In March 2017 Sophie Couchman and I hosted our first Chinese Australian Hometown Heritage Tour to Guangdong and Hong Kong.
I started my trip with a couple of days in Zhuhai before heading to Hong Kong to meet the tour.
https://storify.com/katebagnall/chinese-australian-hometown-heritage-tour-2017-58ff14e195c04e4e17821bc6
Interesting trip! Where can I find out about future heritage tours?
My father was born in Zhuhai before China became a republic. After completing his studies in Hong Kong, he emigrated to South Africa in 1929 (where I was born).
Before my father died in 2007, he wrote down a brief history of our Kuan (官) family and family tree and also pin-pointed the approximate location of his ancestral village on a map of Zhuhai.
I would be interested in finding out if there is anything left of our ancestral village and if any family still live in the area.
Hi Paul! We are running another tour in January 2018, and hopefully more in the future. You can join our mailing list here: http://katebagnall.com/projects/hometown-heritage-tour/. Zhuhai is one of our stops on the tour – on our previous tour we visited the Choy village of Waisha in Tangjia, and on our next trip we will visit Meixi village, which has Hawaiian connections (http://www.cityofzhuhai.com/2016-03/15/c_50094.htm). Kate
This trip is highly recommended for anyone interested in learning about the Chinese-Australian journey of migration from Southern China. I participated on this trip in 2017.
Kate is a powerhouse of knowledge about China, migration stories and Chinese culture and it’s people. She is a great source of advice for family history research.
If you have the chance to join a trip, I would advise that you do as much of the recommended reading as possible to make the most out of the tour.
My only complaint is that I ate too much of the great food that was on offer whilst travelling.