Mid-Autumn Festival 2026: The Reunion Festival of the Separated
Of all the festivals on the Chinese calendar, the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节, Zhōngqiū Jié) is the one built around a single shape. The full moon (满月, mǎnyuè) is round. The mooncake (月饼, yuèbǐng) is round. The table a family gathers around is round — and in…
How to Read a Chinese Zupu: A Diaspora Descendant's Guide
The Book That Was Written for You
Every few years, someone inherits a book they cannot read. Thread-bound, paper soft with age, characters printed vertically in a classical Chinese no one in the family studied. It is a zupu (族谱 zúpǔ) — a clan genealogy,…
Ghost Month 2026: A Guide to Zhongyuan for Diaspora Families
The Gates Open: A Month When the Living Remember
In Chinese cosmology, the seventh month of the lunar calendar belongs to the dead. The gates of the underworld open on the first day, and for the next month the ancestors return to the homes they…
Getting Around Wuyi: Trains, Buses, and Hiring a Driver for Your Roots Trip
The Railway the Villagers Built, the Railroad That Brought Them Home
For 150 years, the story of Wuyi (五邑, Wǔyì) — the five counties of Kaiping, Taishan, Enping, Xinhui, and Heshan that form Guangdong's great qiaoxiang (侨乡, qiáoxiāng), the "overseas Chinese homeland"…
Qixi Festival: How the Wuyi Diaspora Kept Love Alive Across the Ocean
The Seventh Night: When the Separated Are Allowed to Meet
The seventh night of the seventh lunar month is the one night a year when, in the oldest love myth of the Chinese calendar, two lovers separated by the Milky Way are allowed…
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…
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 \—…
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…
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…