The Xu (徐) Surname: From the State of Xu to the Wuyi Tanka and Overseas Diaspora

Two Surnames, One Pronunciation

Ask where the Xu surname origin lies and the answer runs to a state rather than a dynasty. The Xu surname (徐, Xú) descends, in its own lineage tradition, from the lower Huai river — from the State of Xu (徐国, Xúguó), in the Jiangsu–Anhui border country around today’s Sihong (泗洪, Sìhóng), where the tradition places the enfeoffment of Ruo Mu (若木, Ruò Mù), son of the flood-controlling minister Bo Yi. What can be dated is not that grant but the institution built on it: 以国为氏 (yǐ guó wéi shì), taking one’s state as one’s lineage name. By tradition the state stood through the Xia, Shang and Zhou — forty-four rulers across some fifteen to sixteen centuries. In 512 BCE the State of Wu dammed the Huai’s water and turned it on the Xu capital. The state ended. The name did not.

One clarification first, because in English it costs people years. 徐 (Xú, second tone) is not 许 (Xǔ, third tone). Different lineages, different founding states: 徐 is the Yíng lineage (嬴姓, Yíng xìng) of Sihong; 许 is the Jiāng lineage (姜姓, Jiāng xìng) of Xuchang in Henan. 徐 ranks about eleventh among mainland surnames, with roughly twenty million bearers in the 2019 mainland tables; 许 ranks twenty-sixth. The 许 surname has its own article — the sibling, never the parent — and the same-pinyin surname problem has its precedent.

The arc then runs toward water: into the five Wuyi counties (五邑, Wǔyì), the emigrant homeland profiled on this site, and across the Pacific. In the Wuyi delta this surname became a boat-dweller’s name as much as a landed one, carried by Tanka (疍家, dānjiā) families on the rivers of Kaiping and Taishan. That chapter is why one of China’s most populous surnames can be almost impossible to find in a village register.

A Flood-Minister’s Son and the Name That Came from a River

The chain the surname’s literature recites runs through two classical authorities: the Yuanhe Xingzuan (元和姓纂, Yuánhé Xìngzuǎn) and the Tongzhi · Shizu Lüe (通志·氏族略, Tōngzhì · Shìzú Lüè). In that account Bo Yi (伯益, Bó Yì) helped the minister Yu control the great floods and was granted the surname Yíng by the Emperor Shun; his son Ruo Mu was enfeoffed at Xu; and later generations enshrined Ruo Mu as their founding ancestor — the lineage’s own declaration, a tier of tradition rather than of excavation. The mechanism underneath it, taking the state as one’s lineage name, is the datable claim, and it explains why a surname exists at all on the site of a destroyed polity.

Two things are worth naming. First: Xu belongs to the Huai-Yi horizon (淮夷, Huáiyí), the Yí peoples of the lower Huai, rather than the Shandong-based eastern Yí, though some sources use the broader framing — and its Yíng cluster is a kinship map running from Xu, Tan, Ju, Jiang and Huang to Qin and Zhao.

Second, a sharper disambiguation than the 徐/许 confusion. The Huai valley group-states of Shu, Liu and Ying were not Yíng but Yǎn (偃姓, Yǎn xìng), descended from Gao Yao — and the historian Li Xueqin states the boundary plainly: the two lineages are not to be mixed. That is the strongest independent confirmation of this article’s founding claim, from scholarship rather than the clan. A third origin stream, traced to the Shang-era Xu clan, is also recorded. The Yíng line is the main line, not the only line.

The King Who Would Not Fight

Xu’s moral inheritance is unusually specific. Its most famous ruler, King Yan of Xu (徐偃王, Xú Yǎn Wáng), is remembered for benevolence and rightness (仁义, rényì): a king who would not fight. Anhui’s gazetteer institute and Longyou county’s government both tell it — the king’s virtue drew neighbouring states into his orbit; the Zhou king Mu, alarmed, set his charioteer Zao Fu to attack with Chu; and King Yan, unwilling to make war, lost. Tradition counts the states that attached themselves to him at thirty-six, an image rather than an arithmetic. Two versions of the fall circulate and are never merged: King Mu absent at the Jasper Pool while Xu rises as arbiter of the states — the framing fixed by Han Yu’s (韩愈, Hán Yù) memorial tablet for the King Yan temple at Quzhou — and Chu simply campaigning against Xu.

