The Teochew Store Blog / roots-finding

The Teochew Store潮舖一岁啦！

为了庆祝我们的第一周年与答谢各位读者的支持，我们希望邀请您和大家分享您对主题 “My Teochew Family 潮州一家人”的故事.

您的故事可以关于您的家人，在您生活里扮演重要角色的潮籍人士，或者是一个让您领悟的“家”的意义的社群。您可以通过以下两种方式参加...

A list of the top 100 most common surnames in the Teochew region.

List of Towns and Villages in Teochew in 1946. Source: 《马来亚潮侨通鉴》， 新加坡 : 南岛出版社, 1950.

Many of us amongst the overseas Teochews are the children and grandchildren of men and women who left the Teochew region between the 1920s and the 1950s. Ever wondered what the land of our fathers was like back then, or where your ancestral village is/was located? Here are some maps to help:

To download maps in JPEG files, please click here

Source: 《马来亚潮侨通鉴》， 新加坡 : 南岛出版社, 1950.

Teo-an 潮安 (Chao'an)

Thenghai 澄海 (Chenghai) 

Jaopeng 饒平 (Raoping)

Gek-yor 揭陽 (Jieyang)

Teo-yor 潮陽 (Chaoyang)

Pholeng 普寧 (Puning)

Huilai 惠来 (Huilai)

Hongsun 豐順 (Fengshun)

Namoa 南澳 (Nan'ao)

Tuapou 大埔 (Dapu) - historically part of Teochew territory till 1733.

See also List of Towns and Villages in Teochew in 1946

In this age of open information, Wikipedia is often the site where people visit to seek knowledge on a new subject or topic of interest. When conducting an online search on the keyword “Teochew”, Wikipedia’s pages on “Teochew people”, “Teochew dialect” and “Chaozhou” appear on top of Google’s results. Although largely informative, the Wikipedia page on “Teochew people” contains a curious introduction to our background, stating:

“Historically, these people were called Helao or Fulao, as they came mostly from Henan and Shanxi via Fujian, with well-maintained language and customs from north-central China.”

For certain readers can testify that Helao/Fulao does not exist in our daily vocabulary. Whether in China or Southeast Asia, Teochew people uniformly identify ourselves as “Teochew”, or more recently in mainland China “Teo-swa”.

Through further research on Wikipedia, one discovers “Fulao” is actually the Mandarin rendition of the Hokkien expression Hoklo 福佬/老 – meaning literally “Fujian men”. “Helao” 河老 on the other hand is linked to “Heluo” 河洛 (pronounced “Ho-lok” in Hokkien and Teochew), an inaccurate transliteration of Hoklo that has surfaced in literate stressing the purported origin of the Hokkien (and Teochew) people from Henan, in particular the Luo River basin. (Incidentally, the river itself is called Luohe 洛河, and not Heluo).

“Hoklo” is today widely used in Taiwan as a category for the section of its Chinese population whose forefathers migrated from Fujian’s coastal areas between the Qing dynasty and the Kuomintang’s retreat to the island in 1949. It is opposed to the Hakkas whose roots are traced to adjacent inland mountains or Chinese immigrants from other provinces. In a very similar way, the tags “Hoklo” and “Hakka” were adopted by late 19th and early 20th century Western Christian missionaries working in the Teochew region to different its inhabitants in the lowland plains from migrant settlers in the highland borders, whose distinctions in language, self-identity and customs were readily recognised In this context “Hoklo” clearly referred to the Teochew people (for more see The Bible and the gun: Christianity in South China, 1860-1900 by Joseph Tse-Hei Lee).

However there is evidence that at an earlier time “Hoklo” did not apply to the Teochew people. In 1843 Baptist preacher I. J. Roberts visited Hong Kong island, shortly after it was ceded to British possession, and made a family visiting tour. In his journal he recorded an encounter in a village with a family, “who speak the Hoklo dialect; which is nearly the same as Tiéchiú, which the assistant speaks” (cited in The Baptist Missionary Magazine, Volume 23).

This passage highlights pertinently that a close resemblance in speech between Teochews and Hokkiens from southern Fujian, which third parties are often unable to tell apart. At the same time, it gives an important clue to the etymology of the “Hoklo” expression.

