One hundred million people alive today carry the surname 李 (Lǐ). If they were a nation, they would be the fourteenth largest on Earth — more populous than Egypt, Vietnam, or Germany. The character appears on mailboxes from San Francisco to Singapore, on tombstones in the goldfields of Ballarat, on business cards in Vancouver, on DNA test results from descendants who have never set foot in China but know — somehow — that this single character means something.
But a surname is not a census statistic. It is a held breath across three thousand years. The character 李 means “plum tree” — a tree whose fruit sustained the first Lee ancestor, a boy named 利贞 (Lì Zhēn), when he fled persecution with his mother and survived on wild plums. The fruit that saved a child became the name carried by a hundred million descendants.
If you are a Lee, you are part of the largest family on Earth. But which Lee are you? What does the name carry from the Yellow River valley to the rocky hills of Taishan to the country where you now live? And what does it ask of you?
This is not a history of the Lee surname. It is a story about what a single clan — born on the banks of the Yellow River, forged in the granite soil of Wuyi, scattered across the Pacific — reveals about belonging, about survival, and about what we inherit when we inherit a name. Like the Guan clan’s own odyssey through the Wuyi diaspora, the Lee story is one of persistence against impossible odds.
Origins: The Plum Tree and the Long River
The story begins, as all Lee origin stories do, with a boy beneath a plum tree.
In the dying years of the Shang dynasty, an upright minister named 理徵 (Lǐ Zhēng) was executed for speaking truth to the tyrant King Zhou. His pregnant wife fled. According to the official genealogy preserved by the Taishan government, the son she bore in exile — 利贞 — survived by eating wild plums (李子, lǐzi). In gratitude, he changed the family surname from 理 (reason, principle) to 李 (plum). The fruit that saved a life became the name of a hundred million descendants. It is a foundation myth, and like all foundation myths, its truth is not in the fact but in the meaning: the Lee surname was born in survival.
From 利贞 the lineage flows through twelve centuries to 李耳 (Lǐ Ěr) — Laozi, the Old Master, author of the Dao De Jing (《道德经》), the foundational text of Daoism. Laozi is the genealogical pivot: before him, the Lee lineage is legend; after him, it becomes at least partially traceable. His descendant 李宗 (Lǐ Zōng) moved west to 陇西 (Lǒngxī), in present-day Gansu Province, establishing the 陇西堂 (Lǒngxī Táng) — Longxi Hall, the clan hall designation that every Lee ancestral hall around the world displays to this day. Walk into any Lee clan building from San Francisco to Singapore, and you will see the same couplet: “陇西世泽，柱史家声” — “Benefiting from Longxi’s heritage, renowned as the house of the imperial historian.”
Many Lee clan halls also display claims of descent from the Tang imperial family — the Li emperors who ruled China from 618 to 907. But here the careful reader must pause. According to the genealogical research of Li Tingfang, published in his 2016 study An Examination of Guangdong Lee Ancestors (《广东李氏先祖考》), these Tang imperial claims are a fabrication — a form of genealogical prestige adopted over centuries. The cultural identity function is real; the genealogical claim is not. Understanding which is which becomes, in itself, a form of inheritance.
The Wuyi story — the story that matters most for the diaspora — begins not in Longxi but in the Song dynasty. In the eleventh century, an imperial censor named 李联 (Lǐ Lián, 1036–1103) accompanied a Song army into Guangdong and died in 溽阳, in what is now Taishan. His tomb — 李松年墓 — still stands in 广海镇甫草迳. Granite, weathered, roughly one hundred square meters, rebuilt in 1892. The stele reads: “Tomb of Li Lian, styled Songnian, Censor of the Lingnan Surveillance Commission in the Song Dynasty.” Physical stone. If you go to Taishan, you can touch it.
Li Lian’s grandson was 李栋 (Lǐ Dòng), styled 任堂 (Rèntáng). Rentang served as magistrate of 天台县 and became the founding ancestor of all Wuyi Lee branches — the figure from whom every Taishan, Kaiping, and Xinhui Lee in the world descends.
