Cantonese Pacific

The concept of the Cantonese Pacific is crucial to understanding the context of Chinese migration From the Pearl River Delta. It highlights that movement from Guangdong’s Cantonese-speaking regions was not simply a one-way journey from a home village, through Hong Kong, to destinations such as California or Sydney. Rather, it was part of a network of circulation linking Cantonese communities across the Pacific—California, Hawaii, and Australia—through networks of family, commerce, and shared district identities. Hong Kong served as a hub for this system, connecting the Pearl River Delta with the wider world. Historian Henry Yu has been especially influential in popularising the term Cantonese Pacific to capture this distinctive pattern. While the broader Chinese diaspora extended deep into Southeast Asia and beyond, the Cantonese Pacific world represents a distinctive sphere of interaction that flourished once Hong Kong emerged as the principal stepping stone between the Delta and the white settler nations of the Pacific.