Baisha, Taishan

Baisha 白沙镇
Town
Baisha Location in Guangdong
Coordinates: 22°14′45″N 112°35′41″E / 22.24583°N 112.59472°E / 22.24583; 112.59472Coordinates: 22°14′45″N 112°35′41″E / 22.24583°N 112.59472°E / 22.24583; 112.59472
Country	People's Republic of China
Province	Guangdong
Prefecture-level city	Jiangmen
County-level city	Taishan
Area
• Total	238 km2 (92 sq mi)
Population
• Total	140,000
• Density	590/km2 (1,500/sq mi)
Time zone	China Standard (UTC+8)

Baisha (Chinese: 白沙; pinyin: Báishā; Jyutping: baak⁶saa¹; literally: "white sand"; Taishanese: Bak-sa) is a town of Taishan, Guangdong province. It has a population of 140,000 residing in an area of 238 km² (92 sq mi).

History

Baisha town was the ancestral home of many of the first Chinese Canadians. Their descendants live all over Canada, and used to predominate before the 1980s in the Chinatowns of Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, Banff and Edmonton, and US West Coast cities such as San Francisco and Seattle.

Economy

Baisha Town is one of the few regions in northern Guangdong province where illegal rare earth mines were operating.^[1] Baisha Town is rich in rare earth minerals such as dysprosium.^[1]

Dialect

The Baisha variant of Taishanese is fading amongst the descendants of Canadian-Chinese, as Cantonese and Mandarin become more dominant. Based on observations of Chinese-Canadian elders living in Edmonton between 1980 and 2005, it would seem that the Taishan language spoken in Baisha in the mid-20th century differed somewhat from that spoken in Taicheng (Hoiseng in the Hoisan language, 台城), the county seat of Taishan (Hoisan, 台山县). Indeed, the pronunciation was more or less the same as that of people living across the river in the next county, Kaiping (Hoiping in the Toisanese language, 开平). One notable difference can be seen in the shift of certain vowel sounds, as follows:

Besides the differences in some vowel sounds, the consonant [b] of Mandarin is usually realized as [v], and [p] as [h].

References