How a small coast became a world
Chaoshan is a triangle of river delta on the far eastern edge of Guangdong, about the size of Los Angeles County. For most of Chinese history it was a frontier. Then its people started leaving, and kept leaving, and kept writing home.
The frontier, and a poet in exile
Han Chinese administration reached the region early. A county called Jieyang was set up around the Qin and early Han dynasties, over two thousand years ago, and the name Chaozhou ("tide prefecture") first appears in 591 under the Sui. But for centuries this was the edge of the map: a Baiyue frontier of river deltas, malaria and typhoons, where the imperial court sent people it wanted out of the way.
The most famous of them was Han Yu, one of the great prose writers of the Tang dynasty. In 819 he wrote a memorial scolding the emperor for venerating a relic of the Buddha. The emperor wanted him executed, was talked down, and exiled him instead to be prefect of Chaozhou. He lasted about eight months there. In that time he wrote a formal text banishing the crocodiles from the local river, set up schooling, and left. Chaozhou never forgot him. The river was renamed the Han River, the eastern hill became Han Mountain, and the Han Wen Gong Temple on the riverbank is still the city's main historic monument. It's a very Teochew story: a place with an inferiority complex about being far from the center, that adopted the center's exiled poet as its patron saint.
Why Teochew is a Min language, not Cantonese
Chaoshan sits in Guangdong, but Teochew people don't speak Cantonese. The reason is where the settlers came from. Han settlement of the region came mostly overland from the Fujian coast, not from Guangzhou. A Tang military colony at Zhangzhou in 669 was followed by large migrations from Fujian, especially the Putian and Zhangzhou areas, during the Song dynasty, and a final surge of refugees when the Southern Song court fled the Mongols in 1276 to 1279. Teochew genealogies overwhelmingly trace back to Fujian, and the language came with them. That's why Teochew belongs to the Southern Min family alongside Hokkien and Taiwanese, keeps sounds that Mandarin lost a thousand years ago, and is about half intelligible to a Hokkien speaker and not at all to a Cantonese one.
Sea bans, pirates, and the Great Clearance
The Ming dynasty banned private sea trade in 1394 and emigration in 1398. On a coast that lived by the sea, the result was not obedience but smuggling and piracy. Chaozhou natives were among the most feared of the sixteenth-century pirate leaders; Lin Feng, known in the Philippines as Limahong, attacked Manila in 1574. The ban was lifted in 1567.
The Qing did something more drastic. After the Ming loyalist Zheng Chenggong retreated to Taiwan in 1661, the court ordered the Great Clearance: every resident of the coasts of Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang and beyond was forced to move about 25 kilometers inland, and the coast was burned. Chaoshan's seaward counties, Chenghai, Chaoyang and Nan'ao, were inside the evacuated zone. The order was not fully rescinded until 1683. A generation of Teochew grew up as internal refugees, and when the coast reopened, the habit of looking outward for a living was already there.
Red-head junks to Siam
The first great wave of emigration was about rice. In 1723 the Yongzheng emperor ordered ships' hulls painted by province so customs officers could tell them apart. Guangdong's color was red, and the Teochew trading junks became the ang-thau-tsung, red-head junks. A merchant named Chua Ngang came back from Siam with knowledge of its hardwoods and set up shipbuilding at Zhanglin port in Chenghai. Nearly a hundred junks were built there in the Yongzheng years alone, and by the 1800s some reached 500 tons. They sailed south on the winter monsoon loaded with people and came back on the summer monsoon loaded with Siamese rice.
The Teochew got a foothold in Siam that no other Chinese group matched, and the reason has a name: Taksin. Born in 1734 to a Teochew tax collector from Huafu village in Chenghai, Taksin became a general, then the king who reconquered Siam after the fall of Ayutthaya in 1767. He leaned on Teochew merchants to fund his war and, once on the throne, actively encouraged Chaoshan people to settle. After his overthrow in 1782 the new dynasty moved the Teochew from the palace site to Sampheng on the east bank of the river. That neighborhood became Bangkok's Chinatown, and Yaowarat Road, cut through it in the late 1800s, is still essentially a Teochew street.
Further south, in the Straits Settlements, the Teochew story is about pepper and gambier. Seah Eu Chin, born in Chenghai, landed in Singapore in 1823 and within fifteen years had plantations running from River Valley Road to Bukit Timah, earning the title "Gambier King." In 1845 he and twelve Teochew clans founded the Ngee Ann Kongsi to handle the community's temples and burials. It still exists. It runs Ngee Ann Polytechnic.