What the surname kept is a sentence. The deathbed words the provincial institute records are these: I relied on civil virtue and did not understand military preparation, and so came to this. A state that lost is remembered for a king who chose virtue and admitted the cost.

Where he went afterwards stays contested: the Book of the Later Han puts his retreat at Mount Xu in Pizhou, Longyou carries a tradition of a southward flight, and Chengfu in Bozhou is where Chu settled Xu’s last ruler after 512 BCE. Three framings, three places, and this article does not pick one.

What Sihong keeps is the Ancient Xu Pavilion (古徐阁, Gǔ Xú Gé), a national AAA-grade county park: 296 mu of grounds and a seven-storey hall 61.649 metres tall, presenting King Yan and the line of notable Xu with humaneness (仁, rén) at its centre. It commemorates one candidate site; the Xu homeland is a corridor, and a park does not settle which capital held the throne.

512 BCE: The Water That Ended a State

The Zuo Commentary (左传, Zuǒ Zhuàn), in the thirtieth year of Duke Zhao, records it: the Wu ruler attacked Xu, dammed the hill streams and turned them against the capital — and Xu was extinguished. The Wu king was Helü, acting with Wu Zixu and Sun Wu; the trigger was asylum for two of Helü’s rival brothers who had fled to Xu.

The last ruler was Zhangyu, viscount of Xu and, the sources say, King Yan’s eleventh-generation descendant. He cut his hair and brought his wife to beg for the survival of his territory. Refused, he fled to Chu, which settled him at Yi, near today’s Bozhou. Xu lost its name as a state that year.

Here the article must be careful about what a surname is. Later tradition frames that collapse as the birth of a refugee name, and the lineage name did coalesce at the fall, hardening into a surname centuries later in Qin and Han times. But the honest version of that claim is about the record, not about people: no surviving royal stem line is recorded. Twenty million people do not descend from one defeated court.

The archaeology is unusually good. At Jiunüdun in Pizhou, excavations since the 1970s produced what is read as a late Spring-and-Autumn royal tomb cluster of the Xu ruling house: Mound Three (2002) alone yielded 222 objects, including nineteen chime bells (编钟, biānzhōng), reported in Kaogu (2002, no. 5); Mound Two: a 2009 Nanjing Museum brief. An inscription reported as a dedication by a Xu king’s grandson comes from a clan society’s account, not the excavation report, and is not printed here as excavation fact. Nearby Liangwangcheng (梁王城, Liángwángchéng) is read as a late-period Xu centre, appearing twice in the Zuo Commentary.

Candidate capitals are plural and unresolved: Tancheng, Liangwangcheng, Douchong, Bancheng and Sixian. Forty-four rulers by tradition, the span given variously as fifteen hundred, sixteen hundred or sixteen hundred and forty-nine years — reported here as roughly fifteen to sixteen centuries.

Then the water motif changes hands. The commandery-of-origin designations later assigned to Xu — Donghai first, with four others — marked status as much as geography; Donghai sits over the old homeland, which is why Donghai Hall (東海堂, Dōnghǎi táng) became the surname’s dominant hall name, common among many Guangdong Xu lineages but not universal. South the name travelled through Jiangxi and Fujian into the Pearl River delta, where the standard junction in the genealogical record is Zhuji Lane (珠玑巷, Zhūjī Xiàng) in Nanxiong — recorded in the registers as a waypoint, not documented as a route, and read in the light of the Ming–Qing genealogy boom, when delta families retro-traced their origins to the lane; the Justice Ministry’s own heritage page says so. The Zhuji Lane charter memory is a genre as well as a place.

The Rivers of Chikan: Xu Among the Boat People

In the Kaiping gazetteer office’s surname survey, the county’s boat-dwelling population had seven surnames — Xu, Zhou, Wen, Zhang, Huang, Li and Lin — and Xu was the most numerous of the seven. That claim belongs to that office’s account and stays there: one county, one office, one survey. It is not a statement about all Tanka communities, all of Wuyi, or China.

