Meiwan Street in the old town preserves the residence where Kim Ku, the Korean independence activist and future president of the Korean Provisional Government, lived in hiding during the 1930s while Chinese authorities protected him from Japanese colonial police. The street itself is one of the more atmospheric surviving canal-side lanes in Jiaxing, with traditional Jiangnan-style whitewashed houses facing a narrow waterway.
The Kim Ku memorial house is modest — a few small rooms with period furnishings and explanatory panels in Chinese and Korean — but the site draws a steady stream of South Korean visitors for whom Kim Ku is a figure of enormous national importance. The surrounding Meiwan Street district is worth exploring for the architecture and canal views as much as for the specific memorial, and the combination of Korean historical pilgrimage with Chinese water-town scenery gives the place an unusual layered quality.