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Crowds and red paper lanterns fill a street during a lunar new year celebration in Lima's Barrio Chino
Chinese Diaspora Coolie Trade Wuyi Diaspora

Peruvian Chinese: The Coolie Ships, Chifa, and Latin America’s Largest Chinese Community

Peruvian Chinese: The Coolie Ships, Chifa, and Latin America's Largest Chinese Community Between 1849 and 1874, somewhere between ninety thousand and one hundred and twenty thousand Chinese laborers — nearly all of them young men — were carried across the Pacific to Peru under eight-year contracts they signed in a language they could not read.…
September 1, 20260Comments

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Cantonese miners panning for gold during the Australian gold rush, a group of Chinese men working a creek bed with mining tools
Chinese Genealogy How-To Guides Primary Sources

Chinese Immigration Records in Australia: How to Find Your Wuyi Ancestor

Between 1851 and the early twentieth century, the Wuyi (五邑, Wǔyì, the "five counties") region of Guangdong — Taishan (台山, Táishān), Kaiping (开平, Kāipíng), Enping (恩平, Ēnpíng), Xinhui (新会, Xīnhuì), and Heshan (鹤山, Hèshān) — sent an outsized share of the Chinese who crossed the ocean to Australia. They came first for gold, following the…
August 31, 20260Comments

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The entrance doorway of the Situ Clan Library (司徒氏图书馆) in Chikan, Kaiping — the door of the library the overseas clan raised 40,000 silver dollars to build.
Chinese Surnames Surname Archive

The Situ (司徒) Surname: From a Zhou Court Office to the Wuyi Diaspora

The Situ (司徒) Surname: From a Zhou Court Office to the Wuyi Diaspora A Name That Was Once an Office The Situ (司徒, Sītú) surname is one of the few office-derived compound surnames (官职姓, guānzhíxìng) to survive from Chinese antiquity — it began as the Zhou-dynasty office of Minister of Lands and Education (地官大司徒, dìguān…
August 31, 20260Comments

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Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay, the Pacific gateway where hundreds of thousands of immigrants, including many from Wuyi, were processed and detained between 1910 and 1940
Chinese Genealogy How-To Guides Primary Sources

Chinese Immigration Records in the United States: How to Find Your Wuyi Ancestor

Between 1848 and the early twentieth century, the Wuyi (五邑, Wǔyì, the "five counties") region of Guangdong — Taishan (台山, Táishān), Kaiping (开平, Kāipíng), Enping (恩平, Ēnpíng), Xinhui (新会, Xīnhuì), and Heshan (鹤山, Hèshān) — sent an outsized share of the Chinese who crossed the Pacific to the United States. Whole villages emptied their young…
August 27, 20260Comments

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Chinese Genealogy How-To Guides Primary Sources

How to Find Your Family’s Qiaopi Letters: A Hands-On Guide to Wuyi Remittance Archives

How to Find Your Family's Qiaopi Letters: A Hands-On Guide to Wuyi Remittance Archives Between roughly 1850 and 1950, millions of men from the Siyi (四邑) and Wuyi (五邑) counties of Guangdong left for the gold fields, railroads, laundries, and kitchens of North America, Australia, and Southeast Asia — and many of them wrote home.…
August 26, 20260Comments

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