China News Service, Jiangmen, September 22 (Zhang Lu, Du Jiayi) Recently, when I walked into Laisu Village, Gonghe Town, Heshan City, Jiangmen, I saw a group of teachers and students from South China University of Technology walking through the village and alleys. Sometimes they raised their cameras to point at the mottled outer walls of the watchtowers, sometimes they leaned over to record the details of the blue-brick houses, sometimes they chatted with the old people waving cattail leaf fans on the roadside, and asked about the past stories of overseas Chinese hidden in their old houses and memories.
Laisu Village was established in the Northern Song Dynasty for more than 950 years. In 2023, it was rated as a "Red and Beautiful Overseas Chinese Village" in Jiangmen City. In August 2025, Laisu Village has completed the development of version 1.0 of the "Laisu AR Navigation System" and the construction of a digital museum with the help of the first phase of the Laisu Commando Team (referred to as the "Commando Team") from the School of Foreign Languages of South China University of Technology, laying a "digital" foundation for "language + technology" to empower rural revitalization.
A few days ago, Wu Xili, the instructor of the commando team, came to the village again with the second phase of the commando team to systematically upgrade the AR navigation function, deeply explore oral history materials such as village history and family training, create a digital genealogy platform, and conduct industrial research.
Genealogy is the blood code of the hometown of overseas Chinese, and it is also the "ticket" for wanderers to recognize their ancestors and return to their clan. The genealogy of the Zhong family in Laisuxun Village has gone through hundreds of years of additions and spans about twenty generations. It is a voluminous volume with dense branches.
In an interview with China News Service, Wu Xili said that she had previously led a team to Laisu Village in Gonghe Town, Heshan City, Jiangmen to conduct preliminary research. During the discussion with the village committee, she learned that the village committee had an urgent need to build a digital genealogy. When she left, she brought back an original genealogy as a work manual and formed the second phase of the Laisu commando team to incorporate genealogy compilation and digitization into regular work during the semester.
It is understood that the commando members have "moved" more than 300 pages of paper genealogy page by page into the computer and customized "digital ID cards" for the characters in the genealogy one by one. Wu Xili said: "Currently, we have initially built a Zhong family genealogy website. Descendants can renew their lineage online with authorization, and overseas travelers can also remotely check their ancestry, realizing 'root tracing in the cloud.'"
Wu Xili introduced that based on the early digital construction results and more than 10 navigation points, the commando team conducted in-depth iterations of the AR navigation system. Villagers and tourists only need to scan the light tag at the entrance of the village, and the mobile phone screen will display family training animations, live scenes of watchtower shells, and oral video clips.
After using the system, a villager said: "I used to be unable to tell the stories of these buildings when tourists asked about them, but now the AR guide can tell them clearly."
In addition, the commando team carefully prepared an operating guide for the AR navigation system for the village committee and completed in-depth interviews with multiple groups of core figures.
According to reports, the members of the commando team made the personal memories scattered in the minds of the villagers into the "Laisu Memory" oral history series of short videos, archived all video materials according to standardized names, synchronized cloud backup, and handed over the materials to the village committee for safekeeping, making them public archives and digital assets independently managed by the village committee.
During their stay in the village, the villagers dug out family trees and old photos from the bottom of the box, took the team to see ancient wells and ancestral halls, told ancestral legends and festival customs, and expressed their expectations for future development.
Members of the commando team visited many villagers and elders, systematically sorted out the history and culture of overseas Chinese in Suzhou, intangible cultural heritage skills, and red stories, and recorded the villagers' thoughts and hopes for industrial revitalization. In addition, the commando team conducted in-depth discussions with the village committee on the integration of agriculture, culture and tourism.
"We have designed 5 fragrance cards, and the back can be combined to form the pinyin of Lysol." In the studio of the village committee, members of the commando design team were showing the design draft.
"We hope to incorporate Lysol culture into cultural and creative products that can be seen and taken away, so that people will remember Lysol." said Zhang Huaitian, a member of the commando team responsible for the design.
Zhang Huaitian said that in order to find the "right" color for Laisu, they traveled through villages and alleys, repeatedly sampled and compared, and extracted two colors of green gray and off-white from local houses as the keynote of the entire cultural and creative series. "Inspired by elements such as the Sucun Youth Lion Dance Team, we have developed a number of cultural and creative products such as family motto bookmarks. We will increase promotion in conjunction with the peak tourist season in Suzhou."
