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Chinese Surnames Surname Archive

The Guo (郭) Surname: From Zhou Dynasty Nobility to the Wuyi Diaspora

The Guo (郭) Surname: From Zhou Dynasty Nobility to the Wuyi Diaspora The Guo (郭) surname carries one of the longest continuously documented lineages in Chinese history — three thousand years from the Zhou dynasty’s founding brothers to the diaspora communities of the Wuyi (四邑) region (trace your own surname origins with our Surname Compass).…
July 28, 20260Comments

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Yunhuan Lou and Qiuanjulu Mansion in Zili Diaolou Village, Tangkou Township, Kaiping — the destination at the end of the last-mile road.
Labor Migration Wuyi Diaspora

Chinese Railroad Workers: The Wuyi Villages That Built the Transcontinental

Chinese Railroad Workers: The Wuyi Villages That Built the Transcontinental Between 1865 and 1869, approximately 12,000 Chinese workers laid the track that connected America from coast to coast. More than eighty percent came from a cluster of four counties in Guangdong province — an area smaller than Connecticut. Their wages built diaolou towers, their letters…
July 23, 20260Comments

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Statue of the Hongwu Emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, founder of the Ming Dynasty — the only Chinese imperial dynasty named for a commoner's surname.
Chinese Surnames Surname Archive

The Zhu (朱) Surname: 2,300 Years from Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism to the Wuyi Diaspora

In 1313, the Mongol Yuan dynasty made a decision that would shape education across East Asia for the next six centuries: it declared one man's commentaries on the Confucian classics the official standard for China's civil service examinations. That man was Zhu Xi (朱熹), a 12th-century philosopher from Fujian whose synthesis of Neo-Confucianism — his…
July 22, 20260Comments

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A historic Taishanese mansion reflecting in a pond at sunset in Zili Village, Kaiping — part of the Kaiping Diaolou and Villages UNESCO World Heritage Site, built with funds sent through the qiaopi remittance system.
diaspora History and Culture Primary Sources

What Is Qiaopi? A Beginner’s Guide to Chinese Remittance Letters

Between 1850 and 1950, millions of Chinese emigrants sent home letters unlike any correspondence in human history. Each one was simultaneously a love letter, a bank transfer, a household budget, and a legal document — all folded into a single piece of paper. These were qiaopi (侨批, qiáopī), the "overseas Chinese correspondence-remittances" that sustained an…
July 22, 20260Comments

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