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…
village-deep-dives
Chonglou, Taishan: A Village and Its Diaspora
Two Chonglous on the Same Map
Chonglou, in Taishan (台山), was never one town — by its own count it has long been two: a town of the staying and a town of the leaving, so evenly split that local people describe the place as 两个冲蒌 (liǎng gè…
Between 1840 and 1940, over two million people left the five counties of the Wuyi (五邑) region in southern Guangdong — one of the largest sustained regional migrations in modern history. Taishan (台山) sent its sons to build the transcontinental railroad and fill San Francisco's Chinatown. Kaiping (开平) raised diaolou towers with Canadian gold and…
nttThe Wuyi (五) region of Guangdong Province sent over two million people overseas between 1840 and 1940 — and every single one of them came from a specific village. Not a city, not a county, but a village. A place with a name, a founding ancestor, a clan genealogy, and a cluster of houses that…