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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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A vintage photograph of a Chinese restaurant storefront in a North American Chinatown, its proprietor posed outside — the overseas businesses that anchored diaspora community life.
Chinese Diaspora migration-history

Chinese Restaurant History: How Wuyi Immigrants Built America’s Chop Suey Houses

Chinese Restaurant History: How Wuyi Immigrants Built America's Chop Suey Houses The Storefront That Opened a Door The Siyi region of Guangdong sent more than two million people overseas between 1840 and 1940. Among the things they built in America — railroads, mines, laundries — the most enduring proved to be the corner restaurant. Chinese…
August 25, 20260Comments

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Chinese residents of San Francisco's Old Chinatown, photographed by Arnold Genthe around 1900–1906 — the community that built the hand laundry trade
Chinese Diaspora migration-history

The Chinese Hand Laundry: How Wuyi Immigrants Built an American Icon (1850s–1940s)

The Chinese Hand Laundry: How Wuyi Immigrants Built an American Icon (1850s–1940s) The Signature Trade of Chinese America Of all the occupations that shaped Chinese America, none was more widespread — or more misunderstood — than the Chinese hand laundry (洗衣业, xǐyī yè). For a century it was the country's most iconic Chinese trade: born…
August 21, 20260Comments

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Carved Chinese poems in vertical calligraphy on the dark wooden wall of the Angel Island Immigration Station detention barracks
Chinese Diaspora migration-history

Angel Island Chinese Immigration: The Wooden House and the Carved Poems of the Excluded (1910–1940)

Angel Island Chinese Immigration: The Wooden House and the Carved Poems of the Excluded (1910–1940) The Wooden House on the Pacific Gate Between January 21, 1910, and October 1940, a wooded island in San Francisco Bay served as the Pacific gate of the Chinese Exclusion Act (排華法案, Pái Huá Fǎ'àn). Angel Island Chinese immigration was…
August 20, 20260Comments

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