Shantou Museum is the place to put the city into context before wandering the port streets. Exhibits cover local history, Teochew culture, overseas migration, folk arts, and the city's rise as a treaty port.
The museum is useful precisely because Shantou's story is regional and diasporic: families here sent relatives to Thailand, Singapore, Cambodia, and beyond, and those connections still shape the city's food, language, and sense of itself.