On the Road to Gutian 古田

(Different spellings Gutian/Kucheng/Ku Tien)

I am a Minqing person, my greatgrandfather and grandfather left Minqing (Wun Chieh Village) in 1901 with Wong Nai Siong. As I grew up in Sibu, we did not have much to do with Kutien people, who also happened to live in a different village and they were considered like people of another race!! 

In those days, the Minqing and the Kutien kept their distances from each other. so I learned very little about them. In fact it was a little interesting that when I went to school I did not even have a Kutien girl or boy in my class.

In Sibu most the Kutian people have amassed great wealth e.g. The Dings, the Lings, the Tings, etc from Sg. Sadit, or Ah Poh, etc. However I did have an uncle a Mr. Ling who married my mother's first cousin. He always spoke with authority and was full of airs because he was quite educated. He later held a very important social position.

I remember that all the children were terrified even when he made his presence known.

My good friend Wong Meng Lei is a Kutian man. But since he married to Minqing girl, he speaks Minqing Foochow so I am very comfortable with him.

The team went to visit Kutian in 2010 besides Fuzhou. We had a good time driving to Kutian. It is a city which has two parts of history. The older part is under water because of the building of a dam. The other part is now very well developed.

The county was set up in the Tang Dynasty in 741 AD. Since Zhuxi, one of the famous scholars in China, lived there, it is also called "the town of the former worthy."

Photo by Steve Ling

In 1895 the county was the site of a massacre of Christian missionaries.