The Teochew identity has come alive in the social media age. With revived interest in the language and culture many overseas Teochews have embarked on “roots-finding” trips to Swatow. A growing number, young and old, are even considering the further step visit the village of their ancestral origin. But for some this is a challenging mission.

The vast majority of Teochews living abroad, if not all, are immigrants who left their homes before the 1960s, or their descendents. Because of long separation, many have lost contact with family members and relatives in Teochew and with the passing of the older generations, names and addresses can no longer be recalled. But even if the lines of inquiry with the elder folks are broken, there is still hope.

A peculiar character of the early Teochew emigrants is that they perceived themselves as sojourners, and always harboured hopes of returning home to the place where they or their fathers came from. For this reason their gravestones are almost always engraved with the names of their county and village of origin. Thus for those keen to find out where your Teochew roots lie exactly, paying a visit to the grave(s) of deceased relatives can yield invaluable information.

Notwithstanding great changes in China in the previous century, overseas Teochews maintain the convention of referring to local places in our ancestral homeland as they were during the late Qing dynasty period. Teochew was then governed as a now-defunct prefecture, which was sub-divided into eight counties, namely: 1. Hai-yor 海陽 2. Jaopeng 饒平 3. Thenghai 澄海 4. Teo-yor 潮陽 5. Gek-yor 揭陽 6.Pholeng 普寧 7.Huilai 惠来 and 8.Hongsun 豐順. These are often reflected on the gravestones in the following shortened form: 1.海邑 2. 饒邑 3.澄邑 4.潮邑 5.揭邑 6.普邑 7.惠邑 and 8.豐邑. (The word Ip 邑 refers to “county”.)

Hai-yor was renamed Teo-an 潮安 in 1914 and it encompasses also the Teochew prefectural city, now called Chaozhou. Although many overseas Teochews recall that their forefathers left overseas from Swatow, it is rare for a person to trace his/her ancestral origin to Swatow itself. This is because even though Swatow was the most important port and centre of commerce in Teochew in the early 1900s, it was merely a settlement of less than 5,000 inhabitants under Thenghai county before it became a Treaty Port after the Second Opium War in 1860.

The old Teochew prefecture area is currently administered under the three prefectural-level cities Teochew (Chaozhou), Swatow (Shantou) and Gek-yor (Jieyang), each further divided into multiple municipal districts and counties-towns-villages. The table below shows the historical Teochew sub-divisions (names in Teochew transliteration and traditional Chinese) and their modern equivalent(s) (names in hanyu pinyin and simplified Chinese):

Contrary to the perception of some, local communities in Teochew are highly resilient and the majority of them remain intact despite recent decades of rapid economic and social transformations.

Once you have the name of your ancestral village from the gravestone(s) or other sources, you can try to locate them on Baidu Map. Be mindful that the inscriptions on the gravestones are usually in traditional Chinese characters and you need to convert them to simplified Chinese. Also the Teochew term for village hie 鄉 is now replaced by the modern standard Chinese character ceng 村. If you are looking for a place in Hai-yor/Teo-an that is not indicated by village 鄉, but by the word hang 巷, it is very like to be a street within the old prefectural city. For your online searches, replace 巷 with the current equivalent goi 街.

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