In common usage, the reference to a person or a collective group of people in the Teochew is “nang” 人, and the Hokkien variation is “lang”. In both sets of vernaculars “lo” 佬 is rarely spoken. In contrast the Cantonese habitually use this word in their conversations, such as “dai-lo” 大佬 (“big brother”) or “gwai-lo” 鬼佬 (“devil-people”, meaning Westerners).  As such, it is all likely that Hok-lo was in fact a nomenclature coined by Cantonese-speakers to refer to Hokkien migrants into their territory. As Hong Kong was the primary transit point for Christian preachers entering China in the past, the likelihood those who worked in the Teochew region picked up the “Hoklo” expression from their interactions with the locals or fellow missionaries who spoke Cantonese, and later wrongly applied it to the Teochews.

Besides being consistent with the fact that Teochews never call ourselves Hoklo, this is supported by the observation and writing of James Dyer Ball, an Englishman whose credentials included being chief interpreter in the Hong Kong civil service. In Things Chinese published at the turn of the 20th century, he explained:

"Teo Chews is the term applied generally to them (i.e. the Teochew people) in Singapore, Penang, and the Malay States, while “Hok-lo” is the name by which they are generally known by the Cantonese speakers in China. The former name being derived from the departmental city of Ch'ao Chao Fu (in local dialect—Tiu Chiu Fu or Teo Chew Fu) to which the different districts, from which many of the Hok-lo, came, belong; while Hok-lo means “men from the Hok province i.e. Fukien province”.

Between the Teochews and the Hokkiens, many similarities in language and manners are shared. This is unsurprising since they occupy an adjoined territory in Southeast China. However there was definitely no confusion to the distinction of their collective identities in the 19th century, as attested by major violent clashes between migrants from the two groups in Shanghai in 1850 and in Singapore in 1854 – the latter lasted for more than ten days and resulted in the destruction of 300 houses and 500 deaths. The divide in identity may be traced during the Song dynasty (960-1279) when Teochew prefecture was joined with the Cantonese heartlands to form Guangdong province, whereas Hokkien-speaking Zhangzhou and Quanzhou prefectures were made part of Fujian. If the line of separation is so clear and ancient, how could a view persist amongst the Cantonese that the Teochews were “Fujian men”.

The answer appears to lie in the districts of Haifeng and Lufeng, where a Hokkien-speaking coastal enclave exists right between the realms of the Teochews and the Cantonese. Now administered under Shanwei (or Swabue) city, this area was governed shortly under Swatow from the 1950s to 1980s. However the non-Hakka/Cantonese section of its population vigorously rejects any suggestion that they are Teochew and instead insist in emphasising their descent from migrants out of Zhangzhou about 300 years ago. Their location and background strongly suggest that they are the original Hoklo, the “Fujian men”.  

The most famous son of the Hoklos in Guangdong is arguably Chen Jiongming, one-time governor of Guangdong in Sun Yat Sen’s government. An anecdote told that Chen was once asked to play judge and suss out the guilty party of a crime between two suspects, a Teochew and a fellow Hoklo. However Chen was more interested in rescuing his own than the execution of justice. The near identical speech and accent of the two presented him the challenge of telling who was Teochew or Hoklo, since he could not openly display his bias.

Cunningly Chen ordered both men to be beaten and in an instance his answer was derived.  Because the patrilineal character of the Teochew society, the man who was Teochew yelled in his moment of anguish “ua-pe-lu” 我父噜 (Oh my father)! At the same time, the Hoklo being brought up under stronger matrilineal influence, shouted out “ua-bhou-ui” 我母喂 (oh my mother)! Things happening exactly as he expected, Chen ordered the beating for the poor Teochew to be continued, while the Hoklo was released on the sly from the backdoor.

Whether this is a true story is unknown, but it tells an important point: Teochews are Teochews, and “Hoklo” means precisely what it states: “Fujian men”. 