Kaiping’s municipal government describes the county’s boat families as made up mostly of the large Zhou, Xu and Wen surnames; and the Jiangmen city government records that Tanka families of the Wen, Zhou and Xu surnames along the Cangjiang’s Changsha–Lougang reach still dry mud carp (鲮鱼干, língyúgān) by the double-sun technique — entered in February 2021 on the city’s eighth list of municipal intangible cultural heritage. A Xu-bearing Tanka craft is, as of that entry, formally listed heritage.

The lineage text behind the Kaiping account is read here as a lineage text. According to the Xu register the survey cites, the founding hall stood at Pantang in the provincial capital; the first ancestor Zeguang had three sons; the elder branch split away to a village in Xinhui, named in the register and unlocated in any gazetteer or administrative list this article could reach; and the third generation dispersed into Kaiping, Enping, Xinning (today’s Taishan), Yangchun and Yangjiang. Minghai, of that generation, became the first Kaiping ancestor, settling in 1443 on the water at Jiaodi Shahuantang in Chikan.

Two pieces of the record must not be allowed to touch. The Zhuji Lane Xu lineage names its Guangdong entry point as Xu Xin, courtesy name Zejiang — a Northern Song presented scholar of 1051, a friend of Su Dongpo. The Wuyi boat line names its first ancestor Zeguang. Same generation-prefix character, same horizon of entry, and no source states these are the same family.

The places run a chain of three: the 1443 settlement at Jiaodi Shahuantang; the dispersal across the county’s river reaches and beyond; and today’s concentrations at Sanguili village (三圭里村, Sānguīlǐ Cūn) in Chikan and along the Cangjiang reach at Changsha–Lougang. Only Sanguili has press reporting, and it has two independent accounts — a 2017 report on a novelist’s roots visit and a 2023 essay collection — describing it as a village where Xu Tanka families settled and once fished for a living. Xu Jiabin, inheritor of Lougang’s wooden-boat building technique, still builds boats on the Lougang reach. Described as a Xu boat-dweller settlement is the claim, at that scope; no register or population figure was located, and local accounts in Chikan and Kaiping associate the Xu surname closely with the Tanka communities — a local account, not a census.

And here is the synthesis the piece is built on — the explanation the material suggests, not a demonstrated rule. A boat population had no landed ancestral village, no branch descent line (房世系, fáng shìxì), no filed genealogy of the kind a village keeps, and so no entry in a lineage register — and no village for a descendant to find. Absence from a register proves nothing about a population. But it is an explanation that fits.

Hall on Yinglang Road: How Xu Organized Itself on Land

The counterweight to the boats is a building with a door number. In Taicheng the Xu ancestral hall (宗祠, zōngcí) stands on Yinglang Road at numbers 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 — a street-front structure that clan materials say was given its foundation stone (奠基, diànjī) in 1924 and opened in 1929, funded by Xu kin donations raised across the four counties (四邑, Sìyì) at home and overseas. Those dates come from clan and secondary accounts, not a gazetteer page this article could retrieve; the same materials call the hall a listed protected building, a designation no official list here could confirm.

It is one of a street of such halls — the Ye hall a few doors along, completed in 1933 — the normal architecture of a county where clan federations pooled money to survive and stay visible.

The hall is also, in 2024, a live claim. An initiative led by Xu Wanli — chairman of a Kaiping Xu hall named in the 2024 initiative letter and not independently documented — sought restoration on the hall’s original lines, coordination with government for a thirty-year arrangement on the building, and the celebration of its second centenary, so that Xu of the four counties everywhere would have a door to enter for seeking their roots and asking after their ancestors (寻根问祖, xún gēn wèn zǔ).

Then there is the paper, and Wuyi’s Xu records are thinner than the surname’s size would suggest. The New Xinhui Xu Branch Descent Lines (《广东新会（徐氏）房世系》), compiled by Xu Guangzhuo in 1965, is a single volume with a Ming first-settler ancestor (始迁祖, shǐqiānzǔ) named Zhen — microfilmed by the Utah Genealogical Society in 1979 as film 1211204, orderable by any Xu descendant where FamilySearch access allows. Beyond it: a Taishan lineage at Dadan in Wencun (汶村), whose first settler Desan is recorded through the county gazetteer as coming from Zhuji Lane — read here as genealogical tradition; and a lineage preface from Weimei village, in Taishan’s Haiyan township, submitted to a surname database in 2024, where Haiyan is a qiaoxiang in its own right.

