NESTLED on the side of a mountain, the Chinese village of Xiang Yun doesn’t offer much for tourists and has quietly escaped the huge transformation that has swept the rest of the country.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
A single lane through windy roads, blanketed in mists, and flanked by terraces of rice paddies leads to the hamlet populated by just a couple of hundred people.
But the ordinary description isn’t something that bothers Warrnambool mayor Michael Neoh.
The journey to his family’s humble beginnings came on the tail end of Warrnambool’s landmark cultural mission to China.
There’s been over 43 generations of the Neoh name reaching back to the time before Christ — something he happily declares.
His great-great-grandfather and grandfather left Xiang Yun for Malaysia in the early 1900s, where Cr Neoh’s father was born.
Seeking education and opportunity, his father came to Australia, eventually settling in Warrnambool.
“I’d always heard of this village and the name of the house there was Bee Lam, which was the same as my grandfather’s restaurant in Malaysia and my father’s restaurant in Warrnambool,” Cr Neoh said.
“When I knew I was going to China one of my relatives had a letter from a person who was at our ancestral home and a phone number and address so I traced them down and said I’d be coming.”
Neither his grandfather, who has passed away, nor his father at home in Warrnambool returned to the village.
“It’s a burning need to find out what it was like and where you came from,”Cr Neoh said.
What Cr Neoh saw wasn’t to dissimilar to what his ancestors left behind.
“You have a perception of what you hope the place will look like — and it was pretty much a rural village with buildings that were in their original state,”he said.
If anything is timeless, it’s a family name.
Stopping for directions on the way to his village, a woman told Cr Neoh he had plenty of cousins on the road ahead.
“I said my name was Neoh and she knew of the Neohs in that village,” he said.
The township itself, located near China’s southern coast and facing Taiwan, is relatively isolated and locals speak the Hokkien dialect rather than mainstream Mandarin.
When Cr Neoh arrived in the district it didn’t take long to be picked out as the tourist.
“I saw an elderly man walk towards me, up the middle of the street that was basically devoid of any traffic, who said ‘Neoh Kean Lam’,” Cr Neoh said.
‘‘(It was) the first Hokkien words that I had heard.”
Homes in the village are fairly basic but there are some beautiful examples of architecture including a mountain-top pagoda and a century-old temple his family helped build.
It also had strong similarities with the Malaysian city of Penang where many Chinese migrated to throughout the 20th century. “I admire the generations that left their countries,” Cr Neoh said.
“They left China to seek opportunities not knowing what would happen, but they also send some of their wealth back to support family in China.
“It’s something that we don’t see a lot of these days.”
s.mccomish@fairfaxmedia.com.au
