A few years back I meet somebody whose last name is "Lee." This is nothing special as there are pretty much only seven or so different last names in Taiwan. However she mentioned that she is a "Luzhou Lee." I had no idea what this was, so I asked around and no Taiwanese friends knew, so I asked older Taiwanese people and they also didn't know.
So I was forced to go back and ask her what a Luzhou Lee is. They are a large family that settled in an area called Luzhou, just to the west of Taipei. Almost two centuries ago these Lee's who were all related to each other came to Taiwan, and once established, other members of their family came to join them.
The story is that they were all quite poor, but through hard work were able to rise up in business and have offspring who played big roles in Taiwan. Eventually they were so wealthy that they built a large mansion (as seen above) where many members of their family lived.
The Lee family also had many many many children over the years, so much so that almost everybody in Luzhou is related. The lady mentioned that when she was in school, there were more than 500 kids in the school and all of them were related!
Now that we have set up who they are, more on their mansion tomorrow.
