The complex is renowned for its intricate decorations, detailed carvings, and cultural significance. Since reopening, efforts to research and preserve the hall have continued, including lowering the front plaza to its historical level, restoring the stone lion bases at the main entrance, re-erecting flagpoles, and reconstructing ancestral hall components. In January of this year, the hall initiated its eighth maintenance project, covering an area of 1,285 square meters. The number of woodcarvings in Chen’s Academy is just magnificent and rich content can be found here. On the first door beam, wood carvings tell historical stories and folklore, such as ‘Wangmu's Birthday’, ‘Ancient Summit in Spring and Autumn’, and ‘The General’s Seal’. Among them, the most prominent one is the group of woodcarvings of Cao Cao offering feasts at Tongquetai Building in the ‘Romance of the Three Kingdoms’, in which Cao Cao’s generals are competing with their martial skills as Cao watches from the high place.
They were Cantonese people who had spent some time in America and started raising funds from different chen clan ancestral hall lineages to build something with two functions. "People often had to visit Guangzhou for business dealings and imperial exams, so they were in need of a place to stay," explains Huang Haiyan, director of the Guangdong Folk Arts Museum, which was established in the ancestral hall in 1959. Later it was