Any Teochew of age twoscore and above will remember a time when our fathers or grandfathers called themselves Dengnang 唐人 (“Tang people”), and spoke fondly of coming from Dengsua唐山 (the “Tang Mountains”), as China was known before the current term Tiongkok 中國became standard. This use of these references to the Tang dynasty (618–907 AD) is not limited to the Teochew people and is shared by overseas Chinese of origin from the provinces of Guangdong and Fujian (including the Cantonese, Hokkien, Hainanese and Hakka). The Chinese language is uniformly identified as Dengnang-ue 唐人話 (“Tang people language”), its written charactersDengnang-ji 唐人字 (“Tang people words”), and the Chinatowns in the West are “Tang people street” (唐人街). This phenomenon is undoubtedly linked to the glory of the Tang civilization, as even the Japanese till the 17th century saw China as “Tang territory” (唐土) and its inhabitants also as Tang people.

The old Teochews had a particularly penchant to speak of “land” as “mountain” (or “hill”, as the Teochew term sua does not differentiate the two). When a group of Teochews crossed over from Singapore to open new gambier and pepper plantations on the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula in the 1840s, the new town they helped to found, Johor Bahru, was termed as Singsua 新山, the “New Mountain”, though the surrounding terrain is flat. This is dumbfounding as Teochews are seafarers by traditional, and a survey of the geography of the Teochew homeland and the rest of the southern Chinese coast quickly reveals that the concentration of human activity on river estuaries and along the shore. Even though more than two-thirds of Guangdong and Fujian are occupied by the Nanling and Wuyi mountain ranges respectively, these interior highlands are sparsely populated. They are overwhelmingly tall – the highest point in Teochew is the 1497-metres Honghuang-sua 鳳凰山 (Phoenix Mountain) summit, but have barren soil. So why did our forefathers associate in their vocabulary “land” with “mountains”, and where exactly is Dengsua?

A Google map check reveals a city in China called Tangshan (唐山), but its location in the Northeast is closer to Mongolia and North Korea than the South China Sea. The unlikelihood that it was the Dengsua our ancestors had in mind is certain from its past as a nondescript village until it was given its name by a Tang era emperor mourning the death of a beloved concubine in a nearby mountain. Moreover, it seems that the term Dengsua is familiar with Chinese from Guangdong and Fujian, and so the answer must lie closer to home.

Until the Meiling pass was cut through mountains in northern Guangdong in 716, China’s coastal region in the south was practically inaccessible from its political centre in the Central Plain except by sea. The Teochew area was extremely remote and could only be reached by land from Fujian’s Tingzhou and Hakka territory in Meizhou via the Hangkang’s 韓江 (Han River) upstream tributaries, or from other parts of Guangdong through a pass within the Noihue-sua 蓮花山 (Lotus Flower Mountain) range in Pholeng (Puning) county. These journeys lasting weeks were arduous and dangerous. As such, a posting to the Teochew prefecture was abhorred by Tang period imperial officials. The horror of such a fate was highlighted when Han Yu was given the death sentence for criticising a Tang emperor’s Buddhist beliefs, but banished instead to Teochew after his colleagues pleaded for his life.

The angst suffered by the elderly Confucian scholar was tersely expressed in a poem he wrote on his way to Teochew, in which he urged in the final line his nephew to be prepared to collect his bones “from the side of the miasmic river” (full poem shown below). Even worse than disgrace and isolation, Han Yu’s mind was weighed down by the infamous reputation of the prefecture’s chief waterway, which before being named after himself, was known as the “Crocodile River” (鳄江). The fear factor was linked not just to the frequency of attacks on humans by the reptilian beasts, but also deadly diseases like malaria that arose from swamp conditions of the environment.

Palynological studies (the scientific study of spores and pollen, both living and fossilized) reveal that the Hangkang river delta was completely submerged from circa 4000 to 2500 BCE when sea levels over 2.5 metres higher than present. The shoreline, about 30 kilometres further in from today’s limits, gradually retreated after 2000 BCE to leave behind lagoons, semi-enclosed estuaries and marshes. Supporting geomorphological data (geomorphology: the scientific study of the origin and evolution of topographic and bathymetric features created by physical or chemical processes at or near Earth's surface) show that 23.62% of the delta area was formed between 50 BCE and 550, and another 29.72% more recently between 950 and 1250.

