Bringing Bones Home: How the Chinese Dead Returned to Wuyi

The duty: why a grave in America was a failure

The Wuyi emigration story is usually told as an outward story, with the money running back the other way: men left for 金山 (Jīnshān, “Gold Mountain” — North America), and what they sent home built the houses. There was a third flow, and it moved against the men: the remains.

Men who could not go home while they lived came home as freight, and they came ashore at 五邑 (Wǔyì — the Five Counties: Taishan, Kaiping, Xinhui, Enping and Heshan), where a man stopped being an unclaimed box in a warehouse and became an ancestor again. The route ran like this: an overseas 会馆 (huìguǎn, native-place association) exhumed and packed him; 二次葬 (èrcìzàng, secondary burial) made his bones shippable; the 铁箱 (tiěxiāng, bone box) carried his name, native county and serial number; the 出港纸 (chūgǎngzhǐ, departure levy) had already helped pay the journey; a Pacific steamer carried him as cargo; the 东华义庄 (Dōnghuá Yìzhuāng, the Tung Wah Coffin Home) in Hong Kong held him; coffin boats and receiving halls moved him up the Pearl River; and a village grave took him back into his lineage. Named institutions, named costs, named dates — and the places where the record runs thin.

Three limits belong up front. The richest surviving archive — the Tung Wah letters of 1929–1936 — clusters at the end of the practice’s strength, so the best-documented years describe a decline; the last leg on the Chinese side is nearly invisible in American records; and several numbers below are estimates, flagged where they appear.

The obligation underneath had a name. 落叶归根 (luòyè guīgēn) — “fallen leaves return to the root” — was a rule, not a sentiment, enforced because a man left in unsuitable foreign ground was thought to blight his descendants through 风水 (fēngshuǐ), and a grave abroad left the 魂 (hún, the soul) wandering. 入土为安 (rùtǔ wéi’ān, “rest in the earth”) was the condition the whole apparatus existed to restore.

The stake was more concrete than grief: the books give one reason — a man buried in America was excluded from his lineage’s rites, unable to be entered on the ancestral hall’s 神主牌 (shénzhǔpái, spirit tablets) or written into the 族谱 (zǔpǔ, clan genealogy), the record of the 宗族 (zōngzú, the lineage). Repatriation was how the dead re-entered it — the books’ documented reason rather than a universal law, and the reason a family would spend a living man’s fare on a dead one’s box. The return of the living ran on money rather than freight; the return migration of the living is its own account. The dead returned as cargo.

The enabling rite: secondary burial, the technique that made bones shippable

The system rested on a technique that had nothing to do with shipping. Secondary burial — disinterring a body after a fixed interval, cleaning the bones with 拾骨 (shígǔ), 执骨 (zhígǔ) or 捡骨 (jiǎngǔ), meaning gathering, scraping, picking up — placed them in a 金塔 (jīntǎ) or 金埕 (jīnchéng), a bone urn. The causal fact underneath the whole article follows: cleaned bones took a fraction of a coffin’s volume and could travel as ordinary freight. Without it, mass transpacific repatriation is impossible.

Two dated statements of the interval, on opposite shores of the same ocean. 南方日报 (Nánfāng Rìbào, Southern Daily) described in 2014 the custom of burying a relative for about seven years and then raising the bones, and noted that early migrants did the same abroad. A Victoria newspaper, the Daily Colonist, reported in October 1961 that bodies were left in the ground for eight years before the bones were disinterred and returned home. The urn had dimensions too: those recorded in the Wuyi literature stand about three feet high and a foot and a half across at the base, wide enough at the mouth for a skull and a breastbone.

One question here is genuinely open. 谭雅伦 (Marlon Hom) of San Francisco State University, reading the small 金埕 found at 黄坑海槐 — too small for arm and leg bones — suggested that some remains were cremated before shipping, to compress volume and cut freight. 傅健 (Fu Jian), reading the same ground from the Guangdong side, argues the opposite: that cremation happened after arrival and only for the unclaimed, because the overseas records speak overwhelmingly of 骨殖 (gǔzhí, bones) rather than 骨灰 (gǔhuī, ashes). Both are Chinese-side scholarly readings; the tension is live and this article does not resolve it.

The labels: a name, a native county, a serial number

The emblem of the entire system was a stencil. Before a box was shipped, its contents were marked with 姓名 (xìngmíng, name), 籍贯 (jíguàn, native county or village) and 编号 (biānhào, serial number). Those three fields turned a bone box into the dead man’s identity papers and the routing key that got him to the right county and clan association.

