Heshun Township is 3 kilometers away from Tongchong Town in the southwest. The title of the township derives from a verse describing “the rising clouds that herald auspicious future and the gentle breeze that brings peace and harmony.” Heshun is famous homeplace of overseas Chinese. Since ancient times, it has been a place where”eight or nine out of ten people do business in Burma”. The town consists of over 13,000 households and over 6,300 people. There are over 6,000 people who live abroad, almost as many as the people living in Heshun. They are in Europe, America Australia, Southeast Asia, etc. These overseas Chinese and their relatives make up 80% of the town’s total population.
Everywhere in Heshun you can see simple and elegant memorial halls or archways, pavilion and marble balustrades. Heshun Library, built in 1924 and known as “the cradle of Culture”, is the earliest and biggest library at the township level in China. It houses 60,000 volumes of books, many of which are rare editions of ancient works, some being the only copies. Over the door of the library is a horizontal board with inscriptions by Hu Shi and Li Shiceng, Yiqun middle School, which was set up in 1940 and has produced a large number of professionals, has over 1,000 students now.