Jiangmen
Ancestral homeland of four million overseas Chinese across 107 countries — a mycorrhizal network that exported people for 160 years, then reversed to export manufactured goods.
Between the 1820s and 1979, Jiangmen's most valuable export was not goods but people. Nearly four million overseas Chinese trace their ancestry to this Pearl River Delta city and its surrounding Wuyi region, scattered across 107 countries and territories. They sent home qiaopi — remittance letters bundled with cash — that sustained families, built schools, and funded the fortified watchtowers that still punctuate the countryside. UNESCO inscribed 160,000 surviving qiaopi letters on its Memory of the World register in 2013. Roughly 50,000 of them originated in Jiangmen.
Kaiping's diaolou — over 1,800 fortified towers blending Chinese and Western architecture — were funded entirely by overseas remittances, built by families who had never left the village but whose sons worked in San Francisco, Kuala Lumpur, and Sydney. UNESCO designated these towers a World Heritage Site in 2007. Jiangmen's most famous built heritage was financed by people who never lived there.
Nearly four million overseas Chinese across 107 countries trace their roots to Jiangmen — and the city's most famous buildings were funded by emigrants who never returned.
The remittance flow reversed. Modern Jiangmen generates ¥421 billion ($58 billion) in GDP through manufacturing — motorcycles, household appliances, stainless steel, food processing — and its port is the second largest river port in Guangdong province. But the city sits in the metabolic shadow of the Greater Bay Area's eastern giants: Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Dongguan absorb talent and investment that might otherwise flow west. Jiangmen ranks seventh in Guangdong by GDP, a mid-table position for a city with two UNESCO designations.
Mycorrhizal fungi connect different tree species across a forest floor, shuttling phosphorus, water, and chemical signals through underground networks that span hectares. Jiangmen's diaspora functioned as the city's mycorrhizal network: qiaopi carried cash in one direction and chain migration contacts, marriage partners, and cultural identity in the other — a bidirectional exchange connecting 107 countries to a single origin point. The system operated for 160 years before the Chinese government absorbed its functions into the Bank of China in 1979. The formal infrastructure died. The cultural mycelium persists.