Now the reconciliation, this section’s real finding. Xu does not appear in the major-surname tables of the Xinhui and Taishan gazetteers accessible or digitised for this research — a statement about what could be located, nothing more; the pages were not retrieved, and this is not a claim that Xu is not a major surname in either county. Yet a Tanka count in Kaiping puts Xu first of seven. Both can be true, because they count different populations: Xu’s Wuyi visibility is institutional — halls, joint-clan funding — and riverine, invisible to the landed tables a gazetteer records. The New Xinhui register is the only Wuyi-anchored Xu branch genealogy with both a settlement point and a date identified in this research — not the only one that exists, the only one found. Two gaps stay open: the Xinhui village in that lineage text could not be located in any administrative list, and no source assigns a Wuyi Xu lineage to a speech community.

Gold Mountain: The Ports and the Chain

The Wuyi Xu left from the same water they had always used. The great departure point was Haikou Port (海口埠, Hǎikǒu Bù) in Taishan, called the Cantonese world’s first port of emigration, now a heritage site with a remittance-letter plaza; Guanghai and Jiangmen were the other hinges. How the letter system works is treated elsewhere on this site and is not re-explained here.

What moved them was credit-ticket passage (赊单制, shēdān zhì), financed against future wages, then chain migration — in one Wuyi account, families left in groups, a whole lineage segment departing together. The unit of movement was not a man but a name. Where Wuyi people went, overwhelmingly, was the Americas and Australia; Chaozhou and Meizhou speakers went to Southeast Asia instead. Within Taishan, destinations correlate with surnames — Guanghai to Canada and Britain, Duanfen’s Mei to Chicago, the Chen of Liucun in Doushan to Seattle. No comparable Xu destination cluster was documented, and that absence is stated rather than filled.

One named emigrant exists, introduced with his doubt intact. The Australian novelist Alexis Wright — Waanyi, author of Carpentaria, a Miles Franklin winner — is of Chinese descent through a great-grandfather who came from Guangdong in the later nineteenth century, drifted to the Gulf of Carpentaria, and married an Aboriginal woman. He is remembered in the family as Xu Abao and recorded in Australian sources as Sam Ah Bow — remembered and recorded as, because the relationship is given differently across sources and he is documented in no genealogy. What Wright has said is that she was told his surname might indicate he had lived on boats: a family recollection carried across the world by a name and nothing else — boat people left no village behind to be found. Xu romanises as Hsu in older Wade-Giles, and as Sui and Chui in Cantonese and Taishanese, some of which collide with the romanisation of the unrelated 许.

Two Ways to Cross, and the Records That Hid People

In the same decades, two opposite channels carried Cantonese men abroad. The first was elite and guaranteed, and it belongs to this surname. The Chinese Educational Mission sent four cohorts of thirty boys to America from 1872, and it was Xu Run of the Xiangshan Beiling clan who gave the personal guarantee behind the mission; roughly forty of the 120 boys are said to have come from Xiangshan — by the accounts, never as a statistic. The state sent guaranteed students. Everyone else crossed on paper.

The second channel was the paper son: identities bought from citizens, entry attempted through Hong Kong and Macau, interrogations at Angel Island, where detainees carved poems into the walls — a history told on this site, and one with its own documentary trail. The legal frame was the 1882 Exclusion Act, Canada’s head tax and its 1923 replacement, and restrictions in Australia; exclusion did not stop Wuyi emigration, it shaped it. No Xu paper-son file or railroad roster was documented in this research: these are Wuyi patterns a Xu family may well have lived inside.

The records are where this surname’s story sits, and there are three kinds. The first is the letters — yinxin (银信, yínxìn) in Wuyi, the remittance letters known elsewhere as qiaopi (侨批, qiáopī), carried by remittance houses (批局, pījú) and village couriers, the earliest surviving example dated 1883. A household head often appears in a register only as the name written on an envelope as its recipient, so the envelope can stand in for the register when the register is silent — a method, not a demonstrated Xu case. The second is the register’s own shorthand: genealogies record emigrant deaths in set formulas — died abroad (卒于外洋, zú yú wàiyáng), sojourning at Gold Mountain (旅居金山, lǚjū Jīnshān) — and carry name-lists of those who donated funds to print the register (捐赀刊谱, juānzī kānpǔ), which double as ledgers of who was where. These are attested Wuyi conventions, not universal to every Xu register.