And then comes the moment that structured everything that followed. Rentang had three sons. Their settlement pattern organized Lee migration geography for eight hundred years:
- 李侃 (Lǐ Kǎn), the eldest, settled in Xinhui Yunbu
- 李侚 (Lǐ Xún), the second, in Kaiping
- 李佁 (Lǐ Yì), the third, in Taishan
This tripartite structure — 侃, 侚, 佁 — is the genealogical scaffold for all Wuyi Lee diaspora history. Every Lee emigrant who crossed the Pacific in the nineteenth century, every paper son who memorized a false family tree for Angel Island, every Gold Mountain wife who opened a remittance letter in a Wuyi village — each one traces back to one of these three brothers.
Today, Taishan alone has four hundred and fifty-six Lee-surname villages, with over one hundred thousand Lee residents — a concentration detailed in our guide to Taishan villages. The local saying captures it: “出城李，入城黄” — “Lees going out of town, Huangs coming in.” The Lees held Taicheng’s historical core so thoroughly that the proverb became local shorthand.
For seven hundred years after Rentang, the Lees of Wuyi farmed rocky soil, built ancestral halls, and recorded their lineages in clan genealogies. Then the Opium War came, and everything changed.
The Crossing: Gold Mountain Calls
The First Opium War of 1839 to 1842 was the watershed. Before it, Lee-surname maritime trade was small-scale — a few merchants, a handful of sailors. After it, the Qing state’s gradual shift from prohibiting to tolerating emigration, combined with the chaos of the Taiping Rebellion that engulfed southern China from 1850, created the conditions for mass labor migration.
Wuyi’s soil could not sustain its population. Gold was discovered in California in 1848, in Australia in 1851. The credit-ticket system — 赊单制 (shēdān zhì) — emerged: passage advanced against future earnings, a debt that could take years to repay. Young men from Wuyi villages, overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly from lineages like the Lees, became 赊单华工 (shēdān huágōng) — credit-ticket laborers — bound for the place they called 旧金山 (Jiùjīnshān), Old Gold Mountain: San Francisco.
Among them was a man from Taishan whose name still appears in a clan genealogy preserved in his home village. His name was 李天沛 (Lǐ Tiānpèi), from 水楼村 (Shuǐlóu Cūn) in Taishan’s 大江镇. His name is recorded in the Li Wenzhuang Family Genealogy (《李文庄公家乘》), generations twenty-four through twenty-six.
Li Tianpei was not a laborer. He was a labor contractor — perhaps the most significant Lee-surname figure in the story of Chinese railroad labor. With his fellow clansmen 李祐芹, 李天宽, and 李奕德, he formed 联昌公司 (Liánchāng Gōngsī), the Lianchang Company, with offices in Victoria, British Columbia, and Hong Kong.
Between 1880 and 1885, Li Tianpei’s network recruited approximately ten thousand Wuyi laborers for the Canadian Pacific Railway. He subcontracted to 叶春田, who recruited seven thousand more. Total Chinese laborers on the CPR: roughly seventeen thousand. Deaths: at least seventeen hundred. On the four-hundred-kilometer Revelstoke-to-Vancouver section alone, approximately four thousand Chinese laborers perished — in Fraser Canyon avalanches, in dynamite accidents, from exposure and malnutrition.
Li Tianpei was not a victim. He was an organizer, an entrepreneur, a clan mobilizer. His story challenges the passive-laborer stereotype that has long defined Chinese railroad history. But the men he recruited died by the thousands, and the tension is real: the same clan infrastructure that sustained Lee families also profited from their labor. History rarely gives us clean heroes.
Lee migration operated through agnatic kinship — bloodlines through the father — a pattern shared across Wuyi diaspora clans. Established emigrants sponsored paternal uncles’ sons, brothers, cousins. One Lee brother pulled the next; one village fed one Chinatown. By the 1880s, Lee-surname emigrants from Taishan’s 水楼村 could expect to find a clansman waiting at the Victoria docks. The early Victoria Lee pioneers — 李祥, the first Chinese person recorded in Victoria in 1858, who opened the 广利店 trading company; the brothers 李奕德, 李奕卫, 李福基 — established the beachheads. Chinese passenger manifests from the period show columns of the character 李, row after row — brothers and cousins listed together, a village moving itself across the ocean, one agnatic link at a time.
