Every emigrant region is eventually described by the people who left it. The Wuyi counties of Guangdong (五邑, Wǔyì) — the five-county qiaoxiang (侨乡, qiáoxiāng, the emigrant homeland) Jiangmen administers — have spent most of the past century being explained from outside: in remittance letters, in lineage books, in museum cases. In 2026 the direction…
Cities of Wuyi
Explore the cities within the Wuyi region, such as Jiangmen, Taishan, Kaiping, Enping, and Xinhui. This category highlights the unique characteristics, historical landmarks, and cultural significance of each city within the Wuyi area of Guangdong Province.
The Wuyi counties reached their opera by water. Not as a touring amusement that stopped at a market town, but as a piece of the ritual calendar's machinery — something a lineage and a temple were expected to raise, as they were expected to build a hall or repair a bridge. Cantonese opera (粤剧, Yuèjù),…
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…
The Wuyi (五邑, Wǔyì) qiaoxiang (侨乡, qiáoxiāng) — the emigrant homeland of the five counties of western Guangdong — is famous for the people it sent out. It should be equally famous for the people it took back in. The same counties that produced the sojourners, the remittance letters and the women who waited at…
Jiangmen — the prefecture in the western Pearl River delta that brands itself 中国侨都 (Zhōngguó Qiáodū, China's "overseas-Chinese capital") — did not grow a single coffee bean when its coffee industry began. What it had instead was a diaspora. For more than a century the people of the five Wuyi counties — Taishan, Kaiping, Xinhui,…
For about a century, the coast of Taishan (台山, Táishān) in Guangdong's Wuyi (五邑, Wǔyì) counties was a shore people left. Emigrants sailed from its river ports to the Nanyang and North America, and the region earned the name it still carries: a qiaoxiang (侨乡, qiáoxiāng), an emigrant homeland. That shore now produces and ships.…
Most places that lose their people to emigration never build institutions to bring them back. Jiangmen did — and what it built is not a slogan but a paper chain with dates.
A clause in Chapter 8 of the 2019 Greater Bay Area development plan supports building an overseas-Chinese cultural-exchange-and-cooperation important platform (华侨华人文化交流合作重要平台, Huáqiáo Huárén…
For more than a century, the west bank of the Pearl River estuary was the shore people left. From Taishan (台山, Táishān) and Kaiping (开平, Kāipíng), emigrants sailed out of small river ports bound for North America, Australia and the Nanyang, and the money they sent home came back as the fortified diaolou towers that…
For more than a century, Kaiping (开平) was a place people left. Its sons and daughters boarded junks at the Haikoubu departure port, laid the transcontinental railroads, and worked the hand laundries of North America. Their remittances came home as fortified towers — the diaolou that now make the county a UNESCO World Heritage landscape.…
Duanfen, Taishan: The Emigrant Town That Built a School
In the first decade of the twentieth century, when most of the able-bodied men of inland Taishan were already leaving for the Americas, one township put the money they sent home into classrooms before it put it into anything else. The town was Duanfen (端芬镇, Duānfēn…