Our Ancestral Home

Chock Chin was born on 19 November 1865.  He was well born to an aristocratic bloodline–a direct descendant of the ruling house of the ancient State of Chu.  He was born where his family had lived for hundreds of years, in Koon Tong (now called Guan Tang) village which is in the subdistrict of Kung Sheong Doo in the district (county) of Heong Shan (name changed to Chungshan in 1925) in Kwangtung (now called Guangdong) province. It is the area colorized pink on the map below. 

You will find our ancestral village on modern maps as Guan Tang Village官塘村, located in Zhu Hai City珠海市。 Here’s the Google Map to it.

Evolving Place Names

Here’s a short look at the long story of how this one place name has changed over the vast stretch of Chinese history.  It will help you understand why it is so hard for descendants raised outside China to find their their ancestral village on a modern map. 

“Guǎng” (simplified Chinese: 广; traditional Chinese: 廣) means “expanse” or “vast”, and has been associated with the region since the creation of Guang Prefecture in AD 226.

“Guangdong” and neighbouring Guangxi literally mean “expanse east” and “expanse west”. Together, Guangdong and Guangxi are called Loeng gwong (Liangkwang; traditional Chinese: 兩廣; simplified Chinese: 两广; pinyin: liǎng guǎng; Cantonese Yale: léuhng gwóng; literally: “Two Expanses”).

During the Song dynasty, the Two Guangs were formally separated as Guǎngnán Dōnglù (traditional Chinese: 廣南東路; simplified Chinese: 广南东路; literally: “vast south east region”) and Guǎngnán Xīlù (traditional Chinese: 廣南西路; simplified Chinese: 广南西路; literally: “vast south west region”), which became abbreviated as Guǎngdōng Lù (traditional Chinese: 廣東路; simplified Chinese: 广东路) and Guǎngxī Lù (traditional Chinese: 廣西路; simplified Chinese: 广西路).

“Canton”, though etymologically derived from Cantão (the Portuguese transliteration of “Guangdong”), refers only to the provincial capital instead of the whole province, as documented by authoritative English dictionaries. The local people of the city of Guangzhou (Canton) and their language are called Cantonese in English.

Learn more about it at Wikipedia.

Within the Guangdong province (similar to a state), the family lived in the district (or county) of Heong Shan (sometimes spelled Xiangshan or Heung-San).   According to Wikipedia:

Until 1925, Zhongshan was generally known as Xiangshan or Heung-san (Chinese: 香山; literally: “Fragrant Mountain”), in reference to the many flowers that grew in the mountains nearby. The city was renamed in honor of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who had adopted the name Zhongshan. Sun is considered by both the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China to be the “Father of Modern China“, and was from Cuiheng village – now part of Nanlang Town in Zhongshan.

 

 

Hilo Wharf – 1890

Bamboo slips holding early family records

China in 1865

Writing our Chinese Surname

The Hanzi (Chinese character) for our Chock surname is 卓.  We are, it seems, part of a rare breed.  As of 2008 this was the 224th most common surname in China out of the top 300 surnames — shared by only 360,000 people.  By 2020 it was down to 277th.  

By way of comparison, here’s the top 20 list from the Ministry of Public Security in China in 2022.  

  1. 王 (Wáng): 101.5 Million
  2. 李 (Lǐ): 100.9 Million
  3. 张 (Zhāng): 95.4 Million
  4. 刘 (Liú): 72.1 Million
  5. 陈 (Chén): 63.3 Million
  6. 杨 (Yáng): 46.2 Million
  7. 黄 (Huáng): 33.7 Million
  8. 赵 (Zhào): 28.6 Million
  9. 吴 (Wú): 27.8 Million
  10. 周 (Zhōu): 26.8 Million
  11. 徐 (Xú): 20.2 Million
  12. 孙 (Sūn): 19.4 Million
  13. 马 (Mǎ): 19.1 Million
  14. 朱 (Zhū): 18.1 Million
  15. 胡 (Hú): 16.5 Million
  16. 郭 (Guō): 15.8 Million
  17. 何 (Hé): 14.8 Million
  18. 林 (Lín): 14.2 Million
  19. 罗 (Luó): 14.2 Million
  20. 高 (Gāo): 14.1 Million

Everyone with the same name in China does not say it the same way. But they all write the same Hanzi for it. 

My surname is pronounced “Chock” in Cantonese — the language Chock Chin’s family spoke, and the language most Chinese in Hawaii still speak.  In Mandarin it is pronounced “Zhuo”.  Since Mandarin was made the official language of China about 60 years ago, the current residents of Guan Tang Village now speak Mandarin in official public settings and Cantonese among friends and family.  Our friend in the village is called Zhuo Bing Quan, not Chock Bing Quan. 

You can hear the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin, and learn more about it here. 

Here are the different ways our surname is pronounced in different places and languages.

The Chinese writing system is genius for permanent written records that can be understood by everyone for thousands of years. 

If you are looking for your family history in China, the Hanzi for your surname clan is essential.  It is the only definitive way to spell your immigrant ancestor’s clan name. 

The written language has endured for millennia as a readable text across a vast continent full of tribes and cultures and evolving language variants precisely because it does not depend on how it is pronounced to carry meaning.

This is the opposite of Western languages. We spell the sounds the words make. We teach our children to “sound them out” when they are learning to read new words. So if, for example, you don’t know the French word for wood, you can’t understand the meaning of ​le bois if you see it on a page or hear it spoken. But anyone in China will know that this written character 木 means wood — even though they might not understand what it means when they hear you say it your way. 

Why this matters

Unfortunately, Western records seldom used Hanzi spellings of  immigrant Chinese names.  That’s  where the trouble started for family historians yet to come. 

You can usually pinpoint the actual day when your family got marooned in the new world with no way back to your roots.  It’s the day you lost your Hanzi surname.

When a immigrant Chinese man stepped onto the wharf  in a new land, his name was changed by someone who needed to write it down in a way that people in that country could understand. So they asked his name and listened closely to his answer, and came up with a phonetic spelling that looked pretty close to the way it sounded to them. As if by magic, this altered the man’s legal name for the rest of his life, and created the last name his family would use forever.

It all made practical sense.  No other option seems possible.  But the impact was devastating to the connection of his unborn children and grandchildren to their place in China. Immediately this detached his descendants from their actual Hanzi surname — the key to thousands of years of beautifully detailed and preserved ancestral records.  Leaving them with a name that could deviate from one census or birth record to the next.  And might not be spelled like the names of relatives who came on other ships to other shores. 

As a result, it can be incredibly hard to piece together a coherent collection of source records that pertain to specific family members who migrated from China to Hawaii and California and other lands.