The Woman at the Pier
In 1934, a fourteen-year-old girl stepped off a coastal steamer at Singapore's Clifford Pier. The humidity wrapped around her like a wet cloth. The…
When the gold ran out, the Siyi miners did not go home. They picked up hoes instead of picks — and transformed Australian agriculture. By 1900, Chinese market gardeners from…
The Surname You Already Hold
Your surname is not merely a name inherited from your ancestors. It is a compass — a pointer to a specific village, a specific migration…
The Women Who Built Gold Mountain: Jinshanpo Wives and the Hidden Architecture of Qiaoxiang
By RootsWeb Newsroom | June 10, 2026
1. A Face in the Dust
The year is…
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…
In the Siyi (四邑) counties of southern Guangdong — Taishan, Xinhui, Kaiping, Enping — there are villages the old people still call 寡妇村 (guǎfù cūn, "widow villages"). Not because the…
The dragon boat cuts across False Creek like a blade through memory.
Drum — a single stroke, then the answering crash of twenty paddles striking water in unison. The dragon head…
A tower stands alone in a rice paddy near a river called Baisha. Its reinforced concrete walls face west — toward America. It was built with money sent from a…
New Gold Mountain: Wuyi Pioneers in Australia 1850-1901
Your ancestors might have talked about going to Gold Mountain (金山 Jīnshān). But which one?
The Old Gold Mountain (旧金山 Jiù Jīnshān)…