(The Neolithic of Southeast China: Cultural Transformation and Regional by Jiao Tianlong andCharacteristics of the Han River Delta in Geomorphological Development by Zong Yongqiang are recommended readings by those interested in learning more on this topic.)

What these basically tell us is that most of the lowlands occupied by the cities, towns and villages in Teochew were until less than a thousand years ago covered under water and mud. This is confirmed by historical evidences that related to the Teochew prefectural city (Chaozhou), now a distance of 30 kilometres from the shore, as a thriving seaport from the time of its founding in circa 413 to the Sui dynasty (581 to 618). By plotting on a map (see below) showing the Hangkang delta in its various stages of advancement, the local spots of human settlements known to exist before or during the Song dynasty, two interesting trends can be noticed. Firstly almost all those locations dated before or during Tang are lined on the edge of pre-existing dry land; and secondly those that sprung up thereafter in Song sit close to the present course of Hangkang, and the other two major rivers Iongkang  榕江 and Liengkang 練江.

One of many noble acts attributed to Han Yu during his eight-month stint as governor was the eradication of the crocodile malice, supposedly through a ritual offering of a pig and a goat to the giant reptiles and an impassioned order for them to remove themselves to the sea in seven days. This is of course fantasy, but the crocodiles did completely disappear after the destruction of their habitats by extensive engineering works carried out initially to mitigate flood incursions and later to reclaim the wetlands for rice cultivation. The first dikes were apparently built on Liengkang and this facilitated the relocation of the seat of Teo-yor county to the appropriately-named Singheng 新興 (“New Prosperity”) town in 793. Against the background of an agricultural revolution in Song to increase food production, at least 18 major dike construction and repair projects supervised by prefectural officials were undertaken in Teochew from the 10th to 13th centuries (see: Study of Chaozhou Jincheng Rice by Huang, Gui)

These developments on the Han River delta were not unique. From the writings of various mid-imperial China sources, it is known that the other major river basins in Guangdong and Fujian were similarly plagued by the maladies of man-eating reptiles and epidemics arising from the natural environment during Tang, but they disappeared with extensive reclamation of swamps and coastal flats for agriculture in Song. As is Teochew, the two other pre-Tang port cities in the coastal south, Guangzhou and Fuzhou, are now situated fairly upriver, away from the sea.

Centuries ago when Teochew got its name the “Tidal Prefecture” (潮州), little space separated the tides of the South China Sea and the foot of the high grounds where our ancient forefathers had their dwellings. At an age when the Chinese civilisation and culture in Teochew were at their pinnacle, they learned to master the natural environment and gained great strength as a people. Though this prosperity was followed by many ebbs and flows of fortunes, one thing the passage of time did not take way: the home of our people is found in Tang mountains.

A New Year is here again. This is the time when many of us look back to take stock of our experiences in the past twelve months, and make plans to better ourselves with a list of resolutions.

The idea of New Year resolution is closely tied to modern concepts of time management and goal settings, although its root is traced to religious festivals from the West. At its centre is the notion that time exists on a linear time-scale, as indicated by the progressive numbers that mark each different year. However, time was not tracked in the same way in the old Chinese society, which used a lunisolar calendar tied to the four seasons of nature, as well as a recurring sexagenary (60 years) cycle. In this world that our forefathers were familiar with, perpetuity, and not progress, was the keyword.

The emphasis on the perpetual is critical in shaping aspirations and hopes in ways different to what many of us are used to. Here the individual self is merely a part of a larger scheme of things, and the pursuit of his/her personal ambitions are secondary. Instead future happiness is staked on the well-being and the achievements of the next generation. While this is not unique to the Teochew people, no one else takes this more seriously than any Teochew father or mother. At any family gathering, there is always a proud uncle boasting how well his son is doing in his career, or a grinning grandmother counting aloud the number of grandchildren she has.

