BORN in "Sei yap"
Albert came from the village of Kaiping/"Hoi Ping" in southern Guangdong province. In his generation, to say you were from "Sei Yap" was to claim allegiance to the four counties area to the west of the Pearl River Delta and Macau. The four counties were Kaiping ("Hoi Ping"), Enping, Xinhui and Taishan ("Toi Shan").
ITS OWN WORLD
In characters, the name for the area was 四邑 - literally "Four Villages" - pronounced in Mandarin as "Si Yi" and in the local dialect as "SAY-YUP", and variously spelled Sze Yup, Sze Yap, See Yup, Seiyap, etc.
With the addition of a fifth county, Heshan, the area is now referred to as "Ng Yap" (五邑 Wu Yi).
The area has its own distinctive dialect quite different from Cantonese.
It took three days to reach Hong Kong by boat.
It's estimated that there are some 30 million overseas Chinese - mainly in Southeast Asia - and that the overwhelming majority are from southern Guangdong.
With the addition of a fifth county, Heshan, the area is now referred to as "Ng Yap" (五邑 Wu Yi).
The area has its own distinctive dialect quite different from Cantonese.
It took three days to reach Hong Kong by boat.
It's estimated that there are some 30 million overseas Chinese - mainly in Southeast Asia - and that the overwhelming majority are from southern Guangdong.