The third is a register that reached a world stage. The Beiling Xu Genealogy (《北岭徐氏宗谱》) was printed in 1884 by the Zhaoxiu Hall under the direction of Xu Run, catalogued under the Xiangshan branch, and exhibited in a Shanghai Library showcase of genealogy treasures. Its chain runs from the Xiangshan first settler Xu Guangda to the Beiling branch ancestor Xu Guancheng and the five branch ancestors below him. Xiangshan had more than one Xu register, and they are not harmonised here: the Xulun Hall record gives a different founding ancestor, branch ancestor and era, entering Guangdong via Nanxiong. Name the register you are quoting, and stop there.

Xu Run himself deserves no more than a scale cue, with a label: he is a Xiangshan Beiling figure — Zhuhai, not Wuyi. Born in 1838 at Beiling village, he went to Shanghai at fifteen, rose at Dent & Co. to chief comprador, and became a tea king and a land king. He took twenty-four thousand taels of the China Merchants’ first hundred thousand in shares, and founded the Renhe and Jihe insurance firms in 1876 and 1878, often credited as among the earliest Chinese-founded insurance companies — never as China’s first. After the 1883–84 collapse and Sheng Xuanhuai’s accusation, he died in Shanghai in 1911, his coffin returned to Beiling. Both the guarantee and the diversion are in his own chronological autobiography.

The same clan produced the surname’s world’s-fair thread. Xu Rongcun, a Beiling-born Dent & Co. comprador, sent twelve bales of Rongji Hu silk (荣记湖丝, Róngjì húsī) from Nanxun to London in 1851. The Beiling genealogy records gold and silver awards, but the independent basis is the 1852 Royal Society awards report — and this article uses the archival wording. In 2001 Xu Xizeng submitted the genealogy to Shanghai’s exposition bid with the certificates and a certificate from Queen Victoria: a register printed in 1884 in a village beside Macau, entered as evidence about a nation’s first world’s fair.

The Women Who Held the Shore

Behind every crossing was a household that did not move, run by a woman. The Gold Mountain wife (金山婆, Jīnshān Pó) was de facto head of a transnational family for decades — managing land, raising children, meeting clan obligations, building the remittance-funded houses that announced a family’s overseas success. The dream’s power depended on a knowledge gap never closed: some men came home wealthy, many never came home at all, and the wives who waited did not know which they were until the waiting was over.

For the river families, this shape was not an invention of emigration. A boat household was already organised around an absent or mobile male workforce — fishing the reaches, trading at the market towns, later crossing the ocean — so the divided household was the ordinary shape of life on the water, which is why the emigration centuries fitted onto it so easily. That is an interpretation grounded in the documented boat livelihood; this research located no study of Tanka family structure in Wuyi, and none is claimed. No named Xu Gold Mountain wife appears in any source consulted here, and no Xu household letter either.

One Xu woman does stand in the national record, and she is the counter-figure: not the woman who stayed but the one who left and entered history. Xu Zonghan, of the Xiangshan Beiling Xu clan — described in the reporting as Xu Run’s niece, on the authority of a Guangzhou newspaper feature citing the Beiling genealogy, which was not itself read for this article — was a revolutionary of the 1911 generation, associated with Huang Xing. She belongs to the Xiangshan branch, not to Wuyi.

The record explains why this section is short. Registers marginalise women by construction — daughters entered as links to other families, wives as surnames without names — and the letter corpus was written mostly by men. But the letters were addressed to women, about households women ran. The archive’s silence about women is a fact about the archive, not about the women.

The Name as Anchor

The surname is also an institution. The World Xu Clan Association marked its fiftieth-anniversary congress — implying a founding around 1967 — in Pingzhen, Taoyuan, with Thailand’s and Singapore’s Xu associations, ASEAN representatives and mainland Xu guests; add associations in the United States, Britain and Guangdong, and, the loop closing, Xu clansmen of Sihong among the senders of a 2024 congratulatory set. These names come from clan and community media, which is what they are.

Two doors are real for a reader who wants to start. The Xu family network site tianxiaxushi.com runs a standing collection programme — for generation poems, lineage prefaces, ancestral halls and registers — plus a searchable register database. And the 1965 New Xinhui branch genealogy sits on FamilySearch film 1211204.