Coinciding with the evolution of the competitive modern society, recent generations of Teochew parents have made their primary concern the performance of their children in school. Good grades, they believe, will translate into good jobs and security in life. By performance in school, this often refers narrowly to the attainment of high scores in academic subjects like English, Mandarin (or another local national language), science, mathematics, history, literature, etc. At the same time, any interests in other fields, including different aspects of the Teochew culture, is deemed as irrelevant and burdensome. More than once comments have been noted from young overseas Teochews of their parents’ criticism of their desire to pick up the “useless” Teochew language. Not a small number of friends have also questioned the purpose of promoting something as “backward” as the Teochew identity. Its practical value as a medium for business in Southeast Asia, they point out, has greatly diminished since the 1970s.

But as the old saying goes, there are many things money can’t buy. And moving forward in life is not only dependent on the plans we make today. Looking to the past to learn from those who ventured ahead of us in life’s journey is just as important.

One of the best ways to do so is paying attention to the counsel of our Teochew elders. You see, Teochews are traditionally “village people”, whose lives are not regulated by power of the law or the knowledge of elites, but by the agreement of members of family and neighbours on “the immutable law of reason”. This reason contains lessons in life picked up and accumulated over many generations, and further refined from endless debates over tea and across the dinner table. As a result, even a simple conversation with an old Teochew can yield nuggets of wisdom that cannot be learned in any textbook or prestigious MBA courses.

Take for example, five words left behind by my grandfather: zo nang dieh lao sik 做人著老實 – “we have to honest at all times” – forms a short, but precious cornerstone advice invaluable for anybody. My grandmother’s advice to me to marry only a partner who is of “one heart and mind” (dang sim dang yi 同心同意) with myself is another that I fully cherish. Because Teochew wisdom is not housed in books, but shared through daily interactions, enlightenment to the principles of living a rewarding life is not limited solely to the highly-educated, as this short interview with this sparkling former noodle-seller shows:

In the coming year some of us will be seeking “completion” by making “root-finding” trips to our ancestral homeland, while others will strive for the same by more learning and more sharing. The Teochew Store hopes that we can be part of your journey in 2015.

We wish all our fans and readers a Blessed and Fruitful New Year.

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The great joy of being a Teochew is the buffet of delicious food that we get to eat. Teochew plain porridge served with pickled vegetable, chai-poh eggs etc etc, char kway teow, braised goose (or duck), steam promfret, pork trotter jelly, all kinds of kuehs… our taste buds are spoilt for choice.

A popular dish for Teochews both in Swatow and overseas is the traditional Teochew oyster omelette or-luak 蠔烙 (literally “pan-fried oysters”).  It is simple to prepare, delightful to eat, and certainly needs no introduction. But well, here is anyway a video about a famous or-luak stall in Swatow with 50 years of history: 

For anyone inspired to try to serve up a plate yourself, here’s the recipe from allreceipes-Asia :  ­­

Ingredients  Serves: 4 

• 4 eggs

• 2 teaspoons fish or soya sauce

• 2 tablespoons tapioca flour

• 1 tablespoon rice flour

• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil

• 2 cloves garlic, chopped

• 1 teaspoon chilli paste

• 6 to 8 large fresh oysters

• salt and pepper

• coriander sprigs

Directions
Prep:10min  ›  Cook:15min  ›  Ready in:25min 

1. In a medium bowl, beat the eggs with fish sauce and set aside.

2. Mix the tapioca flour, rice flour and a pinch of salt in 125ml water to make a very thin batter. In a large wok, heat 1 teaspoon oil until smoking hot. Pour in the batter and let it set.

3. Pour the eggs over and when it is almost set, mix everything together. Make a well in the centre by pushing the egg and batter mixture to the sides of the wok. Add the remaining oil and stir in the garlic until fragrant. Add the chilli paste and oysters. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Toss until heated through.

4. Turn onto a serving platter and garnish with coriander sprigs. Serve with bottled chilli sauce mixed with vinegar to taste.

Variations of the or-luak are found in neighbouring southern Fujian (where the Hokkien people live), and the dish is a symbol of the importance of the sea to the lives of the Teochew and Hokkien populations in coastal Southeast China. When the renowned Confucius scholar Han Yu was banished in the 9th century from the Chinese Central Plain by the emperor to become governor of Teochew (at that time a frontier region of the Tang empire), he discovered the Teochew diet of oysters and other exotic seafood and was so fascinated that he composed the poem “Helpful Verses for Yuan Shiba Introducing Food in the South” 《初南食貽元十八協律》to inform his friend Yuan Shiba about them. In what was the prolific poet’s first and only poem with food as the subject, he noted how the Teochews enjoyed food prepared with salty and sour condiments, and dipped in pepper salt, pepper oil and orange sauce (but made him burst into sweat and turned his face red), and confessed that apart from the snake, everything they ate were new to him. For the Teochew people however, the appearance of oysters in our diet traces back even much further.

