In the city of Kaiping, time has stood still for close to a century. Scattered over a fertile plain of rice fields, ponds and farmhouses is a cluster of about 1,800 tower houses combining western and Chinese architectural styles that have remained unchanged for the past 70 years.
Built by returning migrant labourers from the US during the Great Depression of the early 1930s, they symbolise not only their new-found wealth but also the migrants' wishes to settle back within their hometown, which lies 140km outside Guangzhou.
Today most of these ancestral homes, also known as the Kaiping Diaolou, are empty, although their history will be a highlight of January's City Festival. Spotlight Kaiping tells the tale of the migrant workers who returned intending to settle but then never did. The Diaolou are all that's left.
The City Festival programme, which includes a three-month playwright workshop and a photo exhibition in March, sits well with the predominantly contemporary urban festival, says Fringe Club director Benny Chia Chun-heng. The theme of migration, the hopes and aspirations of the workers, bears a strong relevance with today's city life, says Chia.
'Everyone has dreams though they aren't always realised,' he says, adding that it wasn't so long ago that Hong Kong was also a point of transition from which people came and went but never stayed.
'Migrants from Kaiping left for America and the European continent to seek a better life because China at the turn of the last century, towards the end of the Qing dynasty, was plagued with corruption.
