Until the end of the eighteenth century, a majority of the emigrants from China originated from Fujian, a province with a rugged coast-line and a tradition of building boats for fishing and seafaring. The encyclopedic Shan Hai jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), an eclectic two-millennia-old compendium of the known world, states: “Fujian exists in the sea with mountains to the north and west”, Min zai haizhong, qi xibei you shan. With limited arable land to support a growing population, the Fujianese turned to the neighboring sea, using small boats for fishing and seagoing junks for distant trade to the Nanyang where they exchanged manufactured wares for food staples. “The fields are few but the sea is vast; so men have made fields from the sea” is how an 1839 gazetteer from Fujian’s port city of Xiamen viewed the maritime opportunities afforded its struggling population during the last century of the Qing dynasty (Cushman, 1993: iii).
Referred to collectively as Hokkien, the local pronunciation of the place-name Fujian, the homelands of migrants can be readily subdivided in terms of at least three main dialects found in areas to the south of the Min River in this complex and fragmented province. Called Minnan or “south of the Min River” dialects, each is a variant of the others and is centered on one of the area’s three major ports: Quanzhou, Xiamen, and Zhangzhou. Although the three dialects are mutually intelligible to some degree, and are spoken in geographic locations that are relatively near to one another, the speakers of these dialects traditionally have seen themselves as belonging to distinct local cultures with dissimilar mores. In neighboring Guangdong province, another source region for significant numbers of migrants to the Nanyang, are other dialect-based communities: Chaozhou (Teochew, also Teochiu) and Hainan hua (Hainanese), which are also in the family of Minnan dialects, as well as Kejia (Hakka) and, farther west, those who speak Guangdong hua (Cantonese). One characteristic shared by all of these groups is that they occupy areas either adjacent to or connected by short rivers reaching the Taiwan Strait that connects the East China Sea and the South China Sea.
These simple plans reveal the characteristic forms of residences found throughout Fujian. The white areas indicate the variety of tianjing, skywells that open up the buildings to air, light, and water.
Elongated two-storey urban residences in Guangdong include multiple skywells, narrow corridors, steep stairs, and stacked rooms.
Along the Fujian–Guangdong coast, there are countless areas that are known in the vernacular as qiaoxiang, literally “home township of persons living abroad.” The term qiaoxiang was used in the nineteenth century to apply not only to sojourners, temporary residents who were abroad, but also to those who had been away for generations. Those Chinese who left China were referred to as Huaqiao, a capacious term often translated as “overseas Chinese,” but essentially meaning “Chinese living abroad.” “Overseas Chinese” itself historically has been a descriptor of considerable elasticity, applying not only to those temporarily abroad but also to those who are Chinese by ethnicity but have no actual connection with China. Guiqiao, indicating those Chinese who returned from abroad, and qiaojuan, indicating the dependants of Chinese who are abroad, are expressions still heard today. Qiaoxiang, as “emigrant communities,” traditionally were bound by social, economic, and psychological bonds in which emigration became a fundamental and ongoing aspect of country life. While poverty and strife may have induced earlier out-migration, over time migration chains create a tradition of going abroad that propels outward movement. In some ways, overseas sites arose as outposts of the qiaoxiang itself, linked to it by back and forth movements of people and remittances of funds to sustain those left behind. Indeed, as Lynn Pan reminds us, “emigrant communities are not moribund. The men might be gone but, collectively and cumulatively, they send plenty of money back. Many home societies have a look of prosperity about them, with opulent modern houses paid for with remittances by emigrants who have made good abroad” (2006: 30).
As later chapters will reveal, individual qiaoxiang are linked with specific locations in Southeast Asia, indeed throughout the world. Emigrants from the Siyi or Four Districts of Guangdong province on the west side of the Pearl River, for example, favored migrating to the goldfields and railroad construction opportunities in California. Farther east and clustered around the port of Shantou, once known in English as Swatow, those who spoke the Chaozhou dialect sailed to Siam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Kejia or Hakka from the uplands beyond Shantou, and accessible to it via the Han River, spread themselves widely. The area between Xiamen and Quanzhou, more than other areas in Fujian, fed the migrant streams throughout Southeast Asia. Jinjiang, once a county-level administrative area just to the south of the port of Quanzhou, not only looms large as the homeland of countless migrants throughout Asia, it is the ancestral home of over 90 percent of those of Chinese descent in the Philippines. Each of these distinct qiaoxiang areas is noted for its own variant forms of vernacular architecture, which explains in at least a limited sense many of the differences in the residences built by migrants in their adopted places of residence. The section below highlights some of the common features among these vernacular traditions, while later chapters will reveal some of the differences.
Old Homes Along China’s Coast
Chinese dwellings throughout the country share a range of common elements even as it is clear that there are striking regional, even sub-regional, architectural styles. Given China’s vast extent, approximately the size of the United States and twice that of Europe, it should not be surprising that there are variations to basic patterns that have arisen as practical responses to climatic, cultural, and other factors. While there is no single building form that can be called “a Chinese house,” there are shared elements in both the spatial composition and building structure of both small and grand homes throughout the country. In addition, Chinese builders have a long history of environmental awareness in selecting sites to maximize or evade sunlight, capture prevailing winds, avoid cold winds, facilitate drainage, and collect rainwater. Details of these similarities and differences are considered at length in some of my other books (Knapp, 2000; 2005).
Adjacent open and enclosed spaces are axiomatic features in Chinese architecture, whether the structure is a palace, temple, or residence. Usually referred to in English as “courtyards” and in Chinese as yuanzi, open spaces vary in form and dimension throughout China and have a history that goes back at least 3,000 years. Courtyards emerged first in northern China and then diffused in variant forms as Chinese migrants moved from region to region over the centuries. The complementarity of voids, apparent emptiness, and enclosed solids is metaphorically expressed in the Dao De Jing, the fourth-century bce work attributed to Laozi: “We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel: But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends. We turn clay to make a vessel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends. We pierce doors and windows to make a house; And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends. Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the usefulness of what is not” (Waley, 1958: 155).
While sometimes what is considered a courtyard is simply an outdoor space, a yard, at the front of a dwelling, a fully formed courtyard must be embraced by at least two buildings. Two, three, or four structures along the side of a courtyard create an L-shaped, inverted U-shaped, or quadrangular-shaped building type. Nelson Wu called such a composition a “house–yard” complex, with the encircling walls creating an “implicit paradox of a rigid boundary versus an open sky” (1963: 32). The