One day in the late 1950s, an archaeological team from the Guangdong Administrative Committee for Cultural Heritage made an unexpected finding when they chanced upon a shell mound in the remote village of Chenqiao (陳橋), some two kilometres west of Teochew city. Composed of tens of thousands of marine shells, including oyster and clam, it stood at a fairly remarkable height of 1.4 metres. The villagers did not think much of the derelict heap, but for the trained archaeologists this was a treasure trove. Found in many parts of the world near coastlines, lagoons, tidewater flats, rivers and streams, shell middens are not random formations but cultural deposits created by our human forefathers during their transition from the hunter-gathering to sedentary lifestyle 4,000 to 10,000 years ago. As they adapted to living in more confined spaces, their diet was diversified to encompass all everything edible within reach, and shellfish that can be easily collected from shallow waters became an important food source.  

And right on cue, investigations at the Chenqiao site unearthed more skeletal remains of cow, pig, deer, fish and turtle (i.e. prehistoric dinner leftovers), and a range of man-made stone and bone tools such as adzes, hatchets, choppers, hammers, pries (for opening the oyster shells) and pottery shards. Even more exciting was the discovery of the fossilised remains of ten human beings, dubbed later by local archaeologists as the “Chenqiao people”. Unfortunately little information has been published about them. Apart from the estimation of their age to be 5,500 and 6,000 years old, it is also reported they included male and female, and young and old, suggesting they were members of a family.

So the next time when you pick up a pair of chopsticks to eat a plate of or-luak, know that you are not indulging in good food, but also continuing a tradition, the Teochew family tradition.

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The online Teochew community has been abuzzed in recent weeks with the jingle “Teochew nang 潮州人, Gaginang 家己人, hey-o, hey-o” sung to the tune of Jambalaya. Simple as the lyrics may be, the ear-catcher produced by the Singapore Teochew Poit Ip Huay Kuan has tugged the heartstrings in many of us.

Gaginang, meaning “(my/our) own people”, is an expression all too familiar for Teochews all over the world. No matter who we are or where we come from, once spoken, it melts away every barrier standing between us and a fellow Teochew.  Besides being the name of a popular website dedicated to the promotion Teochew culture, it is said that Gaginang was in the past the “codeword” that gets you out of trouble if you were ever so unfortunate to be caught in one of the fights of the notorious Teochew triad in Hong Kong.

While we may now have a laugh, the Gaginang identity was formed as result of much pain and hardship, revealed in the full maxim “Teochew-nang, Gaginang, pah-si bho-siang-gang 潮州人, 家己人, 拍死無相干". Literally it means “Teochew people, own people, beat (each other) to death and (it) does not matter”. Although this can be interpreted as “we are together as a people, no matter what happens”, there is still plenty to ponder as to why the idea of beating up one another, to death, even crossed the minds of our forefathers?

Surprising as it sounds, the notion of Gaginang is actually fairly recent. Traditionally the Teochew society was divided in tight-knit clans completely protective of its own members, but distrustful of everyone else. Marriages were seldom arranged with families beyond the next adjacent village. This created an explosive environment during the Qing dynasty when imperial oppression and corruption reduced Teochew prefecture to extreme poverty and lawlessness, and turned the clans and alliances of clans against one another.  The eye witness account of John Scarth who visited Teochew in 1856 reveals an era of widespread fighting and kidnapping that forced the building of walls sixteen to twenty feet high for defence against neighbouring villages not of a quarter of mile in distant. Some four decades later, John Thomson was even told of a gruesome tale of a prisoner in the clan feud having his heart cut out, boiled and eaten. 

