclusion Act sending most of the Chinese back home or to other countries. Eventually, many Kaiping natives returned home attached with western culture. Kaiping brings western and eastern culture all over the world. It joined Sister Cities International and became a Sister City to Mesa, Arizona on October 18, 1993. During Willie Wong's term in office, the mayor of Mesa, he was contacted by several Chinese cities seeking an association in the United States. Since Mayor Wong and many Mesa residents of Chinese heritage have family roots in the Kaiping area, Kaiping was selected. Mayor Wong led a delegation to Kaiping in October 1994. An official delegation from Kaiping returned the visit in June 1996. Kaiping invited Mesa to bring a trade delegation to an April 1997 Trade Fair. “Currently the Mesa Sister City Association is developing a student and teacher exchange program with Kaiping. In May 2000, a group of students and faculty members from Mesa Community College visited Kaiping for several weeks, assisting with English language classes at one of Kaiping's middle schools. Additional exchanges are being planned. ”

Kaiping is also world renowned for being a popular tourist area with its famous villages, sceneries, and historic sites. Once popular village is Genghua in Tangkou town, which is 20 kilometers from the downtown area of Kaiping. Genghua village was built between the years 1926 to 1936. It covers an area of 11,000 square meters which includes Chinese gardens and an atmosphere of Western architectures. It is home to the popular Li Garden. This garden was originally owned by Xie Wei Li, an emigrant Chinese who resided in the United States. The garden was built in the early 20th century. The layout of Li Garden is divided into three sections: villa zone, grand garden, and little garden. Each garden has a style of its own and separated by are separated by artificial creeks or walls, but are connected by pavilion bridges and winding corridors. On the walls and pillars are writings by famous calligraphers. Li Garden takes in much of the Chinese traditional garden architecture and integrates it with the feature of European and American villas of its time, a successful combination of Chinese and the West. “The wars before liberation almost put the garden to the point of destruction. After liberation, Tao Zhu and other government leaders came to visit it in 1957. They gave instruction to protect everything in the garden. They garden then became a sanitarium of the Zhaoqing District in l959. In l983, the garden was first listed as one of the historic reservations of county grade by the Government of Kaiping County. In October l999, the widow of the garden owner entrusted the People's Government of Kaiping City to administer the garden for 50 years. Since then, the famous garden has been completely renewed and expanded. ”

Another popular historic site in Kaiping is Fengcai Shrine that is in the Fengcai middle school in the urban area. It is an ancestral shrine for the Yu Family. Total construction area is 5364 square meters. It started being built in 1906 during the Qing Dynasty and construction lasted eight years. Fengcai shrine not only inherited the Chinese traditional style of architecture, but also integrated the Western artistic characteristics. There is also the Canada Village that was originally known as Yaohua Fang. “It was established by Overseas Chinese who sojourned in Canada. A well-known Canadian architect designed the overall arrangement of the village. There are 10 local-style dwelling houses and one Diaolou in the village. Most of them were built in the 1920s or 1930s.” This village is another perfect example of the merging of Chinese culture with that of the Western world as it has “architectural arts of clay carving, acclaiming the perfect combination of classical columns, arches and domes. ”

Probably the most famous historic sites in Kaiping are the diaolou. To avoid confusion, the term “diaolou” and “tower” are interchangeable. The diaolou are fortified multi-storey towers, which were constructed in the Kaiping area from the early Qing Dynasty (1644 вЂ" 1912), reaching a peak in the 1920s and 1930s, when there were estimated to be more than three thousand of these structures according to a recent survey by the Kaiping City Government . Today, approximately 1,800 diaolou are still standing. The diaolou served two purposes: housing and protecting against forays by bandits. The multi-storey towers had thick walls with slits for surveillance and their solid structure meant that they could withstand both enemy attacks and inclement weather such as flooding. The diaolou were used for defense in times of upheaval. They flourished