Zhongyuan Festival: How the Wuyi Diaspora Honors the Dead
The Month of the Dead — and the People Who Never Stopped Feeding Them
In the Chinese calendar, the seventh lunar month belongs to the dead. This year the gates of the underworld open on August 13 and close on September 10 — twenty-nine days in…
The Li (黎) Surname: From the Ancient State of Li to the Wuyi Diaspora
The Siyi region of Guangdong sent over two million people overseas between 1840 and 1940 — and among the surnames carried in that great crossing was 黎 (Li), a name whose written form had already endured for over two thousand years,…
Wuyi Roots Trip Itinerary: A 10-Day Plan for Descendants \nThe Wuyi region of Guangdong sent over two million people overseas between 1840 and 1940 \— and every year, thousands of their descendants come back looking for the villages their families left. \nThat number inverts almost everything you expect from a place. The Five Counties \—…
The Yu (余) Surname: From Shaoguan Statesmen to the Wuyi Diaspora
A Statesman's Name
The Yu (余, Yú) surname — Yu in Mandarin, Yee in Cantonese, Eu or U in Hokkien and Teochew — traces its Wuyi roots to a Northern Song minister whose descendants built the grandest clan hall in the diaspora. That minister…
Coolie Trade Ships and the Americas: Cuba, Peru, Jamaica
The Crossing
Between 1847 and 1874, roughly a quarter of a million men from the Wuyi (五邑, Wǔyì) counties of Guangdong were carried across the Pacific under contracts that made them neither fully free nor fully enslaved. They went to the sugar plantations of Cuba, the…
"Fujian and Chaozhou: The Other Chinese Diaspora
The Chinese diaspora did not come from one region. If you have followed the story of the Wuyi (五邑, wǔyì) — the five counties of Guangdong whose sons and daughters filled the steamships to Gold Mountain (金山, jīnshān), the Americas — you have been reading one chapter of…
The Tan (谭) Surname: From an Ancient State of Shandong to the Wuyi Diaspora
In the winter of 684 BCE, an army of the State of Qi marched against its small neighbor and erased it from the map. The State of Tan (谭国, Tán Guó) — a minor polity in today's Zhangqiu, Shandong, whose old…
nIn 1046 BCE, King Wu of Zhou overthrew the Shang dynasty and began distributing territory to his brothers and allies. His fifth brother, Ji Du (姬), received a fief in what is now Shangcai County (上县), Henan Province. The state was called Cai (蔡). For the next 600 years, through 25 rulers, the State of…
Budgeting Your Wuyi Roots Trip: What It Actually Costs \\nFor over 150 years, money has flowed from overseas Chinese communities back to the Wuyi (\\五\\邑) region of Guangdong province \\— first as remittances that built railroads, schools, and nearly two thousand fortified towers across the countryside, and now as roots-trip spending by diaspora descendants returning…
The He (贺) Surname: From Wu State Nobility to the Wuyi Diaspora
Not every Chinese surname begins with a murder. This one does.
If your surname is He — written 贺, not 何 — you carry a name born from one of the most dramatic assassinations in Chinese history. In 514 BCE, in the state…