The Chinese name for this cluster of counties — Sze Yup (四邑, four counties) or Wuyi (五邑, five counties) — became a byword for emigration in the second half of the nineteenth century. Economic pressure, regional instability, and the lure of wages in North America and Southeast Asia pushed hundreds of thousands of people out of these river delta towns. Some went intending to return; others stayed permanently, building Chinatowns in San Francisco, Vancouver, and cities across Malaysia and Myanmar.

The exchange ran in both directions. Money flowed back — enough to transform villages, fund schools, and commission those distinctive watchtowers. Ideas came too: architectural styles, foreign fashions, and a cosmopolitan sophistication layered over the rural Cantonese base. The Kaiping Diaolou watchtowers, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, are the most famous physical evidence of this collision between local and abroad. Taishan, 140 kilometers west of Hong Kong, is sometimes called the ancestral home of American Chinese for the concentration of families who trace their roots here.

Jiangmen sits in the western Pearl River Delta, just west of Zhuhai, connected to the regional grid by rail and road. High-speed trains link the city to Guangzhou, Zhanjiang, Maoming, and Zhuhai at speeds of up to 200 km/h. One overnight sleeper from Beijing — train D921, running the full length of the country — stops at Xinhui station, arriving from the capital at 07:33 after a journey that spans the entire continent.

From Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport (ZGGG), intercity buses run directly to Jiangmen, with the first departure at 08:50. The city also maintains a daily ferry connection to Macau operated by CKS, and ferries connect onward to Hong Kong. For those arriving from the west by rail, note that service between Jiangmen and western Guangdong is less frequent than the Guangzhou–Jiangmen corridor, where trains run often and express services skip intermediate stops for even faster connections.

Beyond the watchtowers, the Jiangmen countryside rewards slow exploration. Kaiping is the center of the Diaolou belt, where dozens of towers cluster in villages like Zili — some of them still occupied by descendants of the families who built them, others locked and crumbling, their owners scattered across three continents. Taishan has its own share of historic residences, ancestral halls, and fortified towers, along with a quietly beautiful coastal setting.

In the city proper — three urban districts forming Central Jiangmen — you find monuments and museums dedicated to the emigrant heritage: the Five Counties (Wuyi) Museum, ancestral halls restored with overseas donations, and the kind of neighborhood streetscapes where a Cantonese opera melody might spill from a window above a tea shop. The pull of history is genuine here, not performed.

Jiangmen's food culture is rooted in Cantonese tradition. Pu'er tea — fermented, earthy, warming — is a staple of morning teahouses, where raw bricks display a brick-red color and aged cakes deepen toward reddish-brown. Chaozhou-style Gongfu Tea service, with its miniature teapots and careful pour ratios, speaks to the Chaoshan influence present throughout the region. White tea, lightly processed from buds and young leaves, rounds out the tea table.

The local sweet soup tradition — tong sui, a Cantonese specialty served warm or cold — brings together red dates, lotus seeds, and peanuts simmered slowly until the broth thickens with natural sweetness. These are not restaurant showpieces but household staples, the kind of food that requires patience and rewards it. Eating well in Jiangmen means eating slowly, and eating slowly means understanding something about the pace of the Pearl River Delta in the cities that sent half their people abroad and spent generations waiting for them to come home.