The Xinglong Overseas Chinese Museum documents the history of the Indonesian, Malaysian, Vietnamese, and other Southeast Asian Chinese communities who were resettled here in the 1950s and 1960s, in one of the less-discussed episodes of Cold War demography. The resettlement camps established here received tens of thousands of people expelled from their adopted countries during waves of anti-Chinese nationalism, and the museum traces both the journeys that brought them here and what they built after they arrived.
The exhibits cover the domestic objects, agricultural practices, and cultural traditions the settlers brought with them, as well as photographs of the early settlement period when new arrivals were building the infrastructure of Xinglong from scratch. The Indonesian influence on local cooking — visible in the use of coconut milk, palm sugar, and particular spice combinations — is traced to specific families and specific home regions, which gives the history a human scale that broad accounts of the "overseas Chinese" miss.