The following is from a visit to Chaozhou and Shantou in December 2019 – a warm Guangdong summer day before the world changed.

By the time I entered Qianmei village (前美村) the exhausted sun was starting to tickle the eastern mountains, a geological and cultural bulwark separating the fertile plains of Guangdong’s east Chaoshan region from the wilds of Fujian’s upcountry. A series of territorial barks inspired me to keep distant from the town’s northern gate, instead wending my way into the narrow alleys demarcated by moss-stained walls which stretched along a sluggish canal.

Guangdong – once a malarial jungle populated by the Baiyue 百越 people, ancestors of today’s Vietnamese – was always on the periphery of classical China: reduced by the first emperor Qin Shihuang, crushed by hordes of Emperor Wudi’s Han troops, but with full Sinicisation and absorption into dynastic China relatively late. Today’s profusion of languages – including Cantonese and Chaoshan’s Teochew ‘dialect’, far removed from the north’s Mandarin – recall these plural substrata. As a result, the south is more lacking in my first love of Chinese history – the desert forts of the Silk Road, colossal tombs of past dynasty, monolithic temples and religious grottoes. But its openness to the outside – many of the world’s ‘overseas Chinese’ have roots in migrants and traders from the southern littoral – brought prosperity and a cultural vitality more open to foreign artistic and cultural influences. Over the past few years I’ve become increasingly drawn to tracking down the often remote villages which, in defiance of the vicissitudes of 20th century Chinese history, preserve a memory of China’s fin de siecle period in the late 19th century.

Qianmei backs onto a local tourist attraction, the vast mansion of emigre Chen Cihong 陈慈黉, who returned to his hometown in the 1900s after making a fortune trading in South East Asia. Behind are a fascinating collection of decrepit mansions, their stately architecture now subdivided into smaller homes and workshops populated (seemingly entirely) by elderly Chaoshanese monoglots, impervious to my attempts at Mandarin or Cantonese convention. These fade into the alleys of the older village which – as with many in the region – is centred around a communal pond, with an assemblage of handsome courtyard houses tessellating across the countryside.

Poking my way into one of the open houses, I was met by a beaming elderly couple. In the courtyard of their late Qing home Mrs Liu squatted on the concreted floor, buckets of local fruits spread across the plunge pool (the central roof is open with a recess in the floor to collect rainwater), methodologically being packaged for sale on one of China’s prodigious e-commerce sites. Mr Liu obviously saw my surprise at his perfectly accented Mandarin; as a teenager, he explained, he had got hold of a transistor radio which he used to listen to state news broadcasts, practising Mandarin to complement his Teochew mother tongue.

Besides their (to my mind) objective beauty, villages like Qianmei – where they survive – provide a tangible anchor through the past century of China’s astonishing history, which in a country of often self-imposed amnesia can be hard to trace. With buildings dating to the end of the Qing imperial period, these modest collection of homes and shrines have stood buffeted by the collapse of dynasty, revolution, civil wars and foreign invasion, famine and political persecution, and finally China’s breakneck modernisation. Many still bear the scars – like the indelible red characters and Mao busts daubed on walls, left by the angry youths who had come to smash up any trace of China’s millennial culture and history at the height of revolution.

Mr Liu, it was to turn out, was a simulacrum of his village’s history. Although in his late 80s, Liu sprung up the narrow steps leading to his home’s second story and onto the flat rooftop which overlooks Qianmei’s fields and the distant mountains. A cool breeze caressed us from the east, scudding reddening clouds into the sun’s path as it set in the west.

‘One of my first memories is fleeing there,’ Liu remarked, pointing to the darkening peaks. ‘I was six or seven when the Japanese came. We heard the news as the Guomindang [KMT – China’s governing party in the 1930s] retreated and left the village before they arrived, up to the mountains where they wouldn’t reach’. The nearby coastal city of Shantou (Swatow) and its environs had been invaded in 1939, taking out one of South China’s most important ports to blockade Chiang Kai Shek’s beleaguered government. Liu reminisced about the confused period of occupation – KMT troops caught retreating inland, local guerillas and partisans, but also those who joined the occupying forces.

