Between 1840 and 1940, over two million people left the five counties of the Wuyi (五邑) region in southern Guangdong — one of the largest sustained regional migrations in modern history. Taishan (台山) sent its sons to build the transcontinental railroad and fill San Francisco's Chinatown. Kaiping (开平) raised diaolou towers with Canadian gold and…
What to Eat in Wuyi: A Food Guide for Returning Diaspora
Taishanese cuisine was the first regional Chinese food to globalize. Before Sichuan, Hunan, or Shanghai cooking reached international audiences, immigrants from the Siyi (四邑) region of Guangdong had already defined what "Chinese food" meant for most of the Western world — a diaspora that…
Between 1840 and 1940, over two million people departed from a handful of stone jetties along the Tan River. They were leaving Wuyi (五邑, wǔyì — the five counties of Taishan, Kaiping, Xinhui, Enping, and Heshan), a stretch of rocky, typhoon-prone coastline on Guangdong’s southwestern edge, bound for gold fields in California, tin mines in…
The Guo (郭) Surname: From Zhou Dynasty Nobility to the Wuyi Diaspora
The Guo (郭) surname carries one of the longest continuously documented lineages in Chinese history — three thousand years from the Zhou dynasty’s founding brothers to the diaspora communities of the Wuyi (四邑) region (trace your own surname origins with our Surname Compass).…
The Thread of a Name
Of the hundred family surnames that structure Chinese identity, few trace their lineage to a fire god. The Luo (罗) clan does.
The Chinese surname system is among the world’s oldest continuous genealogical traditions, with many surnames reaching back 2,500 years or more to the Zhou dynasty. But the Luo…
Wuyi Roots Trip Accommodation Guide: Where to Stay in Kaiping and Taishan rnOver four million people of Wuyi (五, Wǔyì — the Five Counties) descent live outside China. Every year, thousands of them plan the journey back — a trip that may have been decades in the emotional making, passed down through family stories like…
A Name That Carries a Civilization
The Xie (谢) surname — the 23rd most common in China, carried by approximately ten million people worldwide — holds one of the most concentrated legacies in Chinese history. In the span of 2,800 years, members of this single family line saved a dynasty from annihilation, founded Chinese landscape…
nttThe Wuyi (五) region of Guangdong Province sent over two million people overseas between 1840 and 1940 — and every single one of them came from a specific village. Not a city, not a county, but a village. A place with a name, a founding ancestor, a clan genealogy, and a cluster of houses that…
Three thousand years ago, a Zhou Dynasty prince received a fiefdom in the northern plains of what is now Hebei Province. The territory was called Fengcheng (冯城) — Feng City — and when Bi Gong Gao (毕公高), the fifteenth son of King Wen of Zhou (周文王), took up residence there, his descendants adopted the place…
In 806 BCE, in the waning years of the Western Zhou dynasty, King Xuan of Zhou granted his younger brother a fiefdom in the Yellow River valley. That fiefdom — the State of Zheng (郑国, Zhèng Guó) — would outlast the dynasty that created it, give its name to one of China’s great surnames, and…