Site Notes
This site is Unicode UTF-8 encoded.
On this site I give the Cantonese pronunciation first (the dialect I speak), then the Mandarin pronunciation in parenthesis (the most widely spoken dialect) and then 中文.
For example: Hoiping (Kaiping) 開平
Instead of making up my own spelling for all the Chinese words, I'm using jyutping romanization system for Cantonese and pinyin for Mandarin. Romanization is the practice of using the Roman alphabet to represent and spell the sounds of another language.
The only time I don't use jyutping is for the spelling of my last name. My family spells their surname as "Kwan," in jyutping it is spelled "Gwaan."
*Notes about the gapou (jiapu) 家譜 English translations
- The Chinese names and places are written in Cantonese jyutping, (Mandarin pinyin), and 中文.
- The stuff in between the brackets [ ] are notes that I added.
- My mommy did most of the translation. Professor Rhoads from the University of Texas (one of my former Asian Studies professors) and Kevin Lee (webmaster at Siyi Genealogy) helped translate some of the phrases that my mommy didn't know.
- I did a rough conversion of the dates from the Chinese lunar calendar to the Western calendar. So if there are any mistakes with the dates, whoops, my bad.