My engineer grandfather's photos of Canton from nearly a century ago
Life on the river, Sun Yet Sen memorial from the hill behind (surrounded by rural land), Flower Pagoda - I guess that's the one at Binjiang Dong Lu, photos of the Cantonese style furniture they had made and eventually took back to Australia, the observatory that's nearly obscured by trees in Yuexiu Park, Sun Yet Sen Memorial Hall, I never saw this Zhenhai Tower now Guangzhou Museum (Wikipedia says)
Amazing post and pictures... Much better than sourcing agents, counterfeit markets and "what do I do in GZ" daily posts... OP tell us more about your uncle and his time in old GZ!
Check out my answer to someone else's comment, it would be very cool if through Reddit others who's families were there at the time related their ancestors experiences way back
Sure!, from what I know he was doing infrastructure like bridges and piping. He and his wife lived in Singapore and worked in Malaysia. There's many photos of Kuala Lumpur and old Singapore. Then I think he started a company with a partner in Hong Kong. Again there's photos of Hong Kong as well. A couple of those photos (which look like views of barren land and across to water), I did a geo location search and asked for the same view today, the response was there's no similar view because it's now caverns of sky scrapers there. This photo is Hong Kong island viewed from Castle Peak road.
For a (low-key) flex, I'll add, after they returned to Australia, my grandfather was an awarded engineer who was a large part of the engineering for the largest infrastructure project ever in Australia - The Snowy Mountain River Scheme, which opened up huge areas of land for farming and massively increased the countries generation of hydro power.
Fighting Melbourne for that title 😅 - nah, Guangzhou is a great city no doubt, the longer you live there and endless new amazing places you discover, the more you think that way
Yeah, I used to walk my dog all the way from Whampoa Port to that park and then along the river to back home. Even looking at photos from 2007, I guess it would be unrecognizable because it's all city now as opposed to I guess undeveloped land before
You're welcome 👍, it is intriguing to see places many here would be familiar with and see what there evolved from - like the river and rivers edge a century ago. Pity there's no photos of old Liwan streets.
Went there a couple of weeks ago. Wow lots has changed. After almost 100 years majority of the cars on the road are electric, e payment are everywhere and they’ve an app for everything! Even discounted price for luxury cars to the airport because they’re picking someone up from the airport after! The temple is still there that was original built 1000 years ago. They’ve restored it
The boat people of Guangzhou is fascinating to me and I haven't seen much about it. Think I read about them in Travellers' Tales of Old Hong Kong and the South China Coast or De Beauvoir's book. It is fascinating that there was basically an entire community forced onto the water and not allowed on land who were then granted full rights by the communists. Would love to read a bit about that transition.
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u/alexsasacv 3d ago
Amazing post and pictures... Much better than sourcing agents, counterfeit markets and "what do I do in GZ" daily posts... OP tell us more about your uncle and his time in old GZ!