The Chinese are a temple people. In addition to the multiple small ancestral temples scattered throughout the neighborhoods of Chinese villages, the oldest clans typically built larger temples called Grand Ancestral Temples, to honor the first ancestor of their clan who moved to the village. This person was forever honored as the founder of that branch of the clan.

Typically a new jiapu is created with this founder listed as the first ancestor in the record. It will also document their parents and birth information in order to tie them back to their proper place in the larger clan zupu.

This newly founded branch of the clan is thereafter referred to by the village name as well as the clan surname. For example, Nazhou Gu refers to the branch of the Gu clan that settled in Nazhou village. This is a practical way of identifying the descendants of sons who moved to other villages and founded new clan family seats in which their own children would live for hundreds of years.  (Seriously. Not everyone in the world thinks it’s a smart idea to move 11.7 times in their lifetime.)

It is a rare, and deeply consequential, decision for a man to leave the ancient seat of his clan and establish a new branch. And this is why his descendants worship their “first ancestor” with particular reverence.

About the Guan Tang Chock Grand Ancestral Temple

The Guan Tang Chock clan built the Chock Grand Ancestral Temple to worship the grand ancestor Zhuo Feng and the 1st ancestor Zhuo Guang Yi, the son of Zhuo Feng.  It was first built in 1575 and remodeled in 1853. In 1958, it was rebuilt to suit the local need and became a community center. In 1964, a typhoon destroyed the building. Later it was rebuilt again.

A large restoration project has been underway for quite some time, funded by the Government. Guan Tang Village got a large funding of $3 million (USD) to remodel the ancestral temples, a community center building (the Chock Grand Ancestral Temple used to be the community center), and an office building.

This is not the case with every ancestral village, so we should feel very lucky. In some cases, like the village of Dong’an, there is a beautifully remodeled Huang Ancestral Temple. (The Dong’an Huang clan is related to our Chock clan through marriage, so Mr. Luo showed us their remodeled temple.)

But unfortunately, many other ancient villages have long since vanished — consumed by huge modern cities. Their descendants no longer have a home village to visit, much less a little ancestral temple in the neighborhood, and certainly nothing approaching a Grand Ancestral Temple. So yes, we are indeed lucky to have such a treasure for our family.

Here is how the Chock Grand Ancestral temple looked in 2021, when Mr. Luo visited the site with Zhuo Bing Quan.

 

Of course, this was not the only ancestral temple in Guan Tang. Each clan, including the Chocks, created smaller ancestral temples within their neighborhoods to worship their own generation branches. As the children of the first ancestor multiplied, they needed more and more of these temples to accommodate the numbers of people who needed to use them to worship the grandparents of their section of the family tree.

According to Zhuo Bing Quan, the Chock clan historian who painstakingly rebuilt our jiapu and restored our smaller temple over the past decades, Guan Tang village once had the most ancestral temples in the whole area, with 61 Chock temples alone.

These smaller temples have always been maintained by the local village clans, not the government. Clan members donate money, services, and other items for clan temple use. When Louise visited Guan Tang in 2019 to obtain images of the Chock pedigree for me, she observed clan members paying for caretakers to open and close the temple door every day.

During the Cultural Revolution these smaller temples were destroyed or desecrated and repurposed in an attempt to sever the Chinese from their old traditions. The most catastrophic impact was not the loss of these buildings, but the records stored inside. Hundreds of years of clan jiapus and zupus — the master sources of family history lineage and stories — were carefully housed within these temples.

They were all systematically seized, carried to the village square, heaped into massive piles and burned to ashes. Zhuo Bing Quan remembers that terrible time. He said it took three days of continuous burning for all the records to be consumed.

The Grand Ancestral Temples were simply converted into community gathering places with no reference to any ancestors at all.

Remodeling and Restoration

Some 57 years after the start of the Cultural Revolution, things are very different in Guan Tang Village. The remodeled temples are expected to reopen to great fanfare in February or March of 2023. (Unless Covid restrictions delay that.)  An auspicious day is being selected to bring maximum good luck to the project. People from far and near are traveling to participate in this great milestone event.

Here’s a sneak peek at how the renovation project looks today.

Two Grand Ancestral Temples have been restored: The Chock and the She. The She temple is the temple of the clan sometimes called She/Say/Sai/Sha — here is their character: 佘

The Chock and the She are the two major clans in Guan Tang. Where the Chock clan had 61 ancestral temples, the She clan had 10 ancestral temples in Guan Tang. The She Grand Ancestral Temple is now much bigger than the Chock’s, but originally that was not the case. The Chock Grand Ancestral Temple used to be a very large temple, but was completely destroyed, and has not been restored to its original size.

Chock Emigrants to Hawaii Honored

For over a year my genealogist, Louise Skyles, and I have been working with Mr. Luo on an exhibit for the Zhuhai Museum, where he is a curator. He is creating a virtual exhibit, which is planned to be a physical installation when Covid is over, that celebrates the great contribution made by those who left the Guangdong (Canton) province in the 19th and early 20th century and moved to Hawaii.

Their lifelong dedication to their families back home in villages like Guan Tang, through incredibly hard work and financial sacrifice, proved to be the key to saving countless lives in this region. Afflicted by famine, drought, pestilence, pandemics, economic collapse, and endless wars, the families who remained in China would not have survived without the regular infusion of money from their relatives in Hawaii.

Chock Chin supported his family in this way without complaint. And over the course of our research, we have found many other Chocks and members of the clans who married Chocks, who likewise sacrificed for this noble cause.

The Museum exhibit will present life sketches and pictures that tell the story of how these men navigated the alien world of Hawaii and created large families full of hard-working, well-educated children who contributed greatly to the growth, prosperity, and defense of America as well as supporting their extended families in China.

The Covid pandemic has greatly slowed the progress of the Zhuhai Museum exhibit. But while it is waiting to launch, Mr. Luo arranged to let the Chock Grand Ancestral Temple have copies of the exhibit panels about Chock families. These will not just be there on loan for the grand re-opening. They will become a permanent installation in the newly renovated temple.

This is a great honor, and I could hardly believe it when Louise shared the good news with me. Our grandfathers who left Guan Tang for Hawaii to save their families so long ago will be long remembered and honored by future generations of Chocks in the very place created to honor the Guan Tang Chock’s “first ancestor.”

I keep thinking about an 18-year-old Chock Chin kissing his parents and young wife goodbye in 1883, and setting off for a long voyage to the Kingdom of Hawaii. The language, the food, the work, and the culture — all were mysterious and profoundly alien to him. Yet off he went, with hundreds of others, because there simply was no other way to keep the family alive. And because the rest of his life, and the work and worry of all his days, was a price worth paying for the family he was leaving, and the family he was yet to create.

I’m thinking he must have visited the Grand Ancestral Temple before he left. To seek a blessing from the first ancestor, who knew a thing or two about starting something big, somewhere else. I’m thinking as he turned back for one last look at Guan Tang village, he never would have guessed that one day in the impossibly distant year of 2023, his own picture and name would hang in the Grand Ancestral Temple, alongside a few of the extraordinary Chock cousins who would share that great adventure with him.

As their descendants living large in the happy ending to their epic struggles, we must always remember and teach our children to love these pioneer forefathers. They are our beloved Hawaiian Chock “first ancestors”, the founders of the beautiful Chinese-Hawaiian world we love. Rooted forever in the soil of that ancient family seat. Now joining the other first ancestors in the sacred memory of Guan Tang Village.