Toishan

English

Etymology

Borrowed from Cantonese 臺山／台山 (toi⁴ saan¹).

Proper noun

Toishan

1. Synonym of Taishan: the Cantonese-derived name.
   • 1945, Mark Tennien, Chungking Listening Post‎^[1], New York: Creative Age Press, Inc., page 63:

     Father O’Neill’s station was one of the most perilous in the mission field. Toishan (whence come 90 per cent of Chinese who migrate to America) is on a branch of the West River which forms the southern boundary of the Canton Delta. On the north bank were the Japanese, entrenched with pillboxes, machine guns, field guns and mortars. On the south bank, as firm as a pillbox in his determination to carry on the church and relief work, was Father O’Neill.

   • 1967, Betty Lee Sung, Mountain of Gold: The Story of the Chinese in America‎^[2], New York: The Macmillan Company, page 16:

     Like an intravenous injection, the remittances also sustained the economy of Toishan. So, in spite of her poor soil, made poorer by the natural calamities of floods and typhoons and depleted after centuries of intensive cultivation, Toishan became one of the most prosperous districts in China. It was often referred to as “Little Canton” after the bustling commercial port of southern China. In the town proper, the streets of Toishan were wide and paved, illuminated with electric lights at night.

   • 1973 February 1, “Chinese New Year to Dawn in Burst of Parades, Song and Dance”, in The New York Times‎^[3], →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on May 05, 2024, page 37‎^[4]:

     “I'm from the Bronx and my mother's making grease balls,” said Miss Ho's flompanion, K. G. Louie. But he said he didn't know the Chinese name for the pastries his mother was preparing in keeping with the traditions of the family, which originated in the Toishan district of Kwangtung Province.

   • 1994, Barry Parr, San Francisco and the Bay Area‎^[5], 3rd edition, Fodor's Travel Publications, Inc., page 100:

     Chinatown's founders were mainly from two classes. City merchants, mostly from Guangzhou (Canton City), were few in number, but they rose to prominence in the community by virtue of their wealth, polish, and ability to speak English. The vast majority of early Chinese immigrants, however, were rural males, laborers largely from Toishan County, whose local dialect is unintelligible to people from Guangzhou. Most of these were sojourners, that is, men who intended to return to China after making their fortune—as indeed many did, bringing back new ideas that hastened the downfall of the Qing Dynasty.

   • 2005, Doug Sanders, Idaho (It's my state!)‎^[6], Benchmark Books, page 49:

     Lewiston was one city with a strong Chinese presence. Most of the people who came there in the late 1800s were from the Toishan district of southern China’s Guangdong Province, a rural area near the Pearl River delta. These immigrants brought their religion with them and practiced it at Lewiston’s Beuk Aie Temple until the late 1950s. Today a museum honors their heritage, part of an attempt to reclaim Idaho’s Asian history.

   • 2010 February 18, Alan Chin, “Essay: A Home 8,000 Miles Away”, in The New York Times‎^[7], →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 04 December 2022, Lens‎^[8]:

     Although I was born in the United States, Toishan is my ancestral home. I speak a local dialect of Cantonese that is incomprehensible to the rest of China.
     Toishan is a county-level city of 1 million people in Guangdong Province in southern China. […]
     Instead of the conventional transliteration system of Pinyin, which The Times ordinarily uses, Mr. Chin has employed Jyutping Cantonese in his post. Readers accustomed to seeing the name “Taishan” will find it rendered Toishan (台山) here, in part to avoid confusion with the famous mountain of Taishan (泰山) and also because Mr. Chin said it is closer to the local pronunciation. In this post, Gongmei is used for 江美, rather than “Jiangmei”; Hoiping for 開平, rather than “Kaiping”; and Cekham for 赤坎, rather than “Chikan.” Slides 2, 3 and 8 were originally captioned Hoiping, but are now more precisely captioned Cekham. (The town of Cekham is part of the district of Hoiping, Mr. Chin explained.)

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:Toishan.

Anagrams

• NATOish, Onitsha