But in 1882, the door slammed shut.
The Paper Son Years: Identity as Survival Strategy
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned Chinese labor immigration to the United States. It would remain in force — through extensions and amendments — for sixty-one years. Lee families, like all Wuyi families, faced an impossible choice: accept permanent separation, or find a way through.
The way through was the paper son (纸面儿子, zhǐmiàn érzi) system. Chinese Americans who could claim United States citizenship — often by taking advantage of birth records destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake — claimed fictitious births in China, creating immigration slots. These slots were sold to village relatives or same-clan strangers. This was not individual fraud; it was clan infrastructure. Lee clan associations, particularly the San Francisco 李氏敦宗总公所 (Lǐ Shì Dūnzōng Zǒnggōngsuǒ — the Lee Family Association headquarters), organized the entire system: maintaining contacts with migration brokers in Hong Kong, coordinating coaching schools in Wuyi villages, and providing legal defense for detainees.
Imagine a young Lee man — call him by the placeholder all such men carry in incomplete records, 李某某 — from 温边村 (Wēnbiān Cūn), a village under the 佁公 third branch in Taishan. The same village that produced the Li Boda yinxin collection. In a coaching school, he memorizes the 口供纸 (kǒugòngzhǐ) — oral confession papers — an elaborate document containing his fictitious family tree, a hand-drawn map of his supposed home village, the layout of his family house, the names of his neighbors, the location of the village well, the distance to the market.
Every detail must match the “paper father’s” testimony at Angel Island. One wrong answer means deportation — shipped back to a village he can no longer claim. The coaching sessions are grueling: mock interrogations, endless drills, the constant threat that United States immigration inspectors have grown sophisticated at detecting fraud. These coaching schools operated throughout Taishan Lee villages, often run by returned emigrants or clan association members who had themselves successfully passed through Angel Island. The psychological cost was profound. Paper sons lived with false identities for the rest of their lives. According to immigration historians, some never told their own children their real names.
April 18, 1906. San Francisco burns. Among the destroyed records: municipal birth certificates.
For the Lee clan, this was an existential opportunity. In the documentary vacuum, thousands of Chinese — including many Lees — claimed United States citizenship, thereby gaining the right to bring in “sons.” The paper son system scaled from isolated cases to an industrial operation. Lee clan associations organized the systematic exploitation of this opportunity — not as criminals, but as clan strategists navigating a law designed to exclude them. The Exclusion Act was unjust. The response was ingenious. But the moral complexity is irreducible, and the human cost — decades of living under a false name — was carried silently.
While Lee men navigated Angel Island and built lives in Gold Mountain, Lee women in Wuyi villages managed an entirely different world — a world of remittance letters, household construction, and decades of solitude.
The Women Who Stayed
The Lee family strategy was the split household. Husband overseas for twenty, thirty, sometimes forty years, sending remittances; wife in the Wuyi village managing the household, raising children, tending to in-laws. This was not an accident of migration. It was a deliberate economic strategy. The wife’s labor — domestic, agricultural, reproductive — subsidized the husband’s overseas wages. Her management of remittances determined whether the family prospered or collapsed. She was called a 金山婆 (jīnshānpó) — a Gold Mountain wife — a term that could carry envy or pity, depending on whether the remittances arrived. These were the women who carried Taishan’s history on their shoulders while their husbands labored overseas. Some women called their condition 守活寡 (shǒu huó guǎ) — “living widowhood” — married to a man who was alive but absent.
The best-documented Lee Gold Mountain wife is the matriarch of the Li Boda family from 温边村, under the 佁公 branch. Her husband, 李云宏 (Lǐ Yúnhóng), went to Cuba. The earliest surviving family letter dates from 1879, sent by 李俊衍 from San Francisco. The first overseas remittance letter is dated November 2, 1925: 李维亮 in Cuba sent money to his father 李云宏 in Taishan. In 1933, 李云宏 sent thirty Hong Kong dollars home — intercepted by 万兴宝号雷维英 in Taicheng, a reminder of the risks and intermediaries in the remittance chain. In 1941, an overseas Lee named 进墣 sent three hundred Hong Kong dollars to his wife, allocating it across six relatives, including birthday money for elders — revealing in granular detail how a Lee family economy functioned across oceans.
