Former Residence of Wang Xiaoda in Xiangyun

In the autumn of 1927, a twenty-six-year-old scholar named Wang Xiaoda was executed in Shantou, thousands of miles from his family home in Yunnan. Before his arrest, he spent his youth at No. 41 Beihei Street, reading under the soft light of the courtyards and co-founding the revolutionary Xiangyun magazine in 1923.

Built in 1901, his family residence reflects the defensive anxieties of the regional horse caravan culture. The compound uses a "one entrance, two courtyards" layout, connected by a walkway wrap-around corner tower and punctuated by ten open patios that catch the cool mountain air. To protect against bandits and fire, the builders raised a stone watchtower by the south gate and enclosed the property with high firewalls on three sides. They hid the wooden structural beams behind fireproof brick and stone, creating flying eaves that shielded the timber from external sparks. Inside, carpenters joined the timber frames without exposing exterior wood, sealing the rooms with hand-carved wooden partition walls and covering the hard-gable roofs with small blue tiles.

After 1956, the residence transitioned from a revolutionary's home to a county guesthouse, and later to a maternal hospital where the rooms echoed with the cries of newborns. A 2.41 million RMB restoration in 2013 preserved these historic structures, allowing the compound to open to the public in 2016.

Today, the site houses the Xiangyun County History and Culture Museum. Visitors walk through the same rooms where Wang Xiaoda once studied, surrounded by exhibits on the Red Army's Long March and the ancient trade routes of Western Yunnan. The scent of ink and the quiet rustle of wind through the courtyards remain, linking a young martyr's brief life to the enduring stone and timber of his birthplace.