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Tag: Kaiping

The Chen Surname Wuyi Diaspora: From Yingchuan to the Seven Sons

Water Has Ten Thousand Branches but One Source 56| In 1225 on a hillside in northern Guangdong, one man gathered his family and made a pact. His name was 陈辉 (Chén Huī), honorifically called 凤台公 (Fèngtái Gōng, Honorable Fengtai). He was a Song-dynasty jinshi (进士), the highest imperial examination degree, who served as Imperial…

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Historic Kaiping diaolou watchtower in Zili Village, a UNESCO World Heritage site built by returning overseas Chinese in the early 20th century

Plan Your Wuyi Roots Trip: Visas, Routes, and Getting There

Plan Your Wuyi Roots Trip: Visas, Routes, and Getting There The Five Counties (五邑, Wǔyì) of Wuyi — Taishan (台山), Kaiping (开平), Xinhui (新会), Enping (恩平), and Heshan (鹤山) — sent over two million people overseas between 1840 and 1940, creating one of the largest sustained migrations in modern history. Today, an estimated 1.3 million…

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The Guan Clan’s 700-Year Odyssey: From Northern Fortresses to Southern Shores

Which Generation Are You? For the Guan clan (关氏, Guān shì), the answer lies in a 32-character generation poem (字辈诗, zìbèi shī) — a naming system carried across the Pacific, preserved across seven centuries, and shared by every branch of the family from San Francisco to Singapore to Sydney. Unlike a family tree, the poem…

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Contemporary Huang clan members participating in ancestral veneration ceremonies at a restored ancestral hall in Taishan, part of the ongoing roots-searching tourism movement reconnecting diaspora descendants with their villages of origin

The Huang Surname: Four Thousand Years from Ancient Kingdom to America’s Largest Chinese Clan

For four thousand years, the character 黄 (Huáng) has traveled across the Chinese-speaking world — carved into ancestral tablets in Henan, inked onto qiaopi letters bound for Gold Mountain (金山, Jīnshān), engraved on association plaques in San Francisco, and typed into DNA test profiles by descendants who have never spoken a word of Taishanese. The…

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Lee Surname Wuyi Diaspora: A Thousand Years from Longxi to Gold Mountain

{{FIG:fig_01}} 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,…

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