Three independent chains confirm the discipline. 刘伯骥 (Liú Bójì)’s 美国华侨史 (A History of the Chinese in America) records the San Francisco 会馆 keeping their own cemeteries, sending men after some years to dig and 执骨, packing the bones into iron boxes — later wooden ones — and marking name, native place and number for the voyage home. On the Taishan side, 陈明信 (Chén Míngxìn), director of the Taishan Municipal Museum, describes 宁阳会馆 (Níngyáng huìguǎn), the Taishan association founded in San Francisco in 1854, and its bone-collection arm 余庆堂 (Yúqìngtáng): it ran its own overseas cemetery, gathering bones on a fixed cycle into iron boxes numbered by name and native place and shipping them to Hong Kong for the Tung Wah hospital to hold and forward. At the depot itself, the surviving 黄江夏堂 shipment lists record each departed friend — 先友 (xiānyǒu) — with native place and the name of the receiving relative. One first page reads: 先友籍贯 台山县大亨和乐村 — “departed friend, native place Taishan county, Daheng village, Hele hamlet.” That line is how a clerk could find a family.

The discipline extended outward: the Chinese consul-general 黄遵宪 recorded in 1882 that the associations posted the dead men’s names and home villages publicly through the ports, so that claimants would know a set was being held.

One caution on names. 余庆堂 (Yúqìngtáng), the bone-collection arm of Taishan’s 宁阳会馆, is not 余风采堂 (Yúfēngcǎitáng), the separate Yu-surname clan hall founded in San Francisco in 1886; they are different institutions with different ledgers. And the label’s purpose was also textual: a 族谱 — the genealogy a returned man re-entered — records emigrant bone returns as a category, a question of reading the register rather than of method, which how to read a Chinese zupu covers.

The money: a levy paid forward, and what a box cost

Repatriation was not funded by the estates of the men who needed it but by the associations, out of dues and levies, as a collective obligation.

The instrument was the departure paper already named — the 出港纸. 黄遵宪, Chinese consul-general in San Francisco from 1882 to 1885, reported in 1882 that the 会馆 collected a fee from men going home, and that the associations had agreed with the steamship companies that no departure paper meant no ticket sold; an association interpreter went down to the pier to collect the paper back. A cited 1894 schedule splits the nine-dollar departing fee three ways: three dollars to the 中华会馆 (Zhōnghuá huìguǎn, the consolidated Chinese association), three to the man’s own 会馆, and three for the collecting and shipping of bones.

The honest form is not that every departing migrant pre-paid his own bones’ return. The levy operated on returners, varied by hall and decade, and carried exemptions. After the mining decline, per-hall rates ran from five dollars (三邑) and six (阳和) through eight (宁阳, 冈州) to thirteen or sixteen for 肇庆, 恩开, 余风采, 谭怡怡 and 人和 — and the standing rule was 老病贫民均免收: the old, the sick and the destitute were exempted. The record shows a prepaid mutual-welfare arrangement with wide variation, not a uniform head tax. 譚雅倫 (Marlon Hom) called it a fair arrangement for returning leaves to their roots, a fee whose surplus subsidised the poor; that is his reading, quoted here as his.

A box cost, as an order of magnitude, about fifteen US dollars in freight and health inspection — triangulated from more than one direction: 傅健 itemises roughly five dollars freight, ten to the California health authority and about seven to the family as a burial subsidy, while 黄遵宪’s 1882 report independently gives a ten-dollar-per-set California health-export fee. A homeward passage for a living man cost roughly twenty dollars — a figure that recurs across the sources, including a 2011 Guangdong Museum of Art exhibition text pairing the fifteen-dollar box with the twenty-dollar return passage and a fare record giving the homeward passage at twenty against a fifty-dollar outbound fare in the 1850s and 1860s. It is a figure of circulation rather than a measured tariff, and it belongs to a particular era: an 1850s–60s return fare and an 1880s box cost are not the same ticket. As an order of magnitude, the point holds: the community raised close to a living man’s fare for each set of bones.

