Dream Houses in China: Migrant-built Houses in Zhongshan County (1890s–1940s) as Transnationally “Distributed” Entities

ABSTRACT The hundreds of houses built in their home villages by people who had migrated from Zhongshan County, China, to Australia between the mid-nineteenth century and the 1940s represent a remarkable record of transnational flows. 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. It is argued here that these houses drew inspiration not from Australia as a country but from a colonial architectural milieu in which Australia participated. The relation of the Zhongshan houses to Australian architecture was to a large degree one of simultaneity rather than 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 in places like Australia where a unilinear, one-way narrative of migration has been imposed, a narrative which disregards the ongoing history of transnational mobility and belonging that is common to many or most peoples’ experience of migration.