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Geography of Chinese Emigration

A majority of early Chinese immigrants to Canada came from Guangdong Province in South China's Pearl River Delta . The emigrants came mainly from two districts in the province, San Yi (the Four Counties) and Si Yi (the Three Counties) as seen in the maps and table below. The provincial capital city, Guangzhou (Canton) was located in Panyu County, San Yi District.

The table below lists the two districts and their constituent counties. There were also significant numbers of immigrants from counties in other districts. The Pinyin names are based on the preferred system used today to romanize Mandarin. However, people who lived in the Pearl River Delta spoke Cantonese. Due to dialectical variations, occurrences of county names in historical records may not always completely match the local Cantonese forms shown below. Moreover, attempts by Canadian immigration officials to record place names on documents such as head tax certificates may have produced results of questionable reliability. When examining place names associated with your family, therefore, do not expect absolute consistency in spelling and romanization.

	Pinyin Mandarin	Local Cantonese Form	Chinese characters
			Traditional	Simplified
Province	Guangdong	Kwangtung
District	Si Yi	Sze-Yap
(4 Counties Group)	Xinhui	Sun Wui
	Kaiping	Hoi-Ping
	Taishan	Toi-Shan
	Enping	Yin-Ping
District	San Yi	Sam-Yap
(3 Counties Group)	Nanhai	Nam-Hoi
	Panyu	Poon-Yue
	Shunde	Sun-Dak
Other Districts In addition to the counties situated in Si Yi and San Yi Districts, significant numbers of Chinese immigrants came from counties in other districts:
Counties	Zhongshan
	Baoan
	Zengcheng
	Dongguang
	Heshan
	Sanshui