The freight: moving the dead as cargo

From the 1870s, remains moved on the San Francisco–Hong Kong run as a distinct, priced class of consigned cargo, documented by bilingual 提单 (tídān, bills of lading) and depot registers naming a 骨箱 (gǔxiāng, bone box). The historian Elizabeth Sinn named the phenomenon the “freightization of the dead” — the dead as a recurring revenue line, not a one-off charity. That is the structural claim here; the specific steamer tariff was not recovered in the record consulted, and the fifteen-dollar figure belongs to the China and Hong Kong side of the cost chain, not to a Pacific freight rate.

The paperwork discipline at the depot was tight: in-and-out receipts and registers had to match along the tear line, and a red “claimed back” stamp marked a set as sent on to its native place. Transit commonly ran six to eight months from an overseas depot to a village.

The ships carried their own coffin: the 金山棺 (Jīnshān guān, “Gold Mountain coffin”) was kept aboard the Americas-bound steamers for passengers who died on the crossing, funded by an onboard 缘簿 (yuánbù, subscription book); unclaimed occupants went to the 义山 (yìshān, the charitable burial ground).

Dated anchors fix the traffic’s earlier decades: an 1870 California report of 1,200 labourers’ remains shipped to China — plausibly Central Pacific dead, though the 1870 report itself is the dated fact — a 1874 report of more than thirty coffins arriving from Kobe, and the earliest reported bone transit through Hong Kong, in 1855. Under exclusion — the 1882 Act and after — an inbound living man met a wall, while an inbound bone box met a freight rate. The dead travelled where the living could not. The books claim that homebound bone traffic peaked in those same decades, and the dated anchors fit that reading, including a Canadian batch of more than 1,800 sets from Victoria in 1931; but the peak itself is not independently dated in the record consulted. A 2015 essay by 傅健 for the State Council’s overseas-Chinese affairs office argues the near-century of exclusion actually promoted the shipment of bones home; a City of Parramatta heritage study, citing New South Wales exhumation files, dates the practice’s decline to the mid-1930s. Both are the sources’ claims. The exclusion era itself is the subject of its own accounts: the exclusion of Chinese immigrants.

Hong Kong, the hinge: a depot and a missing-persons bureau

The transit node was built before it was needed. The Tung Wah hospital was completed in 1872; a 义庄 (yìzhuāng, a charitable mortuary depot) was operating by 1873; in 1875 the Man Mo Temple community built the 牛房义庄 at Kennedy Town under the hospital’s management; and in 1899 the government granted lot 1572 at Tai Hau Wan, where the depot was built and named the 东华义庄. Sets sat there 居港待运 (jūgǎng dàiyùn, awaiting transit in Hong Kong); later halls followed in 1913–18, 1924 and 1926–28. The terminology matters: a 义庄 is a depot, not a burial ground; the burial grounds are 义山 and 义冢, and the receiving halls on the Guangdong end are 善堂 (shàntáng, charitable halls). The Hong Kong 东华义庄 is the transit node, distinct from the Guangdong halls it forwarded to.

Now the volume. Tung Wah’s own order-of-magnitude estimate is that on the order of 100,000 sets of overseas bones passed through the depot before 1949. That is the institution’s estimate, not a census: the press reporting it says the records are incomplete and the number cannot be precisely counted, and no independent check exists. Peak holdings are reported at roughly 600 coffins and more than 8,000 sets of bones, with a circulating variant of 670 coffins — two reporting traditions describing the same 1960s high-water mark, given here as reported rather than counted.

The depot posted unclaimed names in the Chinese press — 华字日报 (Huázì Rìbào) among the papers — sometimes for years, so that a family anywhere in the diaspora might read that a set was held; a notice in that paper on 22 May 1936 routed bones through the Tung Wah hospital, and Tung Wah was still advertising for claimants in the 1960s. Hong Kong’s place as the in-between stop of the whole route is its own story: Hong Kong’s hidden departure points.

For the nameless and the lost, the depot kept what it called a 招魂箱 (zhāohúnxiāng) — a soul-calling box: an empty box bearing only a name, used, in the archive’s phrase, to carry the soul. It is the institutional form of the spirit grave that appears later.

The last leg: coffin boats, receiving halls, and a record that thinned to nothing

From the ocean steamer, the sets were taken by 长生店 (chángshēngdiàn, coffin shops and undertakers) operating 虾苟艇 (xiāgǒutǐng) — literally “shrimp-paste boats”, large fishing craft also called 棺艇 (guāntǐng, coffin boats) — to the depot and on toward the Pearl River ports. The last leg was not safe; piracy and shipwreck were common enough to be noted.

