A Chinese Mental Map of the Irrawaddy Delta

Abstract

This chapter moves its geographic focus southward to Lower Burma, where many Hokkien and Cantonese from coastal China set up their homes and business enterprises. After following a new Hokkien immigrant’s life experience in the Irrawaddy Delta, Li depicts a panoramic picture of Rangoon Chinatown with a detailed look at some of the most important Chinese community institutions, such as temples, native-place and surname associations, and secret societies. By charting out social fabrications and communal landscapes in Lower Burma, the chapter describes the Hokkien and Cantonese everyday life in a new colony whose prosperity and downfall were now closely linked with global markets and imperial agendas, and how the Chinese-ness was subtly exercised and received in a multiethnic state.