Then there is the search that failed, the most human thing in this article, and it stays failed. In 2017 Alexis Wright travelled to Chikan looking for Xu Abao. Tanka families in Sanguili welcomed her; she paid her respects at the Xu ancestral hall. And the villagers could not find Xu Abao in the register, though they acknowledged her as Xu kin anyway. The reason is the one this article has assembled: a boat population had no landed ancestral village, no branch descent line, no findable place. That is suggestive, and the article will not claim more for it — absence from one register proves nothing about a population. By this account the surname was the only document that survived the crossing, and it was enough for her to be received as kin.

Which leaves a dated plan: a hall on Yinglang Road, a restoration on original lines, a thirty-year arrangement with the government, and a second centenary to hold, so that Xu families scattered across four continents have a door to walk through.

Go back to the beginning and the whole thing reads differently. A boy named Ruo Mu is enfeoffed on the lower Huai, in the lineage tradition. The state stands for sixteen centuries, maybe fifteen, and is drowned by its neighbour’s water in 512 BCE. A king who would not fight is remembered anyway, for that refusal. The name drifts south for two thousand years, reaches the Pearl River delta, and learns to live on boats. Envelopes cross an ocean with a name on them. A reel of microfilm sits in a drawer in Utah. A novelist stands in a Chikan village, is told she is family, and cannot be given a village.

The kingdom is gone. The name is not. The 徐 character survived both the state that made it and every register that failed to record the people who carried it — which is to say, three thousand years after a river drowned a capital, the surname is still doing the only thing it has ever done: holding.

Continue Reading

• Your Surname is Your Compass: How to Trace Your Wuyi Roots — the surname-archive hub.
• How to Read a Chinese Zupu: The 10 Parts, Explained Simply — the method for reading a register that records the people this article could not find.
• The Xiao (萧/肖) Surname: One Name, Two Characters, Many Spellings — the surname series’ previous volume, and the same-pinyin problem at its sharpest.
• The Xu (许) Surname: 3,100 Years from the State of Xu to the Wuyi Diaspora — the other Xu, and why two surnames share one pronunciation.

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Sources

• Cangnan County Government — the Xu Ruo Mu origin article (2008): the Yuanhe Xingzuan / Tongzhi · Shizu Lüe origin chain: cncn.gov.cn
• Anhui Provincial Party History and Local Records Institute — the King Yan of Xu entry (2014): anhuids.gov.cn; Longyou County Government (2021): longyou.gov.cn
• Sihong County Government (2022) — the Ancient Xu Pavilion: sihong.gov.cn; Kaiping Gazetteer Office — surname-origins survey (seven boat-dweller surnames; Xu lineage text; via 全国姓名报告 repost): mp.weixin.qq.com
• Kaiping Municipal Government (2021): kaiping.gov.cn; Jiangmen Municipal Government (2021) — the Cangjiang Tanka families and the 2021 heritage listing: jiangmen.gov.cn; ifeng Jiangmen (2024) — Lougang boat-building: ifeng.com
• Sina — the Alexis Wright roots article (2017): Sanguili and the register that could not answer: news.sina.cn; China Writers’ Network (2018): chinawriter.com.cn; Guangming Daily (2024): epaper.gmw.cn
• tianxiaxushi.com — the 2024 Taicheng hall initiative and collection programme: tianxiaxushi.com; FamilySearch / Utah Genealogical Society microfilm (1979) — 《广东新会（徐氏）房世系》, Xu Guangzhuo, 1965, film 1211204
• Zhuhai Municipal Government (2024) — Xu Run: zhuhai.gov.cn; People’s Daily Online (2009) — the 1884 Beiling Xu Genealogy: culture.people.com.cn; historychina.net (2019) — the 1852 Royal Society report; Southern Metropolis Daily — the 2001 Expo bid submission: oeeee.com
• Archaeology 2002 no. 5 — the Jiunüdun Mound Three excavation; Nanjing Museum et al. (2009): the Jiunüdun finds; Ministry of Justice — the Nanxiong Zhuji Lane heritage page (2021), on Zhuji Lane retro-tracing: moj.gov.cn; China Times (2017) — the World Xu Clan Association congress: chinatimes.com
• shine.cn (2018) and Lynda Ng, University of Melbourne (2025) — Sam Ah Bow and the reported boat remark