The receiving end in Guangdong ran through the 善堂. A City University of Hong Kong exhibition drawing on the Tung Wah archives names ten of them: 台山余庆堂, 中山福善堂, 冈州福庆堂, 开平广福堂, 增城仁安堂, 恩平同福堂, 番禺昌后堂, 东莞保安堂, 顺德行安堂 and 新会育仁堂. 傅健 counts at least twenty receiving bodies across Wuyi alone. The named receiving town is 开平百合墟 (Bǎihéxū, Baihe market, Kaiping), where a 2012 Tung Wah field trip interviewed a ninety-year-old villager who, as a child, watched boats flying the Tung Wah flag land coffins at the pier.

The delivery chain has dates. 开平广福堂 (Guǎngfútáng) was founded in 1882 by men from Enping and Kaiping, with a village compact and a depot at Baihe market, expressly to help old friends from the new and old Gold Mountains return to their native places; its rules were published in 1903. Its 1935 letter to the Tung Wah hospital receives a list of bones and burial funds, prints the names of the departed, and posts them at the 义祠 (yìcí, charity shrine) at Baihe market and in the Enping markets, paying two dollars per set toward burial. The Cuban Chinese association sent sixty sets on that occasion, carried by the shipping firm 陈洪记, and a 1948 letter from the 台山荻海宏济医院 confirms receipt of seventy sets shipped by the same carrier. The Xinhui route ran overseas, to Hong Kong, by 民船 (mínchuán, native craft) to Xinhui, then to the native place; the Taishan route came in through 新昌 (Xīnchāng), the port tied to the 新宁 railway’s Daheng station.

This is where the record thins, and the thinning has reasons. 傅健 found the Wuyi receiving bodies left almost no trace in local literature — only 仁育堂 and 宏济医院 are mentioned — for three structural reasons: their funding came from overseas associations, so there were no local ledgers; serving overseas societies was routine rather than the main business of a local charity; and local charities spent their credibility on local relief to keep local merchant support behind them. What survives is the market-level list — a hall’s printed names, a receipt for seventy sets — not a village-by-village ledger of who received what.

The supply side: Canada, the consolidated association, and the 1961 mass graves

The Canadian Pacific Railway recruited roughly 15,000 to 17,000 men from Guangdong between 1881 and 1885, and about 4,000 died on the Fraser Canyon and Rocky Mountain sections. That 4,000 is an estimate rather than a count, and it carries a serious counter-figure: the contractor Andrew Onderdonk himself estimated only about 500 to 600 Chinese workers died on his own section. The line that repeats in Chinese accounts — that a Chinese man lies under every railway tie — is quoted to the account that makes it, not stated here in this article’s own voice.

Remains gathered from across Canada were funnelled through the 中华会馆 (Zhōnghuá huìguǎn — here the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association) in Victoria — 域多利 (Yùduōlì) — and held in a vault in the Chinese cemetery on Penzance Road in Oak Bay, the Harling Point cemetery, whose first burial was in 1903. The railroad dead and the exclusion around them have their own accounts: building the transcontinental railroad; the Canadian head tax that shaped the same migration is covered in the Canada head tax and Wuyi.

In October 1961, the Daily Colonist reported that bones gathered from across Canada more than twenty-five years earlier would be buried in a mass grave, in what the paper called the only traditional Chinese burial ceremony ever held in Canada. The report gives 849 bones and records that they would have been shipped to China in 1946 had the Chinese authorities not refused them. The Chinese account of the Canadian railway dead gives 820; the Old Cemeteries Society of Victoria records about 900 in thirteen adjacent unmarked mass graves. The sources conflict, and the range is the honest report. The sorting of the 1961 graves by the men’s home county rests on the Chinese account and fits the pattern of the permanent county graves, though the record consulted does not restate it independently.

The terminus and the freeze: Sandy Ridge, spirit graves, and 1937 / 1949

Families who could never recover a body erected 招魂葬 (zhāohúnzàng) or 衣冠冢 (yīguānzhǒng) — spirit burials and cenotaphs, the latter literally “clothing-and-cap graves” holding the dead man’s clothes. Cost could still stop a return even when the bones were known: a Hong Kong memoir from the folk-history archive records a widow who asked a returning migrant to carry her husband 馮橋’s bones home, then abandoned the plan because the expense was too great. The claimants’ side of that archive was carried substantially by women — widows and mothers appear as prominent petitioners in the letters of 1929 to 1936 — but the corpus is not page-accessible at this stage and the tilt is not quantified; they appear as prominent petitioners, not by how much. The wives who waited out those decades are their own account: the Gold Mountain wives.

