Rags to Riches from Rome to the China Seas
I've never been to Zhangli village in Fujian province, just outside the city of Quanzhou, which the Venetian merchant Marco Polo described as one of the world's greatest ports in the 13th century. I'm not taking you that far back in time, just to the middle of the 19th and the construction of a set of 23 red brick mansions, arranged along five rows and spread across 16,300 square meters (around 175,000 square feet. That's about the same area of the Biltmore Estate, the private home erected by the Vanderbilts in Asheville, North Carolina, at roughly the same period. The Chinese property, with its curved roofs, internal courtyards and halls for ancestor worship, belonged to a family with the Spanish surname Velasco. I know about it because Mariano Velasco was my great-great grandfather.
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