Chinese Railroad Workers: The Wuyi Villages That Built the Transcontinental
Between 1865 and 1869, approximately 12,000 Chinese workers laid the track that connected America from coast to coast. More than eighty percent came from a cluster of four counties in Guangdong province — an area smaller than Connecticut. Their wages built diaolou towers, their letters…
Migration History
Between 1840 and 1949, the Wuyi region sent over two million people overseas — and for a century, the only thread connecting them to home was paper. The qiaopi (侨批, qiáopī) — remittance letter — doubled as financial transaction and intimate family document: a few silver dollars folded inside a few sentences. Money and love…
Liu (刘) Surname: From Han Dynasty to Wuyi Diaspora
The Emperor's Lineage
The Liu surname — 刘 (Liú) — is carried by more than 80 million people worldwide, making it the fourth most common Chinese surname. But numbers alone do not capture what the Liu name represents. This is the surname of emperors: Liu Bang,…
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…