Shen Junming's homestay hotel in Xikeng village. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Construction of the hall has been like finding a missing link, allowing the village to maintain its integrity, says Xu Tiantian, who designed the memorial hall.

The Beijing architect has designed 20 public buildings, including museums, a bridge, a theater and factories, in various parts of Songyang.

Rural development has gained ever growing support from the central government since President Xi Jinping listed rural vitalization as a priority on the government's top agenda at the 19th CPC National Congress last year.

Architects such as Xu see it as a good opportunity to take part in social change by changing the way they do things.

Rural architecture need not be eye-catching, she says. The important thing is that it changes people's lives.

A factory in the village of Xing that makes brown sugar, and which Xu designed, has drawn many plaudits for her from locals. When the factory opened in 2016 people replaced tea trees with sugar cane to produce brown sugar, a traditional skill passed on for generations. For villagers, brown sugar has supplanted tea as the main source of income because of brown sugar's rising price.

Wang Weixing recalls that in his childhood brown sugar was something people made at home, and the environment for making it was not particularly clean or hygienic, he says.

The new factory is laid out in such a way that visitors can get a taste of how brown sugar is made and experience the village's sugar culture. Once sugar cane is harvested in autumn, brown sugar production begins, a process that takes place in November to December, and this attracts many tourists keen on see how the product is made.

The transparent factory has a circular corridor that allows visitors to watch the entire sugar-making process, and this in effect puts the workers on stage. They wear clean orange uniforms and treat their work like a kind of performance, says Wang, 52, who is in charge of the factory.

"At first they were bashful, but now they have taken it in their stride and are confident in going about their duties as visitors from far and wide look on."

When sugar is not being made, the factory becomes a community center, a public space in which villagers can enjoy square dancing, a popular pastime in China, watch films, and hold meetings and exhibitions.