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Post by rufus on Feb 5, 2014 17:49:21 GMT -5
Hi all, My wife's late parents were both from Kaiping. I'm trying to put together a book on them for our children. As part of the book I'd like to include a section on the history of Kaiping (Hoiping) and Guangdong. I've searched and found a few things but nothing more than passing references. I'm wondering if anyone has run across a book or article or website that reviews/discusses the history of Guangdong and includes the history of the Kaiping area. Has anyone run across anything along these lines? Thanks for taking the time to think about it. Cheers
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Post by laohuaqiao on Feb 5, 2014 20:28:53 GMT -5
In Chinese, there is the Annals of Kaiping County 开平县志 covering from 1573 when a village was founded as part of Enping to being formally established as Kaiping County in 1649 to 1999. 作者: 司徒星 / 余玉晃 出版社: 中华书局 出版年: 2002 页数: 1778 定价: 338.00 装帧: 精装 ISBN: 9787101035278 For a website, try the Kaiping government site, www.kaiping.gov.cn |
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Post by rufus on Feb 5, 2014 20:45:48 GMT -5
Thank you, laohuaqiao Unfortunately I don't read characters. I should have specified in English, if possible. I have tried the English version of the website english.kaiping.gov.cn/ in the past to no avail. But it's a good idea to look again Thanks again.
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Post by laohuaqiao on Feb 5, 2014 22:35:26 GMT -5
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Post by rufus on Feb 6, 2014 15:01:44 GMT -5
Thank you. I hadn't seen this before. Although it's primarily concerned with the diaolou it's an interesting read, does provide a bit of history and the bibliography may lead to some other finds. I was hoping to find specific information on life in the villages during the early to mid 1900s, history of the county, commentary on various times, disasters (including dates and other specifics) etc. Most of what I have read is the same, it glosses over any history, just saying that there were bandits or that there were famines or that there was conflict with other groups but doesn't give any specifics. How were the villages affected during the wars? There appears to be conflicting text on this, although it could be that some of the commentary has been from more isolated villages. I wish I'd been able to find out from my wife's parents but they really didn't want to talk about life in China at all. I respected their wish but.....now we have to do it this way. At any rate, thank you for the continued suggestions. They're all appreciated! |
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Post by Doug 周 on Feb 6, 2014 16:17:22 GMT -5
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Post by rufus on Feb 6, 2014 23:34:39 GMT -5
Thanks Doug, I hadn't seen this one before nor had I thought of Project Gutenberg. It should prove to be an interesting read. That got me thinking about archive.org and sure enough I found some books there. Here's a link to one, archive.org/details/villagetownlifei00lianrich entitled,"Village and Town Life in China" by Y K Leong and L K Tao copyright 1915. Although it won't be about life specifically in the Kwangtung area it too, should be an interesting read. Using various search terms at archive.org provided other older texts. At first glance none are on the Hoiping area but they might be useful. Thanks again for the link. |
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Post by Doug 周 on Feb 7, 2014 15:02:50 GMT -5
rufus,
I thank YOU. You gave me another resource to read. I have always been curious why our ancestors left their homeland. Like you, I want to know what their life was like during their diaspora
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Post by FayChee on Feb 7, 2014 21:16:12 GMT -5
Hello Rufus,
I was wondering if you would be kind enough to post your story about Kaiping after you have finished your research. I am like you...hungry for anything pertaining to my Ancestors homeland.
I went to the link you posted for the 1915 book, and learned something very interesting already!.......I had the role of the father all wrong.......
"The father, as far as the internal working of the family is concerned, retains merely a theoretical power. Thus it is the mother who generally decides such important questions as when the child is to begin schooling. She finds the bride or the husband for the children respectively, and arranges all the matters concerning their betrothals. She manages all the business of the home and directs all the social and extremely punctilious relations with friends and kin. She sees that all the ceremonies such as those of marriage, birth, and death, the proper degree of respect due from one member of the family to another, the regular keeping of festivals, etc., are duly observed according to the " Chia-li-pu," i.e., a book of family laws both moral and ceremonial peculiar to each family. Thus it is very far from the truth to imagine that in Chinese life the position of woman is low. On the contrary, woman occupies in our actual life a very exalted position. The mother of the family is on an equal footing with the father."
Up until now, I just assumed that it was my granddad that chose my dad's first wife and probably the adopted son....now I am thinking that perhaps it was my grandmother who did all of this and I know absolutely nothing about her. So my next project will be to dig for information about my grandma from anyone still alive who may have known about her.
Fay Chee
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Post by douglaslam on Feb 9, 2014 18:59:05 GMT -5
I agree with DJ for thanking rufus for "another resource to read." For a person like me, born in China before Mao's ascendance, I only have a notional knowledge of family and ancestral hall, the first two chapters of the book. The ancestral hall, which comes into our discussions often is dealt with in detail. I find precisely little in Chinese on the subject because it is taken for granted.Few people today could articulate the functions of a an ancestral hall as well as the author who wrote the book back in 1915."...it links oneself with a family greater than one's own, namely, the clan. He feels he is not alone...instinctive craving for the past, for one's origin..." is what draws us to this Board.
On pages 73 and 75, it states well what ancestor worship is all about and how it is misunderstood by outsiders. Ancestor worship is one of our strengths not understood , puzzled or even vilified by non-Chinese. This book is a gem.
