About This Site
What this is
Chaoshanwiki is a digital knowledge base of Chaoshan folk custom and travel: festivals and rites, life-cycle ceremonies, god processions, dress and ritual craft across Chaozhou, Shantou and Jieyang, and alongside them the places worth the trip, the routes between them, and what to know before you go.
Two aims, plainly. Someone from outside should be able to see how a Chaoshan household keeps a festival, receives a guest, or works a piece of embroidery; someone from here should be able to look up the old usage their own family kept. Place pages carry no vague praise — what to look at, which hours to go, what to avoid. Local usage and the documentary record are kept in separate voices; where they disagree, both are set out.
Who runs it
Chujia Kuang (邝楚嘉), pen name Jiayan Yide, from Jieyang, Guangdong. Most of the writing, photography, checking and layout on this site is done by one person.
The Chaoshan material starts from home: growing up in Jieyang, seeing how a festival is kept, how a procession moves, how a batch of kueh is steamed, and only then going to the books. Prefectural gazetteers, county records, genealogies and field notes — whatever can be traced ends up on the page; where nothing can be traced, the page says so and gives the place and date of collection.
Since 1996 he has worked on the traditional calendar and the history of astronomy, and runs a second site, kuangchujia.com: solar terms and new moons computed from NASA JPL DE421 and the Chinese standard GB/T 33661—2017, datasets and preprints on Zenodo under CC BY 4.0, code on GitHub. That site covers how time is counted; this one covers how people here live it.
Identity, checkable: ORCID 0009-0002-7650-833X, OpenAlex A5151908354, GitHub @Kuangchujia, Zenodo under “邝楚嘉”. All one person.
The site belongs to no institution and takes no payment for edits. Commercial work does not change what an entry concludes, and no partner gets a say in it.
The two sites
This site covers Chaoshan: seasons, rites, processions, craft, dialect, food, places and routes. kuangchujia.com covers time: calendar rules, the exact moments of the 24 solar terms, sexagenary days, and positions in the sky, in five languages, with 1,120 observation anchors.
One rule connects them: when a page here gives a solar-term moment, it cites that site; when that site needs a piece of local custom, it links back here. Neither republishes the other.
How it is written
Three layers, kept apart: the prefectural gazetteer’s general account; the county-by-county variants of Haiyang, Chaoyang, Jieyang, Puning, Huilai, Chenghai and Raoping; and field testimony with its place and date of collection. No layer is allowed to stand in for another.
Written county by county — the same name in two counties is two different practices. Gazetteer text is kept apart from modern reporting, and reprints are marked. Where two readings exist, both are given with their sources. Where no source can be found, nothing is written.
Text goes up as it stands; public-domain plates are logged with their source and the basis for the judgment; licensed photographs and field shots carry their licence type; an entry with no image yet says so on the page.
Scope and name
Chaoshan here means the whole of present-day Chaozhou, Shantou and Jieyang. The site name carries no place name of its own, so that no single city stands for the three. Domain chaoshanwiki.com, English name Chaoshan Folkways.
Seven counties form the main body: Haiyang, Chaoyang, Jieyang, Raoping, Chenghai, Puning, Huilai. Note that the prefecture held more than seven: after 1738 it administered nine, adding Dabu and Fengshun, both in Meizhou today. Those two are marked as in-prefecture comparisons, not part of the main body.
Chaozhou Fu is a historical unit. It equals neither present-day Chaozhou city nor the three cities of the region. It is used here because the gazetteers and county records are themselves organised by prefecture and county; a shared prefecture does not make customs uniform, and differences are written county by county.
Licensing
Text is CC BY-SA 4.0: reuse with attribution and share-alike. Images remain under copyright and need a separate commercial licence. Data is CC BY 4.0. The three layers are independent — free to quote the text does not mean free to reuse an image.
Corrections
For a factual error, a misquotation, or an image whose permission is in question, write to chaoshanwiki@gmail.com. Three things make it quick: the page and paragraph, the source you rely on, and what you think is wrong.
Verifiable errors are fixed and the revision date updated; where a point cannot yet be checked, the wording is softened and marked; an image under question comes down first. Corrections are free, and no one is asked to identify themselves.
WeChat, phone and WhatsApp are listed on the contact page. Social accounts carry short questions and update notices only: Instagram, Facebook. Submissions, permissions and corrections that need a record still go by email — email keeps a thread, direct messages do not.
Revision
Substantially revised between 22 and 28 October 2026: sections on what the site is, its editorial rules, who runs it, licensing and scope were added; the contact address moved from “to be decided” to a real one; the framing changed from the old prefecture as the overall frame to custom and travel together. On 28 October the page was rebuilt: the sections were reordered, the note on the editor was filled out to a checkable identity and the division between the two sites, and the contact details now point to a dedicated contact page.
The date at the foot of the page records saves; this section records substantive changes. Where the two differ, this section prevails.
Original text on this site is CC BY-SA 4.0; images remain under copyright and commercial use requires a separate licence.
Last revised: 28 October 2026