Trying to find Chinese village "Sung Sang" in the "Sam Suey District"?

Question

My grandfather's Angel Island (Port of San Francisco) immigration records indicate he came from this village. I know it is in the Pearl River area, Southern China. An old uncle said it meant "three rivers". I haven't been able to locate the area. It was stated grandfather's dialect was the "Sam Suey District dialect". The transliteration may be problematic. Any help or suggests is greatly appreciated. Grandfather arrived in America around 1899.

Answer 1

Most of the Chinese in America traditionally did come from the Pearl River Delta. In Hawaii, they come from Zhongshan (Chungshan, "Middle Mountain") famous as the home of Sun Yat-Sen, who also lived in Hawaii for a time. The Chinese in Washington, DC traditionally come from Taishan (Toishan, "Terraced Mountain"), farther west.

Sam Suey may refer to the Sham Shui Po District of the mainland portion of Hong Kong, but I don't think so.

"Three Waters" would be "San Shui" in Mandarin, and there seems to be a city (maybe more like a county) of about 120,000 called San Shui (Sam-shui) just west of Guangzhou (Canton). San Shui became a British "Treaty Port" a couple years before your grandfather arrived in California, so citizens involved in trade there would have more access to the outside world than most Chinese of the period. Your grandfather may have jumped at the very first chance he had to leave China on a merchant ship.

It is a place where several rivers converge: the Xi Jiang (Hsi Chiang or "West River"), the Bei Jiang (Pei Chiang, North River), and the Sam Shui Reach, a very short section with three main tributaries: Hsi Nan Chi (Xinan Ji, possible Southwest River), the Fatshan Branch, and a smaller stream.

San Shui District is difficult to find on many maps, but its administrative center is "Xinan", and it seems to be labelled "Hekou" ("River Mouth", one the areas within San Shui District) on Google Earth, where it is at about 23 degrees, 11 minutes North and 112 degrees 52 minutes East. The built-up area of Xinan is actually clearly visible on Google Earth, just east of the red dot labelled "Hekou".

I did find San Shui/Sam-shui on the old US Army topo map (circa 1954) linked below (through the excellent map library at the Univerity of Texas), about "one square up and six squares left" of the city Guangzhou (Canton), near the bottom of the map.

I'm fairly sure San Shui/Sam-shui is your district. The village might be too small to even show up on this map. Also, with a braided river meandering across a plain, there's a small but significant chance that Sung Sang may be underwater by now.

It may be that the village is on the map, but its pronunciation got lost in the translation. What I mean is this map was probably translated from Chinese characters using the Wade-Giles romanization of the Mandarin (National or Northern Chinese dialect) pronunciation, rather than attempting to spell the local Canotonese dialect. Some Cantonese words are very similar to the Mandarin equivalent (Sam-shui for San Shui), and some are not (Hong Kong for Xiang Gang).

The third link below is a map of the Foshan (Fatshan) Prefecture in Chinese characters. If you know someone who speaks Cantonese and reads Simplified characters (those used by the the PRC for the past several decades), they may be able to find a placename on here that sounds like Sung Sang. The modern San Shui District is the green area within the thick purple line. Keep in mind that internal political boundaries like these may have changed a great deal in the past century.

The two maps are huge graphic files. Depending upon how your computer handles big graphics, you may need to click on the lower right hand corner to zoom in enough to read the names. I don't know about printing these on a normal printer, either.

That was fun! I got to use my China expertise, my geography and cartography skills for a genealogical cause. How often does that happen?

Answer 2

Well this is really hard as Chineese names are translated phonetically, Zhu Jiang looks like it fit with your description

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_River_(China)

The Perl River is formed by 3 large rivers, and (too me) phonetically many of the names mentioned in the link above sound like it could be the place you are talking about.