These 银信 (yínxìn) — remittance letters, literally “silver-letters” — were the emotional and economic lifeline. Also called 侨批 (qiáopī), the system that carried them has been recognized as a UNESCO Memory of the World. A Lee woman opening an yinxin envelope: six weeks from Cuba, a few silver dollars, a few sentences. “Still working. Still alive. Tell mother I remember her.”
Some letters never came.
When the Great Depression hit, between 1929 and 1939, remittance flows collapsed. Lee women who had managed households for decades on overseas money were suddenly cut off. According to yinxin scholars, some families lost everything — land, homes, the diaolou towers that had been their pride. The fragility beneath the system was absolute.
But Lee Gold Mountain wives did not simply receive remittances — they deployed them. In villages like 温边村 and 水楼村 and across the Taishan countryside, Lee women supervised the construction of 碉楼 (diāolóu) — fortified towers that were both defensive structures and conspicuous expressions of overseas success. The 三益碉楼 (Sānyì Diāolóu) in 四九镇五四儒笏村, later restored by Li Boda into the 三益银信博物馆, stands as physical testament to this reality: a building funded by remittances, designed by Lee clan ambition, managed by Lee women during construction.
These towers dot the Kaiping and Taishan countryside — recognized as UNESCO World Heritage since 2007 — and they are, fundamentally, monuments to the women who built them in absentia.
Clan as Survival Technology
The split household could not have functioned without the third pillar of Lee diaspora life: the clan association. 宗亲会 (zōngqīnhuì), clan associations, were not social clubs. They were the closest thing to a government that overseas Lee communities had.
The San Francisco 李氏敦宗总公所, the 海外李氏宗亲总会 (founded 1982, now headquartered in San Francisco), and more than twenty-five Lee organizations across the United States provided: loans for businesses. Legal defense against deportation. Migration brokers to navigate the paper son system. Cemeteries for the dead — because Chinese were barred from white cemeteries in many jurisdictions. Political advocacy — fighting discriminatory legislation, funding Sun Yat-sen’s revolution, organizing anti-Japanese war fundraising during the 1930s and 1940s.
The Lee clan’s most distinctive institution was 祠校一体 (cí-xiào yītǐ) — the ancestral hall–school integration. In 1922, Lee community leaders founded 敬修学校 (Jìngxiū Xuéxiào), Jingxiu School, in the 任堂祖祠 in Taicheng. In 1928, it moved to the newly built 李氏大宗祠 (Lǐ Shì Dà Zōngcí) — the Lee Great Ancestral Hall — on 草蓢街. Two stories, Western-Chinese fusion architecture, with the Longxi Hall (陇西堂) plaque in the main hall upstairs, Laozi’s statue, and tablets for the founding ancestors.
The school’s motto, drawn from its founding song: “敬德修业为其首” — “Revering virtue and cultivating achievement above all.” The clan also established a monthly publication — 《敬修月报》 (Jìngxiū Yuèbào), Jingxiu Monthly — in 1928, distributed free to Lee communities worldwide. Still in publication today under editor-in-chief 李荣熙, it stands as one of the longest-running clan periodicals in the Chinese diaspora.
Parallel institutions multiplied. The 日新学校 (Rixin School, founded 1924), 佑新学校, and 培新学校 were built to commemorate ancestor 李章华 by three Lee branches in 板岗, 东坑, and 筋坑 — funded by 李星衢, 李煜堂, 李文启, and Hong Kong Lee clansmen at a cost of one hundred and thirty thousand silver yuan. The flagship 章华楼, a Western-style building with arches and a bell tower, was a statement in brick: Lee clan ambition made visible.
