Location: Sungang Village, Baogang Road, Luohu District

History: Dates back to 1350s

FEW people, even those who grew up in the city, know the city has an ancestral fortified village built by a "founding father" of the Ming Dynasty.

The village in Sungang, Luohu District, was built by He Zhen, a Yuan (1279-1368) and Ming (1368-1644) official, during the 1350s.

His title of "founding father" was posthumously conferred on him by Ming Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang in 1388 to commemorate his service to the Ming government as governor of Jiangxi, Shandong, Sichuan, Shanxi, Zhejiang and Huguang provinces.

The history of Shenzhen usually focuses on its most recent 26 years, which is probably one of the reasons why the 600 year-old Lingnan-style village has gone unnoticed until recently.

Although the site received municipal and provincial-level heritage listing in 1988 and 2002 respectively, it has suffered under the city's modernization. Located just meters away from the railway line connecting Shenzhen and Guangzhou, trains roar past the village every five minutes. Standing among the dense apartments in Sungang, the 4,000-square-meter village was home to more than 700 migrant workers between the 1990s and early 2000.

Migrant workers were moved out two years ago to help restore the historical site, said a spokesman from the heritage site, but few people visit the village these days, even though admission is free.

"We only see visitors on the first and the 15th day of every lunar month when they come to pray at the temples here," he said.

He Zhen was born in 1321 in Dongguan during the Yuan Dynasty.

He tried to report a gang of insurgents in his neighborhood to officials, but He himself was reported as a rebel and subjected to a manhunt.

He escaped to present-day Nigang in Luohu District at the age of 34, and later attacked insurgents in Huizhou, Guangzhou, Chaozhou in Guangdong and Cangwu in Guangxi. He was crowned as a senior official by the Yuan Dynasty for his military successes.

However, to protect his people from battle, he capitulated to the Ming emperor Zhu Yuanzhang in 1368 when the Ming army attacked Guangdong. Zhu later appointed him a government official in return for the surrender.He built the fortified village in Sungang during his escape to Shenzhen in the 1350s. His great, great grandson, He Yunlin, refurbished the village's 160 houses in the Qing dynasty. Its 263-meter-long boundary wall is made of brick and has a watchtower on each of its four corners.

The 160 two-storey houses are separated by a grid of nine streets. The village also has a small Buddhist temple and three wells. Most of the centuries-old buildings in the village have been re-faced with concrete and given doorplates with typed Chinese characters.

The area's name, Sungang, which literally means 'small mountain full of bamboo shoots', was also initiated by He.

"They saw the place was dotted with bamboo shoots when He and his family first arrived, and therefore called it 'Sungang,' which also means 'prosperous afterworld'," said He Jianxiang, one of He Zhen's latest descendants.

"The He families moved out from the village in the 1980s, but most of the native Shenzheners in the neighborhood are surnamed He," said He.

Chen Wei, director of municipal cultural relic protection bureau, said more than 2.5 million yuan (US$320,000) had been invested on restoring the village, including the Mazu temple (Mazu is the legendary goddess of the sea) next to it.

By bus:

No. 18, 33, 53, 63, 80, 209, 212, 237, 238, 243, 303, 322, 323, 333, 371 381

Free admission. Open daily 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.