Skip to content Skip to footer

Blog Classic with sidebar

HomeBlog Classic with sidebar
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
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
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
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
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
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
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