About This Site
Chaoshanwiki is a digital knowledge base on the history, customs and crafts of the Chaoshan region. It does three things at once, and none of them replaces the others: it shows the reader what a custom, a dish or a craft looks like; it explains why it works that way and how counties differ; and it lets the conclusion be checked — sources, periods, places and disputed readings are written on the page.
It therefore carries no verdicts such as “worth a visit”, and it does not turn oral tradition into documented history. Where a claim is local usage, repeated by the press, or not yet verified, the page says so. Where verification failed, the page reads to be checked rather than a smoother sentence.
Four editorial rules
- Written county by county. The same name in two counties is two different practices; they are not merged into one account.
- The prefecture is the frame. Geography follows the Qing-era Chaozhou Fu, for the reasons below.
- Evidence is graded. Prefectural and county gazetteers are kept apart from modern reporting; reprints and second-hand sources are marked.
- Disagreement stays visible. When two readings exist, both are given with their sources; the reader is not told which one to pick.
Geographic scope: Chaozhou Fu and the seven counties
Chaozhou Fu here means the Qing-era prefecture (nine counties after 1738), used as the framework because the gazetteers and county records this site depends on are themselves organised by prefecture and county. This site writes seven counties as its main body — Haiyang, Chaoyang, Jieyang, Raoping, Chenghai, Puning, Huilai — and treats Dabu and Fengshun, in the same prefecture then but in Meizhou today, as in-prefecture comparisons rather than part of the main body.
Chaozhou Fu is a historical administrative unit: it equals neither present-day Chaozhou city nor the three present-day cities of the region. Nor does a shared prefecture make customs uniform — where practices differ, they are described county by county.
Who runs it
Chaoshanwiki is independently initiated, built and maintained by Kuang Chujia (邝楚嘉). It is kept separate from his calendar and archaeoastronomy project: that site covers calendrics and the history of astronomy, this one covers local custom and culture, and neither republishes the other. Where a page touches calendrical or astronomical data, it cites that project’s published material and datasets.
Licensing
Text is released under CC BY-SA 4.0: reuse is allowed with attribution and share-alike. Images remain under the photographer’s copyright and require a separate commercial licence. Data is released under CC BY 4.0. The three layers are independent — being free to quote the text does not mean being free to reuse an image.
Corrections
For factual errors, misquotation or image-licensing problems, write to chirca@163.com with three things: the page and passage, the source you are relying on, and your conclusion (wrong, outdated, or two readings coexist). Verifiable errors are corrected and the revision date updated; where verification is not yet possible the wording is softened and marked, rather than the dissenting view being deleted. Images whose permission is in question come down first.
Revision
This page was substantially revised on 22 October 2026. The date at the foot of the page records saves; this section records substantive changes. Where the two differ, this section prevails.