‘Come back to hang out’: Taiwanese woman tracks down 300-year-old ancestral homeland in mainland China, with help from internet users
- The woman’s father gave her a genealogy book when she and her husband had planned to visit Fujian province for a holiday
- Leveraging social media, she found evidence that one of her ancestors had moved to Taiwan over 300 years ago
For many people, one of life’s great joys is diving into their ancestry and tracking their heritage and history.
For a Taiwanese woman who goes by the pseudonym Lailai, she found the village in Fujian province, in southeast China, where her ancestors lived before they migrated to Taiwan over 300 years ago during the Qing dynasty (1644–1912).
The woman, who works in Beijing, travelled to Fujian province with her husband to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival recently.
Before the trip, Lailai’s father passed along a genealogy book of their family, hoping she could visit their ancestral hometown in the province, the mainland news outlet Xiamen Daily reported.
According to the book, the family, with the surname Lai, lived in a place called Shentian Luxi in Pinghe county, a mountainous region in the southern part of Fujian that is around 120km from the ocean.