For about a century, the coast of Taishan (台山, Táishān) in Guangdong's Wuyi (五邑, Wǔyì) counties was a shore people left. Emigrants sailed from its river ports to the Nanyang and North America, and the region earned the name it still carries: a qiaoxiang (侨乡, qiáoxiāng), an emigrant homeland. That shore now produces and ships.…
The Xu (徐) Surname: From the State of Xu to the Wuyi Tanka and Overseas Diaspora
Two Surnames, One Pronunciation
Ask where the Xu surname origin lies and the answer runs to a state rather than a dynasty. The Xu surname (徐, Xú) descends, in its own lineage tradition, from the lower Huai river —…
Most places that lose their people to emigration never build institutions to bring them back. Jiangmen did — and what it built is not a slogan but a paper chain with dates.
A clause in Chapter 8 of the 2019 Greater Bay Area development plan supports building an overseas-Chinese cultural-exchange-and-cooperation important platform (华侨华人文化交流合作重要平台, Huáqiáo Huárén…
Wuyi Roots Trip With Children: A First Family Visit to Taishan and Kaiping
The Child's Trip Is a Different Trip
Most parents have taken a child somewhere they badly wanted the child to care about, and watched the child care about something else. That is not a failure of the child; it is a mismatch…
A village with no land, and one export
On the western shore of the Pearl River estuary, roughly thirty kilometres north of Macau, sits a village that never had enough ground to feed itself. Cuiheng Village (翠亨村, Cuìhēng Cūn) held about sixty households and around ten surnames in the 1860s. The soil was thin and…
Wuyi Roots Trip Gifts: What to Bring, Give, Never Hand Over
The Ledger You Are Walking Into
In a Wuyi (五邑) village, a gift is not a neutral object. It is a recorded obligation — one that can be carried for years and called in at will.
The mechanism is 人情 (rénqíng), reciprocity treated as…
The Xiao (萧/肖) Surname: One Name, Two Characters, Many Spellings
The Chinese surname Xiao is registered under two characters — Xiao (萧, Xiāo), the older form, and Xiao (肖, Xiào, also read Xiāo as a surname), the substitute the mainland registers carry — and the difference is neither ancient nor genealogical: it is the residue…
The Lu (陆) Surname: From Yamen's Loyal Minister to the Wuyi Diaspora
Lu (陆, Lù) is a top-hundred Chinese surname: 57th to 60th on the 2018 household-registry counts, about 4.2 to 4.4 million mainland bearers — Yuan Yida's Contemporary Hundred Surnames (2005) gives 60th at 0.31 per cent, other compilations 61st at 4.8 million, an…
Chinese in Malaysia: the story starts in 1786, at a burial ground
Malaysia's Chinese story does not start where the famous one starts. It starts on Penang island in 1786, when Francis Light raised a free port on a thinly settled coast — thirty-three years before Singapore's. What survives from that first generation is not…
For more than a century, the west bank of the Pearl River estuary was the shore people left. From Taishan (台山, Táishān) and Kaiping (开平, Kāipíng), emigrants sailed out of small river ports bound for North America, Australia and the Nanyang, and the money they sent home came back as the fortified diaolou towers that…