Hong Kong was the fulcrum of Lee transpacific life. 金山庄 (jīnshānzhuāng) — Gold Mountain Firms — based in Hong Kong served as remittance clearing houses, routing money from San Francisco and Sydney to Taishan villages. 李石朋 (Lǐ Shípéng), a Taishan Lee, built a banking dynasty there. 李星衢 (1879–1955), from 台城板岗昌和村, founded 康年银行 and became a Justice of the Peace (太平绅士), organizing anti-Japanese war relief and — critically — fundraising a rice shipment during the 1943 Taishan famine. His son 李伯荣 (Lǐ Bóróng, born 1933) would become the Lee clan’s greatest philanthropist, donating over two billion Hong Kong dollars to Taishan causes: schools, hospitals, ancestral halls. The arc from remittance agent to banking dynasty to philanthropy is the Lee clan’s Hong Kong story.
But the sojourner identity — the belief that overseas life was temporary, that one would return to Wuyi to die — could not survive the twentieth century.
Sojourners to Settlers
World War II was the transformation point. Lee soldiers — including fifteen Taishan Lee revolutionary martyrs documented in the 1994 Taishan Revolutionary Martyrs roster: 李荣熙, 李志民, 李炳辉, 李立, 李来就, 李长松 (one of the few named women), and others — fought and died in anti-Japanese campaigns. 李艺空, a United States overseas Chinese volunteer pilot, returned to fight Japan and was killed. Military service meant citizenship. The repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, followed by the War Brides Act of 1945, meant family reunification — for the first time in six decades, Lee families could legally come together on American soil.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 ended national-origin quotas. A new Lee migration began: family-based, gender-balanced, increasingly professional. Lee families that had been separated for decades — by Exclusion, by war, by poverty — reunited. The split household gave way to nuclear family migration. Lee Americans moved from Chinatowns to suburbs. Lee professionals — doctors, engineers, academics — entered a different America than the railroad laborers and laundrymen of the previous century. The arrow of migration did not land; it simply changed direction.
And then began the return.
The 海外李氏宗亲总会 (Overseas Lee Clan General Association) holds triennial world conferences. The ninth, in Taishan in 2005, drew approximately three hundred attendees — mainly North American Taishan Lees. In 2025, more than one hundred and fifty delegates visited Zhongshan and Taishan for Jingxiu School’s 101st anniversary. The World Lee Clan General Association’s 2017 conference in Shishi, Fujian, drew more than twenty-six hundred attendees from across the globe.
On the individual level, Lee descendants search. The generational naming poems — 班派 (bānpài) or 字辈诗 (zìbèishī) — documented on the official Taishan government website are a practical tool for tracing Chinese genealogy. Take the 佁公 branch poem: “高第开基，广衍云礽，伟烈始兴，树绩文章，家国宏猷.” Match your grandfather’s generation character, and you can identify your Rentang sub-branch. The seven-volume Taishan Lee Clan Genealogy (《台山李氏族谱》), housed at the 李氏大宗祠 — thirty-six jin in weight, forty-two centimeters tall — awaits researchers.
And then there is 李柏达 (Lǐ Bódá) himself. Taishan yinxin scholar. President of the Taishan Yinxin Culture Research Association (台山市银信文化研究会). Restorer of the 三益碉楼 into a museum. Donor of his family’s eighty-plus yinxin letters and over two thousand additional documents to the Taishan government. Publisher of Cuba Overseas Chinese Silver Letters: The Li Yunhong Clan Family Letters (《古巴华侨银信：李云宏宗族家书》, 2015) and World Memory Heritage: Taishan Yinxin Archives and Research (《世界记忆遗产：台山银信档案及研究》, 2017). In 2023, he was named a “Good Person of Guangdong” (广东好人).
Li Boda embodies the return arc: a descendant who turned family documents into public heritage, who transformed a crumbling diaolou into a museum, who made his great-great-grandfather’s 1879 letter from San Francisco speak to the present. He is one man, one family, one village. But his work is a mirror for every Lee descendant searching.
Which Lee Are You?
One hundred million Lees. One founding ancestor — Rentang — in Song-dynasty Taishan. Three sons. Three branches — 侃 (Xinhui), 侚 (Kaiping), 佁 (Taishan). Four hundred and fifty-six villages in Taishan alone. Railroad laborers in the Fraser Canyon who did not come home. Paper sons at Angel Island who lived their entire adult lives under borrowed names. Gold Mountain wives in Wuyi villages opening yinxin envelopes with fingers worn rough from managing everything alone. Clan association leaders in San Francisco funding a school that still teaches today. A descendant in Sydney searching a generational poem for her grandfather’s generation character.
