Prior to Liberation in 1949, Sandhill, Pondside, and Lu's Home, the three major villages of Zengbu, were organized as single-surname lineage villages. Such settlements are very common in this part of China, where the old Chinese lineages (“clans,” or jiazu) were especially strong (see Freedman 1958, pp. 1–8). Two separate Liu lineages inhabited Sandhill and Pondside and, as the name indicates, a Lu lineage inhabited Lu's Home. Groups of people with various other surnames, interspersed with colonies of families from the dominant lineages, inhabited Upper Stream and New Market, Zengbu's two smaller villages, satellites of Lu's Home and Sandhill, respectively.

The Lius of Sandhill and Pondside first settled in Zengbu over nine hundred years ago, in the Song Dynasty, when many of the old established lineages of Guangdong province were founded by Chinese migrating from central and northern China. The Lius first settled in Pondside village next to a Zhong lineage, which at that time lived in the present Lu's Home village area. The founding ancestors of the Liu lineages were half-brothers, sons of the same man by different wives. The Pondside Lius are believed to be descended from the son of the first wife, the Sandhill Lius from the son of the second. These two men founded two lineage villages, each with its own separate ancestral hall. As the present-day villagers put it in their own ritual idiom, “the two groups did not share sacrificial pork,” which they would have done if they had considered themselves members of one group.