Tung Wah’s permanently unclaimed remains were buried at 沙岭 (Shālǐng, Sandy Ridge), the public cemetery near the Hong Kong border; the Tung Wah register describes those graves as holding bones raised from the hospital’s charitable burial grounds and left unclaimed. The government gazetted the cemetery, with a separate urn cemetery, in April 1950, and a 1951 ordinance moved older remains there.

The route stalled at 1937, with the Japanese invasion, and halted at 1949, with the founding of the People’s Republic and the transport stop that came with the UN embargo and the Korean War. Independent statements on both ends confirm the dates: Oregon State University’s archive on Chinese disinterment gives 1937 and 1949; the 1961 Victoria newspaper gives the 1946 refusal; Hong Kong’s memory archive describes native-place burial stopping during the occupation, resuming, and ending after 1949. By the 1960s the depot held close to 10,000 coffins and bone sets and fitted metal racks to hold them, and Chinese cemeteries in America converted from provisional way stations into permanent graves. The richest archive, covering 1929 to 1936, documents the decline of the very system it best records.

The modern continuation is a policy, not a mass practice: a 2005 notice from Guangdong’s civil affairs, overseas-Chinese and customs authorities lets overseas bones and ashes re-enter the province by permit for 原籍安葬 (yuánjí ānzàng, burial in the native place). The two unsynchronised returns that ran alongside it — the last remittance, and the box that arrived a decade later — belong to the remittance-letter account: reading qiaopi remittance letters.

The graveyard as a Pacific map, and the inversion

A returned migrant’s tombstone in Wuyi often inscribes the foreign place where he died — 旧金山 (Jiùjīnshān, San Francisco), 檀香山 (Tánxiāngshān, Honolulu), 秘鲁 (Bìlǔ, Peru) — beside the name of the ancestral village. Read across a lineage’s burial ground, the stones become a map of the Pacific, drawn by where its sons died. That reading is reported rather than counted — no survey tallies how many Wuyi headstones name a foreign death-place — so a reader planning a visit can check it against a family’s own stones: the Wuyi village atlas, how to find an ancestral village, and the returning-bones graves, spirit cenotaphs and receiving-hall sites in between.

The graves that replaced the returns measure how much of the route ended permanently. The Jiangmen survey of 2014 counts nine 华侨义冢 (huáqiáo yìzhǒng, overseas-Chinese charitable grave sites) across the region — seven in Xinhui, two in Taishan — the largest holding 1,508 plots; the Xinhui district government recorded about 2,000 surviving plots in 2022, and Taishan’s 1956 memorial stele at 石化山 (Shíhuàshān) is the monument to the county’s unrepatriated. These numbers stay partial: a Taishan site at Longkeng was planned for more than 800 pits holding 6,000 sets, with more than 600 buried by January 1949, and then the documentation stops. The dated batched returns tell the same story from the arriving end: 1,819 sets from the Victoria Taishan association in 1931, and 1,093 from the San Francisco Taishan hall in 1948.

By the 1980s, some descendants were carrying their ancestors the other way: Chinese Americans disinterred kin long buried in Wuyi and shipped the remains to America, arguing that the remains and the rites, not the place of burial, carried identity. The evidence is dated but narrow: Oregon State University’s archive records a steady increase in remains shipped from China since the 1970s, and a 1987 case has Jieyuan Ouyang carrying her in-laws’ bone ashes from Hong Kong to New York in a suitcase, while a Brooklyn cemetery built a Hong Kong-style trapezoid section and a community leader coined the phrase “the immigration of the dead.” This is a documented practice with unknown scale, not a total inversion of 落叶归根: the axiom has not reversed, and what changed is where some families now locate an ancestor’s belonging. Hawaii’s graveyards carry 檀香山 stones the way this article began: the Chinese in Hawaii’s sugar plantations and the Taishan overseas Chinese museum hold that layer; grave-sweeping in Montana is the American-side pendant.

The return of the dead is where a diaspora’s history stops being about where people went and becomes about where they insisted on belonging. The route ends not at a port or a depot but at a stone in a village, naming another ocean.