We chewed the fat some more before Liu showed me into the upper story of his house, which had been in his family for decades. A pair of broad open windows overlooked the courtyard where Mrs Liu continued her packaging operation; Liu pointed to holes in the upper and lower lintels. ‘There used to be bars here,’ he explained, tracing their form against the dusky sky. ‘I remember tearing them out in the ‘50s – they were iron, and everyone wanted to make more’. In a directionless attempt to rocket agricultural China into the industrial big league, as part of his ‘Great Leap Forward’ (1958-1962) Mao had inspired Chinese across the country to produce steel by building small garden furnaces, stoking them with low quality coal and feeding any available ‘waste’ metal in to produce fresh iron. The result was predictable – poor quality furnaces with insufficient temperature to produce anything beyond useless slag, while government quotas led to families like Liu’s to literally strip their houses apart to produce more raw metal.

Behind the window was a threadbare bedroom; undecorated aside from a small table and bedding strewn on the floor. This was the Liu family guestroom, ready for when family visited. Closing the room were two plain panel doors. Liu tapped then with a wry smile; when he was a boy, he remembered, they had been decorated with bold splashes of paint, Daoist and Buddhist mythological scenes in the famed Chaoshanese vernacular style. When the Red Guard had arrived, China’s Cultural Revolution snapping hot on the heels of the Great Leap Forward, Liu had preempted the threat of violence for harbouring the imagery by removing the doors and – performatively – throwing them onto a pyre the activists had set up in the centre of Qianmei.

I chose not to press Liu too far on his remembrances. He seemed phlegmatic and comfortable discussing what to him must have seemed ancient yesteryears; and perhaps this small village escaped the worst excesses of China’s bloody modern history. But the suffering – death, starvation, destitution, and indescribable violence – that witnesses to China’s history from the late ‘30s to late ‘70s recount were too familiar to me, even as many of the stories are consciously consigned to undiscussed history. Elsewhere these scars are often marked by an absence – a pagoda destroyed by invaders’ artillery, a village depopulated by collectivisation, a shrine torn down to the shrill catcalls of political slogans – but Liu’s age and willingness to talk gave a presence to the history, one I felt uncomfortable cajoling him into discussing too much.

As I went to leave, Liu and his wife pressed a bag of their fruit – wax apples – into my hand; I had a long journey back to Guangzhou, they remarked, and might get hungry. How did they know? Well, their son was nearby – not Guangzhou, but Shenzhen, the famed boom city which had drawn rural migrants from across China as it grew in the early ‘80s. Liu junior had moved there, and was now with his family; he still came home, only sometimes, not enough; they could talk on the phone, but he seemed less interested in his roots. Even his Chaoshanese, Mrs Liu told me, was going – they had to speak in Mandarin, as linguistic walls reinforced those of distance, age and – increasingly – cultural dissimilitude between generations.

The light was starting to get fade as I plucked a route back out of the village (still mindful of the dog). Here again, the Lius served as avatars for the village itself; the only sign of youth a rusting basketball hoop on an empty court, while stooped silhouettes picked their way through lines of washing drying in the cooling air. A young man came out of the dark, trying to talk but unable to articulate words – apparently with learning difficulties, and I guessed abandoned to a life in the village of the old while his peers left, without education or much support.

It’s easy to dehumanise the rural and the ancient in China – to extremes of both touristification, displacing residents and despatching the real history and culture of a village to commoditise and sell to urbanites; and neglect, where the old slowly fade from existence, denuded of the young who have left for education and prosperity in county towns and cities, and leaving abandoned artefacts for architectural connoisseurs, robbed of any context, meaning, or relevance by the departure of the owners who raised them. The Lius seemed happy, not least to talk to an interested face, but the sunset over Qianmei was hard not to associate with their stranding – tethers to not one but several lost worlds, granted a peaceful, gentle, but final close as they, their village, and their memories faded from memory.