The Wuyi counties reached their opera by water. Not as a touring amusement that stopped at a market town, but as a piece of the ritual calendar's machinery — something a lineage and a temple were expected to raise, as they were expected to build a hall or repair a bridge. Cantonese opera (粤剧, Yuèjù),…
The duty: why a grave in America was a failure
The Wuyi emigration story is usually told as an outward story, with the money running back the other way: men left for 金山 (Jīnshān, "Gold Mountain" — North America), and what they sent home built the houses. There was a third flow, and it moved…
Money in the Qiaoxiang: WeChat Pay, Alipay and Cash for Returning Diaspora
The Rail That Never Stopped
In the qiaoxiang (侨乡, qiáoxiāng) — the home counties the emigrants left behind — money in China has never moved as a bare transaction. Sending it home has been a relationship with a delivery date.
Before any bank…
The Xiao (萧/肖) Surname: One Name, Two Characters, Many Spellings
The Chinese surname Xiao is registered under two characters — Xiao (萧, Xiāo), the older form, and Xiao (肖, Xiào, also read Xiāo as a surname), the substitute the mainland registers carry — and the difference is neither ancient nor genealogical: it is the residue…
For more than a century, the west bank of the Pearl River estuary was the shore people left. From Taishan (台山, Táishān) and Kaiping (开平, Kāipíng), emigrants sailed out of small river ports bound for North America, Australia and the Nanyang, and the money they sent home came back as the fortified diaolou towers that…
The Tang (汤) Surname: From the Shang Dynasty's Founding King to a 900-Year Wuyi Lineage
A Surname from the Founding of a Dynasty (Tang, Tāng)
The Tang (汤, Tāng) surname takes its character from Cheng Tang (成汤, Chéng Tāng), the king who founded the Shang dynasty (商朝, Shāng cháo) around 1600 BCE. Surname tradition derives…
Taishanese Phrases: 30 Things to Say to Your Wuyi Relatives
Why These Taishanese Phrases Aren't Pinyin
For roughly a century, Taishanese (台山话, Táishān huà — the diaspora spells it Hoisan or Toisan) was the working language of North American Chinatown: not Mandarin, and not the Cantonese of the phrasebooks. It was the speech of laundries…
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…
Vancouver Taishan Remittance: How Qiaopi Letters Crossed the Pacific
For a quarter-century around the turn of the twentieth century, the busiest thing crossing the Pacific between British Columbia and Guangdong was not a steamship or a passenger — it was a letter with money folded inside. Between 1895 and 1915, thousands of Taishanese men working…
The Peng (彭) Surname: A Top-31 Name, Scattered Thin at the Edge of the Wuyi Diaspora
The Peng surname (彭, Péng) ranks about thirty-first among China's surnames, with roughly 6.9 million bearers — about 0.49 percent of the Han population — according to the cited surname study, Wu Jianhua's Peng Surname History (Peng Xing Shihua),…