Swatow, and the coolie ships
The Treaty of Tientsin in 1858 named Chaozhou as a treaty port, but foreign ships ended up at a fishing village at the mouth of the river called Swatow, today's Shantou. A US consulate opened there in January 1860. Locals were so hostile that the British consul didn't manage to enter Chaozhou city for another five years, and by 1874 the port had 30,000 residents and 147 foreigners.
What Swatow did have was ships going south, and an endless supply of young men from the crowded, typhoon-hit villages behind it. Between 1904 and 1935, port records show about three million passengers leaving Swatow for overseas, roughly half of whom came back. Some went as free migrants to join relatives. Many went as indentured laborers in what the Chinese called the "pig trade," bound for plantations in Sumatra, tin mines in Malaya, and rice mills in Siam and Cochinchina. By the 1930s Swatow was the third-busiest port in China after Shanghai and Canton, and a typhoon in August 1922 killed somewhere between sixty and a hundred thousand people in and around it.
Wherever the ships landed, the Teochew built the same institutions: a temple, a cemetery, and a guild hall. Kuching's Teochew association dates to 1863, Penang's to 1864. Chen Cihong, who set up the Chen Hong Li rice firm in Bangkok in 1871, became one of the richest men in Siam and went home to build a mansion in Chenghai that's now a museum.
The letters
If there's one thing that explains Teochew family culture, it's the 僑批 qiaopi: a remittance and a letter delivered together, from a man abroad to a family at home. The word pi is the Min word for a letter. The system ran for over a century.
In the early days a returning traveler, called a shuike ("water guest"), would carry the money and letters by hand, deliver them in person, collect village news, and sometimes write the reply for an illiterate mother. As volume grew, remittance shops took over: firms based in Singapore or Bangkok with branches in Swatow, who took your money abroad, changed the currency, and paid a local courier (a pijiao, literally "letter foot") to walk it to your village. The reply letter, the huipi, came back as the receipt. Fees fell from 10 to 20 percent to around 3 percent as firms competed, and most remittances were small. In 1936 the Swatow post office alone handled forty million dollars in remittances, said to be supporting about two thirds of Teochew households. During the Pacific War, when the sea was closed, a 3,000 kilometer overland route through Guangxi kept hundreds of thousands of letters a month moving, at one to three months each way.
The state banks absorbed the trade in the 1970s. What was left behind was paper: over 160,000 surviving letters from 1883 to 1979, about 100,000 of them in the Chaoshan collection. UNESCO added them to its Memory of the World Register in 2013, and the Shantou Qiaopi Museum in the old town holds more than 120,000 items. If you've seen the film Dear You, this is the world it's set in. Read a few of them and the pattern is always the same: the money, then the apology for how little it is, then the question about whether the children are studying.
The network, on a map
The system had three tiers. A "first-tier" firm in Bangkok, Singapore, Saigon or Phnom Penh took your money and letter. A "second-tier" house in Hong Kong changed the currency and forwarded the bundle. A "third-tier" firm in Shantou sorted it by county and handed it to a courier on foot. The first documented Teochew firm opened in Singapore in 1835; the last ones in Shantou were folded into the Bank of China in 1979. The map on the home page has a layer for it: switch on "The letters."
The second exodus: 1975
By the mid-twentieth century most of the world's Teochew had never seen China. Their families had been in Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Saigon and Singapore for two or three generations. Then, in the space of a few years, the Indochina chapter was torn up.
In Cambodia the Chinese, about sixty percent of them Teochew, numbered around 425,000 in 1961. They were shopkeepers, rice traders, moneylenders and market gardeners in every provincial town. When the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh in April 1975, they emptied the cities. The Chinese were not targeted as an ethnic group so much as as urban "capitalists," but that was enough: estimates of Chinese deaths from 1975 to 1979 run from 200,000 to 300,000, and historian Ben Kiernan's widely cited figure is that the community was cut in half. In Vietnam, after the 1978 rupture with China and the nationalization of trade, some 450,000 ethnic Chinese left, many of them as boat people from Cholon, the Chinese quarter of Saigon.
The survivors scattered. Around 158,000 Cambodians were admitted to the United States between 1975 and 1994, and Long Beach, California became home to the largest Cambodian community outside Cambodia, with Chinese Cambodian families also settling in the San Gabriel Valley. In Paris, ethnic Chinese refugees from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam built the Quartier Asiatique in the 13th arrondissement around the Olympiades towers; its two anchor supermarkets, Tang Frères and Paris Store, are both Teochew family businesses. Montreal, Toronto, Melbourne and Sydney got their share. None of these countries' censuses count "Teochew," which is why a Teochew American from Long Beach is officially Cambodian, and why so many of us grew up being asked whether we were Chinese or Cambodian and not having a short answer.
That's the last chapter so far. The next one is being written by people who understand the language but can't speak it, which is roughly where this site comes in.