Dahuaishu Immigration Memorial, Hongtong

The Dahuaishu ("Great Sophora Tree") Memorial Park in Hongtong commemorates one of the largest internal migration programs in Chinese history. In the early Ming dynasty, the central government forcibly relocated hundreds of thousands of people from the Shanxi basin to repopulate the depopulated plains of Henan, Hebei, and Shandong after decades of civil war and plague. The staging point for many of these migrations was a large sophora tree in Hongtong, and the tree became a powerful folk memory — millions of families across northern China trace their origins back to this specific spot.

The memorial park is built around the site of the original tree, which is long gone but marked with a replacement and an extensive set of steles and exhibition halls explaining the migration and its historical context. For many Chinese visitors this is an emotionally significant site — a roots tourism destination analogous to Ellis Island — rather than a conventional heritage attraction. The park is well-maintained and the exhibition halls contain documentary material about the Ming resettlement programs and the oral traditions they generated.

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A story
The Great Sophora Tree of Hongtong was the staging point for one of the largest forced migration programs in Chinese history. In the early Ming dynasty, the central government relocated hundreds of thousands of people from the densely populated Shanxi basin to repopulate the war-devastated plains of Henan, Hebei, and Shandong. Migrants tied red cloth to the tree as a memory marker, which is why a gesture of touching the tree root before departure became a folk ritual. The original tree is long gone, but descendants claim ancestry from it across much of northern China.