Chaoshan People: From Ancient Roots to Future Stars

A novelist from Chaoshan, a region in Guangdong province, China, explores how his ancestral home’s culture may uniquely prepare its people for interstellar migration. For centuries, people from Chaoshan have migrated across the globe, Southeast Asia, Europe, and North America, maintaining their dialect, cuisine, and religious practices.

The author observed this cultural persistence while working at Google and traveling in Shenzhen, realizing the region’s decentralized network of kinship and reciprocal obligations could translate to a successful off-world settlement. This cultural framework, built around ancestral halls, remittance letters (qiaopi), and local deities like Bo Gong, prioritizes maintaining human connection over rigid structures.

Unlike the Western trope of explorers severing ties with their past, Chaoshan migrants carried their culture with them, effectively transporting their homeland instead of leaving it behind. The author acknowledges a tension between preserving tradition and embracing change within the Chaoshan identity, calling it “Chaoshan futurism”, a blending of local customs with distant futures. He believes that these everyday cultural acts, like performing the Yingge dance or brewing kung fu tea, are the key to long-term cultural survival, something algorithms cannot replicate.