The Name That Was a Kingdom
In the eleventh century before the Common Era, a man named Man Gong (曼公) knelt before the Shang king and received a fiefdom in the fertile Nanyang basin of present-day Henan province. The territory was called Deng (邓). For nearly four centuries, the State of Deng (邓国) navigated the…
Cao Surname Wuyi Diaspora: Three Thousand Years from Zhou Dynasty State to Gold Mountain
In the eleventh century before the Common Era, King Wu of Zhou (周武王) conquered the Shang dynasty and divided his new realm among his brothers and loyal generals. One of those brothers was named Zhenduo (振铎). The king gave him a…
Between 1840 and 1949, the Wuyi region sent over two million people overseas — and for a century, the only thread connecting them to home was paper. The qiaopi (侨批, qiáopī) — remittance letter — doubled as financial transaction and intimate family document: a few silver dollars folded inside a few sentences. Money and love…
In the spring of 1885, a Hakka woman of the Yuan clan (源氏, Yuán Shì) stood at the edge of Xiaoxiang Village (霄乡村) and watched her eldest son walk toward the Xijiang River (西江). He was sixteen. He carried a cloth bundle containing three changes of clothing, a small pouch of ground tea leaves (擂茶,…
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 laundry in San Francisco by a man — call him Zhang — who left his village in 1902. He never saw the tower finished. He…