Taishan Overseas Chinese Museum

The Taishan Overseas Chinese Museum, in Taicheng city centre, covers the history of emigration from this county to North America, Southeast Asia, and Australia. The exhibits trace the journey from nineteenth-century Pearl River Delta poverty to the construction of Chinatowns from San Francisco to Vancouver, through the exclusion acts, the money flowing back as remittances, and the gradual decline of the Taishanese language after immigration reform in the 1960s opened America to immigrants from across China.

The collection includes photographs of emigrant villages before and after overseas money transformed them, letters written home in Taishanese, and objects that travelled back across the Pacific — American phonographs, Canadian mail order catalogues, Sears Roebuck goods that arrived in a Guangdong village in the 1920s. For visitors with any connection to Chinese-American history, the museum provides context that no Chinatown in North America can offer.

things to do museum
A story
At the peak of Chinese-American emigration, Taishanese was the dominant Chinese language in North American Chinatowns — not Cantonese, not Mandarin. The laundries, restaurants, and railroad construction gangs of the American West were largely operated by people from this one county. The museum makes this extraordinary demographic fact concrete with photographs, documents, and objects brought back or sent home across the Pacific.

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