Talk:Taishan, Guangdong

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Sei yap dialect[edit]

A recent change says the Taisanese people speak a dialect called 'sei yap'. I kind of disagree to this change. Sei yap (四邑 literally means 4 townships) refers to the four towns in that region where taisan is one of the four (開平 Hoi ping,恩平 Yun ping,新會 Sun Wui,臺山 Taisan). I believe the dialects from all these towns are almost identical but still there are local variations. So sei yap is just a collective terms for these four slightly different dialects, it is a loss of details when you say Taisanese people speak sei yap. Likewise, when you change "Cantonese people speak Cantonese dialect" to "Cantonese people speak Chinese dialect", it is the similar kind of problem, it is still technically correct, but not as good.

Discussion on that area in Chinese

By the way, the native (i.e. local) taisanese pronounciation of the name "tai san" should be "hoi san". So it is appropriate to use its pinyin spelling as the title of the article?--

To directly above: No. Standard Hanyu Pinyin (based on the Beijing dialect) should be used for the title of this article. It's the standard across all of mainland China to simplify the myriad dialects. People shouldn't have to search for a name based on how its said in only a small section of the country, It should be rendered as Tai Shan or Taishan. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.69.46.240 (talk) 21:40, 26 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Kowloonese 00:52, 22 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Why the lopsidedness?[edit]

Because it is estimated that over 75% of all overseas Chinese until the mid- to late-20th century claimed origin in Taishan, the city is also known as the "Home of Overseas Chinese."

I think it is a good topic to expand on. Why almost all early Chinese emmigrants were from the Sei Yap region? What was the historical and/or economical reason behind such biased statistics?

I heard from my parents that Sei Yap was a very poor region compared to the prosperous Canton. So the relatively well-off city people stayed in China and the village people from Sei Yap "sold" themselves to the labor force that worked on the railroad in the US near the end of the 19th century. There was a Cantonese slang called "selling piglets" which refered to the long term labor contracts to work in the US railroads and gold mines. The men received a sum of money from some labor dealer. They left the money to their family and then worked in the US not expecting to return. Many settled down in the US after their labor contracts were fulfilled. Then the Chinese Exclusion Act stopped the flow of Chinese immigrants for generations. Those who were already in the US form communities of mostly Taisaneses. The distribution didn't change until the lift of the exclusion act. The iron curtain of communist China limited Chinese emmigrants to those from Hong Kong and Taiwan until the flood gate opened in the 1970s after Nixon visited China. So the distribution of Chinese immigrants in the US were shaped by three waves, namely the early Railroad/Goldrush wave, and two other recent waves with and without the communist iron curtain. Most old Chinatowns in the US still have a high concentration of Taisanese. The Cantonese and the Mandarin people usually form communities outside of the old Chinatowns.

See also Chinese immigration to the United States

Can someone research more and write about this topic?

Kowloonese 02:02, 22 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently, this was due to the Punti–Hakka Clan Wars that occurred in Guangdong, China between 1855 and 1867. Most of the fighting took place around the Toi Shan of the Sze Yup counties. I would need to research this topic some more to be confident enough to edit the article about it, but if I am not mistaken, this would mean that most of the people in the first wave of Asian immigrants to the United States were also the first wave of refugees to the United States (greater than at least 200,000). So not only were the first 300,000 Chinese-Americans attracted to the United States due to physical labor opportunities, but most of them left due to an immigration push factor in their home country. Voluntari Tau (talk) 23:07, 29 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hsu (2000)[edit]

You can certainly find the answers to many of your questions in this book and the references included therein:

  • Hsu, Madeleine Y. (2000). Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882-1943. Stanford University Press. ISBN 080-473-814-9.

This book certainly cleared up many speculations that have swirled around in my family. I haven't read it for a few years, but maybe I'll take another glance sometime soon and expand the article accordingly.

Aaron Lee 18:44, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Adrienne Clarkson[edit]

The Adrienne Clarkson in Wiki says she is Hakka. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.161.63.5 (talk) 01:04, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Anna May Wong[edit]

Need to determine in which part of Taishan the village of Chang On is located (as well as characters). Anna May Wong's father came from there, and it was apparently located very close to Wing On. The second character for both is probably 安. Badagnani (talk) 23:17, 31 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 12 April 2018[edit]

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: consensus to move the disambiguation page to Taishan and the city page to Taishan, Guangdong per the discussion below. Dekimasuよ! 22:30, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]


– The city is not the primary topic. Roughly half of the Google results for "Taishan" refer to Mount Tai, e.g. Denver Post/Associated Press: "China’s mountains: Huangshan and Taishan". UNESCO calls the mountain Mount Taishan: [1]. Page views are about the same: [2]. Neither Lushan City nor Huangshan City (which shared names with famous mountains) occupies the primary topic position. Unlike Lushan City and Huangshan City, however, Taishan City is not named after a mountain, so the baseline should be a disambiguation page, like the German, French, Norwegian, Dutch, and Cebuano Wikipedias. Timmyshin (talk) 14:49, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.
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