ABSTRACT
“Our people came from under the stork’s nest in the big locust tree” is a common saying in Houhua Village and the surrounding area. According to the Gazetteer for Neihuang County, migrants came to Neihuang from Hongtong County in Shanxi Province in the twelfth year of the reign of Emperor Yongle in the Ming Dynasty (A.D. 1414). They had been forced by an imperial edict to move from relatively crowded Shanxi Province to sparsely populated northern Henan Province and settle there permanently as colonists. Records from their place of origin elaborate: Those designated to colonize Neihuang were gathered in the shade of a gigantic locust tree in the courtyard of the Temple of Beneficence in Jia Village, 2 li north of the Hongtong county seat. The ancient temple, built eight hundred years earlier, in A.D. 628, was being used in Emperor Yongle’s reign as an administrative office for his emigration officials. The prospective colonists were gathered there before being marched off, leaving ancestors, family, friends—everything they had known—for an uncertain future in northern Henan. As the colonists looked back from a distance, the relatives and friends who had sent them off gradually faded from sight. Finally, the only familiar landmark to be seen was the locust tree with its huge stork’s nest. It became a symbol of their former home. The Wang family of Houhua Village was part of that migration.
