ABSTRACT
The hundreds of houses built in their home villages by people who had migrated from Zhongshan County to Australia between the mid-19th century and the 1940s represent a remarkable heritage record of transnational flows of people, ideas and money. The chapter offers a typology of remittance houses in Zhongshan, providing detail on architectural style, building technology and the changing lifestyle the houses both reflect and enabled. Beginning as enlarged versions of vernacular houses, by the 1920s many of the houses were being built in a neoclassical style based on reinforced concrete frames. The relationship of the Zhongshan houses to Australian architecture was, to a large degree, one of simultaneity rather than of a unilinear flow of influence. It is proposed that the houses represent a transnationally ‘distributed’ form of heritage that provokes a rethinking of the conventional approach to migrant heritage. The chapter ends with a discussion of the fate of remittance houses in Mao’s China and, following Mao’s death, of the diaspora’s renewed connection with the houses.