If your surname is Lee and your family came from Wuyi, your story runs through one of those three branches. Like the Zhang surname diaspora who share the same Wuyi soil, your ancestor may have crossed on a credit ticket in 1880, or entered as a paper son in 1922, or arrived as a professional after 1965. Your great-grandmother may have managed a household in 温边村 on remittances from Cuba. Your grandfather’s generation character may appear in one of the poems preserved on the Taishan government website, waiting to be matched.
The name 李 — plum tree — was born when a child survived on wild fruit. It traveled from the Yellow River to Longxi to Wuyi to San Francisco to every continent where Lees now live. The story is not finished. The arrow is still in flight.
If you want to know which Lee you are, here is where to begin:
- Identify your branch: Check your family’s generational naming poem against the five branch poems documented in the Taishan government’s Lee surname archive — the 侃, 侚 (three sub-branches), and 佁 poems each follow distinct character sequences.
- Locate your ancestral village: Cross-reference known family migration stories with the forty-plus Lee villages catalogued across Taishan, Kaiping, and Xinhui. Use our guide to finding your ancestral village and then plan your roots trip when you’re ready. If your family came through Victoria or Vancouver, investigate the 水楼村 connection through the Li Wenzhuang Family Genealogy.
- Explore Lee genealogy: Contact the 海外李氏宗亲总会, headquartered in San Francisco, or consult the Taishan Lee Clan Genealogy housed at the 李氏大宗祠 on 草蓢街 in Taicheng.
- See Lee family letters: Visit the 三益银信博物馆 in 四九镇, restored by 李柏达 — a physical place where the paper trail of Lee diaspora life is held, preserved, and open.
- Stay connected: Subscribe to 《敬修月报》, the Lee clan publication founded in 1928 and still in print — one of the longest continuously operating clan periodicals in the Chinese diaspora.
The plum tree still bears fruit.
Sources
- Taishan Municipal People’s Government. “李氏起源及台山李氏族谱” (Lee Surname Origin and Taishan Lee Clan Genealogy). cnts.gov.cn, 2017.
- Li Tingfang (李挺芳). An Examination of Guangdong Lee Ancestors (《广东李氏先祖考》). Jinan University Press (暨南大学出版社), 2016.
- Mei Weiqiang, Zhang Guoxiong (梅伟强、张国雄). History of Wuyi Overseas Chinese (《五邑华侨华人史》). Guangdong Higher Education Press (广东高等教育出版社), 2001.
- Liu Jin (刘进). Yinxin and Wuyi Qiaoxiang Society (《银信与五邑侨乡社会》). Guangdong People’s Publishing House (广东人民出版社), 2011.
- Yuan Ding (袁丁). Transnational Migration and Modern Guangdong Qiaoxiang (《跨国移民与近代广东侨乡》). Zhonghua Book Company (中华书局), 2014.
- Madeline Y. Hsu. Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882–1943. Stanford University Press, 2000.
- Li Boda (李柏达). Cuba Overseas Chinese Silver Letters: The Li Yunhong Clan Family Letters (《古巴华侨银信：李云宏宗族家书》). 2015.
- Taishan Television. “祠堂根深 — 台山李氏大宗祠” (Deep Roots: Taishan Lee Clan Ancestral Hall). cnts.gov.cn, 2017.
- UNESCO. “Qiaopi and Yinxin Correspondence and Remittance Documents from Overseas Chinese.” Memory of the World Register, 2013.
- The Paper (澎湃新闻). “台山银信：构筑侨乡连通世界的金融网络” (Taishan Yinxin: Building Qiaoxiang’s Global Financial Network). 2021.
- Tan Guoqu (谭国渠). “台山侨情拾趣” (Gleanings from Taishan Qiaoxiang). Tencent News, 2019.
- Li Wenzhuang Family Genealogy (《李文庄公家乘》). Compiled by Li Tianpei, 1880s. Housed at Taishan Lee Clan Archives.
