Migration and qiaopi letters
What this section holds本欄收錄
How people came, and how they left. This section is a branch of history and geography, kept on a page of its own because the material is of a different kind: administrative geography rests on official gazetteers, migration on genealogies, dialect and remittance letters.
How to read it這一欄怎麼讀
Entries opened so far in this section: qiao pi, and Zhanglin port and the red-bowed ships.
Migration history is easily written as one sentence — ‘they came from the Central Plains by way of Fujian’. The sentence is not wrong, and it says nothing. To get down to cases takes three kinds of material, and each of the three has a weak side.
1. Genealogies
A genealogy records the line of descent, the place moved from, and the first ancestor to settle. Its strength is names, dates and generations. Its weakness is that genealogies after the Ming and Qing commonly improve on the past, attaching the founding ancestor to a great name, and the further back the attachment reaches the more doubtful it is. Two things to check when using one: whether the descent below the founding ancestor is continuous and countable, and whether the place moved from is specific below the level of the county. A genealogy that says only ‘the Central Plains’ or ‘Putian’ and never names a village is usually speaking in general terms.
2. Dialect
Dialect boundaries can show where the migrants came from and in what order. The Chaoshan speech is mutually intelligible with Quanzhou and Zhangzhou speech, though not fully. The dialect islands along the Chaoshan-Hakka border, around Jiexi, show the sequence and the interleaving of arrival. The hard side of dialect material is that it can be rechecked: how a given word is said by a given speaker, once recorded, can be compared. The soft side is that it is recent — it proves how things are now, not how they were then.
3. Qiaopi letters
Qiaopi are a product of modern times, mostly from the late Qing to the Republic. What they record is what happened after a man had gone: who left, how many years he stayed away, how much money came back, and how it was divided. For the routes and the dates of going overseas, qiaopi are more reliable than genealogies, because they carry postmarks, remittance houses and dates.
Three lines三條線
- Hoklo into Chaoshan: down the coast from southern Fujian, step by step, forming the main body of the Chaoshan speech area. It has to be established by dialect boundaries and genealogies together, not by the single sentence ‘they came from Fujian’.
- Hakka moving in: in from the hills, step by step, forming the Chaoshan-Hakka border belt. The village affiliations and the differences in custom along that belt are the part of this section most in need of comparison county by county.
- Going overseas to the South Seas: a habit from the Song and Yuan into the Qing, at its height in modern times. The core physical evidence left behind is the qiaopi — letter and remittance in one, tying the households at both ends.
What the material must carry材料要求
Migration history does not accept ‘it is said’. A genealogy must state its edition and where it is held; a qiaopi must state the remittance house, the year, and both sender and recipient; dialect material must state the collection point and the speaker. Where none of the three is present, nothing is written.
Progress進度
The first subjects are listed on the history and geography page, and the writing order falls after the administrative history.
Using the three together三種材料怎麼合用
First fix the modern ‘actual’ with qiaopi, then trace the Ming and Qing ‘origin’ with genealogies, and last check with dialect whether origin and actual connect. Where the three cannot corroborate one another, the account stops at the layer that can be shown and goes no further.
What is not included here本欄不收的
First, no promotional phrasing of the ‘descendants of so-and-so are found all over the world’ kind. Second, no founding-ancestor story that has neither genealogy nor letter behind it. Third, no merging of the migrations of different counties and different surnames into a single line.
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Last revised: 5 November 2026