Sources

Books (cited to volume and chapter)

• 刘伯骥, 《美国华侨史》及续编 (A History of the Chinese in America), 黎明文化事业, Taipei, 1976 / 1981 — association cemeteries, bone gathering, iron boxes, name/native-place/number marking.
• 李宁玉, 《枫骨中华魂：纪念百年前修建加拿大铁路的中国人》, 云南人民出版社, 2000 — the ~US$15 box / ~US$20 passage pairing; the railway-death account.
• 谭金花, 《落叶归根，魂归故里——海外华侨骸骨原籍安葬 (1850–1949)》, 香港商务印书馆, 2020 — the repatriation monograph.
• 叶汉明, 《东华义庄与寰球慈善网络：档案文献资料的印证与启示》, 三联书店(香港), 2009 — the depot’s archive and charity network.
• 东华三院档案及历史文化办公室编, 《落叶归根——东华三院华侨原籍安葬档案选编》 (2 vols.), 中华书局(香港), 2020 — the 1929–1936 letter corpus.
• Elizabeth Sinn (冼玉仪), Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press, 2013 — “freightization of the dead”.
• Sue Fawn Chung & Priscilla Wegars (eds.), Chinese American Death Rituals: Respecting the Ancestors, AltaMira Press, 2005 — death ritual and the reverse-flow chapter.

Archives and archival institutions

• City University of Hong Kong, 东华三院文物馆 virtual exhibition — the ten Guangdong receiving halls; the 黄江夏堂 name-lists; the 1948 Taishan letter; the 1936 华字日报 notice: cah.cityu.edu.hk
• Oregon State University Special Collections, Oregon Chinese Disinterment Documents: scarc.library.oregonstate.edu
• Tung Wah Group of Hospitals archives and heritage pages: rho.tungwah.org.hk
• Hong Kong Memory, 东华与海外华人的归葬服务: hkmemory.hk

Newspapers and newspaper archives

• Daily Colonist (Victoria, BC), 14 October 1961 — 849 bones; mass grave; the 1946 refusal: archive.org
• 华字日报, 22 May 1936 — notice routing bones via the Tung Wah hospital.
• 南方日报, 6 August 2014 — the depot, the 6–8-month transit, the ~100,000 estimate: news.sina.com.cn
• 江门日报 (傅健), 2015 — the Wuyi receiving halls and the $5+$10+$7 itemisation: chinaqw.com
• 傅健, 把无形的丰碑建成有形的丰碑, 国务院侨务办公室, 2015: gqb.gov.cn
• Guangdong Museum of Art exhibition text, 2011 — the $15 box / $20 return passage: gdmoa.org
• City of Parramatta heritage research — the mid-1930s decline, citing Williams (1999): historyandheritage.cityofparramatta.nsw.gov.au
• Asian American Writers’ Workshop, “Immigration of the Dead”, 2017 — the 1987 case: aaww.org
• Old Cemeteries Society of Victoria — Harling Point and the thirteen mass graves: oldcem.bc.ca

Government records

• 《关于华侨、港澳台同胞遗体（骸骨、骨灰）入粤安葬管理有关规定的通知》, 粤民福[2005]45号, 7 November 2005: smzt.gd.gov.cn
• 江门市人大常委会, 《江门华侨义冢调查报告》, 2014 — nine grave sites; the 1,508-plot maximum.
• 江门市新会区人民政府, 提案答复函 第2022092号, 2022 — about 2,000 surviving plots.
• 广东省人民政府侨务办公室 — 石化山华侨义坟碑: qb.gd.gov.cn

Academic articles and theses

• 傅健, 《侨胞骸骨安葬问题研究》 and 《华侨年老还乡与拾骨重捡的历史记忆》(2015): blog.sciencenet.cn
• Yasong Zhou, The Global Burial Network of the Early Generation of Chinese Migrant Laborers, MSc thesis, Columbia University, 2020.
• CUHK 民间历史档案库, 《阿公旅美一百年》 — the soul-calling box; the 馮橋 case: libguides.lib.cuhk.edu.hk
• 叶汉明, 从东华义庄看顾香港与全球华人慈善网络, ECNU lecture abstract, 2013.

Continue Reading

• What Wuyi Workers Built: A Labor Migration Atlas
• The Coolie Trade and Early Migration Patterns (1840–1874)
• Chinese in Canada Before the Head Tax: BC Gold Rush, Victoria, and the Road to 1885
• The Women Who Built Gold Mountain: Jinshanpo Wives and the Hidden Architecture of Qiaoxiang

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