Taishanese, not Cantonese, was the language of old San Francisco and New York Chinatowns. The county that sent them is an hour from Guangzhou, and its fortified towers were paid for with remittances.
Here’s a fact that surprises most people, including many Chinese Americans: for roughly a century, the language of North America’s Chinatowns was not Cantonese. It was Taishanese — Hoisan-wa — the dialect of one county in southwest Guangdong.
The reason is emigration at extraordinary concentration. From the mid-19th century — the California gold rush, then the transcontinental railroad, then laundries, restaurants and grocery stores — a very large share of Chinese arrivals in the United States and Canada came from Taishan and the neighbouring counties of the Siyi. The exclusion-era community that formed in San Francisco, New York and Vancouver was, to a first approximation, a Taishanese community.
What the money built
Emigrants sent money home, and the remittances reshaped the county. The most visible result is the diaolou — multi-storey fortified towers standing in the middle of rice fields.
They were built mostly between the 1890s and the 1930s, funded from abroad, and they served two functions: defence against the banditry that plagued the region in the late Qing and Republican years, and display. Their design is genuinely hybrid — reinforced concrete and iron shutters, gun ports and overhanging corner turrets, topped with whatever the returning owner had seen overseas: Roman colonnades, Gothic arches, Byzantine domes, Islamic keel arches. Some are startling. All of them are strange.
The neighbouring county of Kaiping holds the UNESCO-inscribed cluster — Kaiping Diaolou and Villages, listed in 2007 — with the highest concentration and the best-preserved interiors, notably the Zili village group and Ruishi lou. Taishan has its own towers, less curated and often standing alone in a field with nobody at all around.
Diaolou in the Taishan countryside — built with money earned overseas
The villages
Beyond the towers, this is Cantonese rural country: paddy, fish ponds, banyan trees, ancestral halls, and the mild delta climate.
What makes it distinctive is that half the families here have relatives abroad, often for four or five generations. Returning descendants come to find village records, ancestral halls and family houses, and the local archives exist substantially for that purpose. If your family came from here, this is where the paper trail is.
The influence went both directions. Village festivals combine long-standing ritual with customs brought back from abroad, houses were built to designs from San Francisco, and there are villages where the money for the school, the road and the clinic all came from overseas.
Eating
Taishanese food is homely rather than refined — this isn’t Shunde. Seafood off the nearby coast, rice congee, stir-fried seasonal greens, salted fish, and the mild, sweet-savoury register that Cantonese cooking uses when it isn’t performing.
Worth noting for anybody who grew up eating in an American Chinatown: a good deal of what you think of as Cantonese-American food traces to this county’s home cooking rather than to Guangzhou’s restaurants.
Practical notes
Getting there: Taishan is in Jiangmen prefecture, about two hours by road from Guangzhou, with rail to Jiangmen and bus onward. A hired car makes the villages and towers workable.
Do both counties: Kaiping for the UNESCO clusters and museum-standard interiors, Taishan for the emptier, more atmospheric version.
When: October to April. The delta summer is hot, humid and typhoon-prone.
Nearby: Guangzhou, Shunde, Macau — and, for the other end of the same story, the Quanzhou coast of Fujian, which sent its emigrants to Southeast Asia instead.
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