In the spring of 1885, a Hakka woman of the Yuan clan (源, Yuán Shì) stood at the edge of Xiaoxiang Village (霄村) and watched her eldest son walk toward the Xijiang River (西). He was sixteen. He carried a cloth bundle containing three changes of clothing, a small pouch of ground tea leaves (擂,…
For over 150 years, the Wuyi region (五邑, Wǔyì) of southern Guangdong — the five counties of Taishan, Kaiping, Xinhui, Enping, and Heshan — has sent more overseas Chinese across the Pacific than any other place on earth. Today their descendants number in the millions, scattered across North America, Southeast Asia, Australia, and Latin America.…
The Woman at the Remittance Shop — One Jinshanpo's Story, 1923
In 1923, a woman named Chen A-Mei walked the dirt road to the remittance shop in Taishan city for the 247th time — once a month, every month, for nineteen years. The dust kicked up around her cloth shoes. A woven basket hung from…
The Woman at the Pier n nIn 1934, a fourteen-year-old girl stepped off a coastal steamer at Singapore's Clifford Pier. The humidity wrapped around her like a wet cloth. The harbor smelled of salt, diesel, and copra — nothing like the mulberry groves and fish ponds of home. She wore the simple cotton clothes of…
When the gold ran out, the Siyi miners did not go home. They picked up hoes instead of picks — and transformed Australian agriculture. By 1900, Chinese market gardeners from five counties in Guangdong's Pearl River Delta — the Five Counties, or Wuyi (五邑, Wǔyì) — supplied an estimated 75 to 80 percent of Sydney's…
The Surname You Already Hold
Your surname is not merely a name inherited from your ancestors. It is a compass — a pointer to a specific village, a specific migration history, a specific set of documentary holdings, and a specific overseas settlement pattern. If you know your surname, and perhaps just one fragment — “Taishan”…
The Women Who Built Gold Mountain: Jinshanpo Wives and the Hidden Architecture of Qiaoxiang
By RootsWeb Newsroom | June 10, 2026
1. A Face in the Dust
The year is sometime in the late 1940s, and the village lies in Taishan (台山, Táishān), in the rocky southwestern corner of Guangdong's Pearl River Delta. A woman…
The White Island
The islands rise from the Pacific as white cliffs — not of chalk, not of limestone, but of guano (鸟粪, niǎofèn), the accumulated excrement of millions of seabirds deposited over millennia, thirty to fifty meters deep in places. There is no vegetation. No soil. No fresh water. Only guano, rock, and the…
In the Siyi (四邑) counties of southern Guangdong — Taishan, Xinhui, Kaiping, Enping — there are villages the old people still call 寡妇村 (guǎfù cūn, "widow villages"). Not because the men died in war. Because they walked to the coast one morning in the 1850s and were never seen again.
In one such village, a…
rnrnThe dragon boat cuts across False Creek like a blade through memory.rnrnDrum — a single stroke, then the answering crash of twenty paddles striking water in unison. The dragon head surges forward, painted eyes glaring, carved scales glistening in Vancouver's June light. On the shore, a spectator watches. She has lived in this city her…