The Teochews who ventured to Southeast Asia in search of livelihood on the other hand, could afford no such “luxury”. Away in foreign land and separated from their family network, they could only seek companionship and support from fellow Teochew emigrants, who were the only ones who spoke the same language and understood their needs. In places where even the other groups of Chinese were hostile, unity was the sole key to survival. This common experience of diaspora had a healing effect on the fractious tribe, and by the turn of the 20th century the Teochews overseas had learned to see beyond parochial clan interests.

The Teochew prefecture was struck by a series of natural disasters in the early 1900s, including the Swatow Typhoon that took away more than 100,000 lives in 1922. Overcoming their differences from the past, thousands of Teochews abroad from all districts and social classes pulled together their resources to provide aid and relief to victims in the homeland. In areas where local government officials were incapacitated or simply incompetent, directors of the Teochew association in Shanghai stepped in to provide much needed leadership. The recovery of Swatow was swift. When nations across the globe were embroiled in depression in the 1930s, the city’s port was the path of growth to become the third largest in China, after only Shanghai and Guangzhou. This was the moment in history when the world discovered the strength of the Gaginang spirit – a spirit based on sacrificial giving and caring of all Teochews as one big family, a spirit we will do well to carry on with.

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Finding a place is usually less of a challenge than locating the people we want to find.

Villages in Teochew are typically inhabited by one, or just a few, surname-clan(s). At the same time, they are of fairly large population size of up to several thousands. In other words, most people in a neighbourhood are related in one way or another by blood or marriage. Thus turning up at the place of your ancestry looking for “fifth uncle of the Tan family” can be a futile exercise if you do not do your homework.

To ensure the success of your root-finding mission, you need to have an idea of your family tree and structure, and gather other details, such as the year your parents/grandparents left overseas, in order to identify the correct kin, or more aptly get yourself recognised. Old family photos or letters are of course most useful. Full Chinese names of your direct relatives are another critical piece of information, as the middle characters by tradition denote the generation of a particular lineage line.  

The best spot to begin your enquiries on the ground is the clan ancestral hall (called祠堂 sêu têung in Teochew), which functions as the “memory bank” of the village. In its absence, go to the local marketplace as this is where virtually all families are represented. Because Teochew villages tend to be tight-knit communities, it could well be a matter of minutes before you find yourself drinking tea in the company of your long-lost relatives.  

Anecdotes similar to a scene in the 1989 movie Eight Taels of Gold (shot partially in Teochew), where Sammo Hung starring as a Chinese immigrant taxi driver from New York was thoroughly fleeced of his wealth by a whole village of relatives on his homecoming, has caused much anxiety over what to expect when we meet our relatives in Teochew.

If you plan to go back to your village just to take some photographs as souvenir, you might leave feeling emptier inside than before. Seeking to relate is the whole point of roots-finding. While circumstances vary for individual families, it is safe to say that on the whole economic condition in the Teochew region has improved drastically since the 1990s, and possible harassment by “poor cousins” should no longer be a major worry. By custom, Teochew people are extremely hospitable towards their guests, and their obligation towards kin and kith is even more complete. So chances are, you will be made to receive even more than what you have in mind to give.

What should we say, and how should we behave, when meeting dozens of relatives for the first time? These are serious questions for overseas-born Teochews to consider, especially if we are brought up in highly Westernised environments.  One misstep may just ruin the first impression we give.

For starters, being able to handle at least simple exchanges in Teochew language helps to break the ice, for few people in Teochew are comfortable with Mandarin in the family setting. Speak English only when you wish to murmur to yourself. Be ready also to share plenty of family stories, but be prepared to listen to even more. Do not be overawed when more than one person tries excitedly to engage in conversation with you at the same time, for this is way people in the villages, especially the elderly, interact in everyday life. Keep smiling.

Stay reminded also, that the Teochew society is not composed of individuals, but lots of people organised within set family structures. Observance of generation status, birth order and gender are inherent in the manner in which people relate to one another. Always show respect to elders and thoughtfulness to the young. Lastly, make sure you are well-versed with the different family addresses before you meet your clan – it will come in handy!

Read also: 

• Roots-Finding: Locating Your Ancestral Village in Teochew (Part 1)
• Roots-Finding: Locating Your Ancestral Village in Teochew (Part 3)