Memory of Macau ------ Zheng Guanying

Me at the Gate of the Mandarin House

The outlook of the Mandarin House

The stamp issued for the 160th anniversity of the birth of Zheng Guanying

Many famous people had recorded their memories in Macau, which is a city assemble both Chinese and European culture. Zheng Guanying, a pioneering thinker and reformer who initiated the exploration of ideas of liberal democracy and science in modern China, was one of them.

In the alley by the side of the famous Lilau Square, a mansion of the building style of the south China, which has a history of one hundred and fifty years, stands there quietly, has a well-known name --- Mandarin House. Zheng Guanying's family had lived in this house for generations, and Zheng Guanying himself spent most of his life there.

Zheng's mansion has neither colourfully paintings nor luxurious decorations, which let us realize that its owner has a noble charaacter. This mansion has a great history, which mostly impressed the visiters --- Zheng's most famous work, Words of Warning in Times of Prosperity, a masterpiece that has an enormously powerful influence on modern Chinese society, was written in this house. At that time, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen had ever discuss the social affairs of that period with Zheng Guanying there.

It was July when I get there. When I arrived at the gate of the Mandarin House, I saw a notice of renovation there, and I did not see the living of the famous thinker. However, there was an exibition on Zheng Guanying at the Macau Museum.

In the museum, the tablets from the Mandarin House, and the writings, correspondence, accomplishments and historial artefacts of Zheng and his family, were all presented to the public. I realized Zheng's inner world and his thought process there.

An official named Zeng Guoquan had ever given Zheng a tablet written "Great Virtue Well Applied". Zheng set up many good habits for his posterities instead of colleted a good number of books ar earned a great deal of treasure for them. Learning from the pillar couplets which was in the Mandarin House before, I realized that Zheng had ever told his children to economize their outcomes and not to have too many lust.

Zheng had learned a lot and taken part in many social activities in his whole life. By his masterpiece, Words of Warning in Times of Prosperity, he had aroused passionate respenses from academics, politicians, economists, and even the military, and shaped the thinking of the famous people like Emperor Guangxu, Sun Yat-Sen and Mao Zedong, and the views of many other people. Zheng summed up his life-long experience in business and politics in one single eternal quote:"To resist foreign aggression, one must continuously strive to make progress; to continuously strive to make progress, one must first acquire wealth; to acquire wealth, one must first build up the education system, institute a Constitution, value morality, and improve governance."

Zheng Guanying had been recorded in the four hundred years' history of Macau, and the five thousand years' of China.