Fay Chee, my grandmother was one such woman, though she may not have fulfilled all the roles mentioned. She could not read or write.
The traditional village and town life in China cannot sustain the relentless attack first under Mao, and now the march of progress. It was not allowed to ease into the 21st. century with modification and adjustment along the way. It was dragged screaming and kicking, resulting in a broken body which is hardly recognisable and may never recover..
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Post by rufus on Feb 11, 2014 20:04:00 GMT -5
Thanks for your comments. I haven't had a chance yet to review the book. I hope to in the next week or so once we're back home. I found Fay Chee and douglaslam's comments interesting with regards to the book and I think it will be quite beneficial. I certainly see my wife's late mother in some of the commentary that Fay Chee quoted. That's really neat. Fay Chee, certainly I would be willing to post. However, that may be a long time in coming. It's difficult to find resources/information so it's always good when people share. What may be of no use to one, can be very important to someone else. Having said that I'll post this link rootsinchina.blogspot.ca/2010/01/our-province.html Although from one individual's point of view I particularly appreciated some of the historical comments, local idioms and the drawing of the house and village. Although not the village of my wife's parents I'm sure the description and house would be quite similar. You need to go through each link 'our province', 'our county', 'our bo', 'our village', 'our house' etc on the right. An interesting observation about the transformation of the villages, douglaslam. The screaming and kicking analogy is quite likely the case with regards to many of the villages that have been swallowed up and losing (at least partially) their identity, making them more difficult to locate. Cheers, |
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Post by Doug 周 on Feb 12, 2014 13:14:25 GMT -5
This information and the enclosed diagrams are eerily similar to the coaching papers USA bound Chinese purchased and studied for passing the interview process to enter North America, usually via Angel Island. Dr Chiu (the autobiographer and author of the information) did not need coaching papers since he entered the USA in 1948, after the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act. I wonder if this information was taken from an archive based on his village. He was less than 14y/o when he left his village to live in Hong Kong. One can presume that this information, a source of income, was earlier sold to purchasers of paper sons connected to this village. I am not questioning the authenticity of the information. On the contrary, all coaching papers, while not representing fact for the individual paper sons, do represent an actual village. The information needs to be factual, since an American official is trying to cross check its veracity. The enlightenment for me is that whereas I initially downplayed the minutia of these coaching papers, these details are in fact glimpses into real village life of early 1900. |
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Post by rufusk on Apr 1, 2014 15:25:11 GMT -5
Hi all, Couple of things. First, Doug, you noted that the link posted earlier was 'eerily similar to coaching papers USA bound Chinese purchased..." Do you, or anyone else know, whether or not Chinese emigrants arriving in Victoria, or other places in Canada, in the early 1900s had to pass similar 'exam' type questions? i.e. were they subjected to the same type of vigorous immigration checks that have been posted for those arriving at Angel Island? If so, has anyone ever seen a set of these questions or were they the same as for the US? Do we know this for sure or is it speculation? FayChee, I have been slowly attempting to extrapolate some data but the more I found out about history in the Guangdong/Pearl River Delta/SiYi/Kaiping, the more I realize how little I know. I find it interesting, too, how one's perspective seem to sway their version of history but I guess it's no different than any other writing or country. This makes me wonder what I can trust as the 'truth' and what I can't. At any rate, I did find, for me at least, a very interesting link. It's a 2002 version of the Kaiping Annals. It's written in characters but if you set up Google Translate to automatically translate the page, you can get a readable version....albeit with interesting phrases. If you dig down through the links you can go back several centuries. Although it doesn't give everything it does list events that happened year by year, sometimes month by month, sometimes multiple things in a month, sometimes it skips things altogether. What I've be able to do is copy transliterated pages and save them in a Word document. Now I'm going through and figuring out what might be useful. In some cases I might find something of interest but the translation doesn't make a lot of sense (for example I still haven't found out where 'Rooster town' is and it comes up a lot; I note that the term 'bandit' is used a lot so I'm guessing it means more than our westernized version of bandit and so on). I have found some interesting things. One that comes to mind is that being in such a tropical locale they would never see freezing temperatures yet it's recorded, "Guangxu eighteen years ( AD 1892 )November 28 night, under the snow . A few days after ablation, froze a lot of pond fish" At any rate the link for the book is kps.gd-info.gov.cn/books/dtree/showbook.jsp?stype=v&paths=14783&siteid=kps&sitename=开平市地情网This may be old news to some of you but to me it was a real find. If you haven't seen it already...enjoy. Cheers Rufus |
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Post by lachinatown on Apr 1, 2014 18:55:16 GMT -5
Maps are good, except low resolution
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Post by laohuaqiao on Apr 1, 2014 20:48:31 GMT -5
Looks like it's the online version of the Annals of Kaiping I mentioned previously.
Rooster town is probably Golden Rooster Town Jinjizhen 金鸡镇.
Fending off bandits was a big concern in their daily lives. 2,000 to 3,000 fortress-like dialous were built in Kaiping within a span 30 to 50 years, and a similar number were built in Taishan, the adjacent county. My grandfather built his brick house with 1-foot thick outer walls. His bedroom overhangs the front entrance to the house, with a gunport on the bedroom floor over doorway. I don't know if any small town in American West had houses built like that.
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