The Chinese Labour Corps: The 140,000 Men Who Went to the Western Front and Left No House Behind
The Chinese Labour Corps: a branch of the diaspora the story skips
The overseas-Chinese story most readers carry is southern, mercantile and remittance-shaped: a letter with money folded in it, a tower house, a grave beside the…
Pan-Chinese
Chinese in South Africa: a migration the diaspora story skips
Most histories of the Chinese abroad in the gold-rush age stop at the harbour. They follow the men who reached San Francisco, the diggings of Victoria, the cold gullies of Otago, the sandbars of the Fraser River — the familiar ports and fields of the…
Two exits from one province
Guangdong's emigration ran at least two different machines, and only one left from a coast.
The lane the world knows sailed from the delta edge — Taishan, Kaiping, Xinhui, Enping, Heshan, the counties grouped as the Wuyi — on credit-ticket passages: the Wuyi, Fujian and Chaozhou diaspora routes. The second…
Chinese in Malaysia: the story starts in 1786, at a burial ground
Malaysia's Chinese story does not start where the famous one starts. It starts on Penang island in 1786, when Francis Light raised a free port on a thinly settled coast — thirty-three years before Singapore's. What survives from that first generation is not…
Three Diaspora Routes: Wuyi, Fujian, and Chaozhou Compared
Ask most people how the overseas Chinese left China, and you will get a single answer: they crossed the Pacific to work the goldfields and build the railroads. That is true — but it is only one of the answers, and it is the newest one. Long…
"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…