Liede Village: the rebuilt ancestral halls on Liede Creek

The one old thing in the new-town grid — or the memory of one. Liede was a 900-year-old creek-side village whose fields became Zhujiang New Town; in 2007 it became Guangzhou's first whole-village redevelopment, was demolished, and by 2010 its residents had moved into tower blocks. What the village kept, by its own insistence, is the line of ancestral halls, the temple and the dragon-boat pond re-erected along Liede Creek — a kilometre of grey brick, granite and banyan between the skyscrapers, free and open, best on Dragon Boat Festival when the creek fills with boats.