Chaoshan Wiki

简体 ｜ 繁體 ｜ English

Sources and evidence

No second-hand narration here, only three things: what this site cites, how it cites it, and what happens when it gets something wrong. Every judgement in an entry should trace back to a rule on this page.

1. Three levels of source

Mixed together, they flatten out, so they are graded. The levels are for checking, not for showing — a star rating on the page would only encourage readers to skip the check.

  • Level 1 | Primary documents and official lists. The prefectural and county gazetteers themselves; Ming and Qing printed play texts; national and provincial heritage lists; the list of Major Historical and Cultural Sites Protected at the National Level; the UNESCO lists. This level can support a definitive statement.
  • Level 2 | Institutional databases and edited editions. Library subject databases, gazetteer-office editions, museum catalogue records, university research. Level 2 supports facts, but where numbers and dates are involved the edition relied on must be named.
  • Level 3 | Reporting and reported speech. Newspaper features, local media, retold interviews. Level 3 adds setting and detail only and never supports a conclusion on its own; if a fact rests on level 3 alone, the text says “according to a report in …”, not “it is so”.

2. Prefectural and county gazetteers

The most complete surviving Chaozhou Prefecture Gazetteer is the 1762 edition compiled by Zhou Shuoxun, forty-two chapters plus a preface volume, reprinted in 1893 by the Chaozhou Prefectural Security Bureau. It records nine counties under the prefecture: Haiyang, Chaoyang, Jieyang, Raoping, Huilai, Dabu, Chenghai, Puning and Fengshun. This site covers seven of them as core material — the whole of today’s Chaozhou, Shantou and Jieyang — and marks Dabu and Fengshun as within-prefecture comparison.

Online reading, checked on 18 October 2026: the Shidian ancient-books edition of the Chaozhou Prefecture Gazetteer; chapter 12 at the Chinese Text Project; and the Gujin Tushu Jicheng, Chaozhou section, at the ancient-text knowledge graph. The three rest on different editions, so any citation must name the edition and the chapter used.

Passages from the “customs” chapter are quoted as they stand, without rearranging or merging entries. The seasonal entries are built on the prefectural gazetteer as quoted in the Gujin Tushu Jicheng.

3. Method and reference works

Pronunciation of dialect terms follows published Chaoshan dialect dictionaries; the classification of custom follows the existing categories of the “customs” chapter in local gazetteers rather than a system invented here. Batch numbers for heritage items follow the State Council lists and the project pages of the China Intangible Cultural Heritage network; where the two disagree, the list prevails.

4. Databases and institutions elsewhere

  • Chaoshan Folkways (built by Shantou City Library, online since 2004, revised from the former Chaoshan Literature Database, more than twenty thousand records)
  • Guangdong Intangible Cultural Heritage Centre — heritage lists, provincial, national and UNESCO
  • China Intangible Cultural Heritage network and digital museum — project details and officially recognised bearers
  • Local Gazetteers Office of the Guangdong Provincial People’s Government
  • Chaozhou Municipal People’s Government — public information, including municipal heritage list notices
  • Shantou University Library “Chaozhou songbooks” database — transcribed texts and bibliography

Availability and ownership of these sites are as they stand at any given time; this site points to them and does not copy their content. Some are intermittently unreachable from outside mainland China, and where that happened during checking, the list texts and catalogue records were cross-checked instead, with a note in the entry concerned.

5. How facts reach the page

Three rules, applied to every entry.

  • One source per statement. A judgement matches one place in one source. Where a source is itself quoting another, the text says so and gives the intermediate level.
  • Numbers must be recomputable. Every year, number, item count and chapter cited in the text must point to a specific place in the named source. Where that is impossible, the number goes and the description stays.
  • Where two accounts disagree, both are recorded. No splitting the difference, and no choosing for the reader. The date the rod-puppet form arrived, the origin of the songbooks, the relation between yingge and the northern yangge — the text says “two accounts exist” or “scholars have not settled it”, and names who holds each.

6. Currency and correction

Administrative divisions, heritage lists and protected-site lists all change, and this site does not claim that an older statement still holds. Each page carries a revision date at the foot.

If you find an error, use Call for material or write directly, naming the page, the sentence, and the source you rely on. Once checked, the text is corrected and the revision date updated — never quietly, because then a reader cannot trace what changed. Of the 346 pages on the site, 196 carry a sources section; the rest are mostly index and process pages that make no factual judgement.

7. Three machine-readable entry points

For crawlers and citation tools, on the same rules as above:

  • Namespaces — the cz prefix, identifier rules for entries, entity type definitions
  • Datasets — metadata for all 346 pages (CSV and JSON)
  • Fact sheet — atomic citable facts, one per line, with source and check date

8. Citation rules

Documents are cited by title, chapter and edition; modern edited editions by editor and publication details. A statement whose source cannot be checked does not go into an entry. Anyone citing this site should give the page URL together with the revision date at the foot — a conclusion without a version cannot be traced.

9. Calendar data and academic identifiers

Solar terms, lunar phases and calendar conversion in the seasonal entries come from this site’s sister project, Chujia Kuang’s Historical Astronomy and Calendar site (kuangchujia.com). Those figures are not copied from tables; they are computed, by back-calculation from the NASA JPL DE421 ephemeris and modern celestial mechanics, with the calendar arranged according to GB/T 33661—2017, the national standard for compiling and issuing the Chinese calendar.

Academic identifiers:

The datasets are released under CC BY 4.0, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22788686.

On citing or reusing the data, keep the attribution, the source link, the licence notice and the DOI. Where this page is less detailed than the dataset documentation, the documentation governs.

Home › Sources and evidence

Last revised: 3 November 2026