The Nanyang Chinese diaspora is the long process by which people from the coastal provinces of southern China migrated into Southeast Asia, the region Chinese called the Nanyang, or 'Southern Ocean.' Both halves of that label bear flagging: 'Nanyang' is a Sinocentric term, and 'diaspora' a contested one, kept here for familiarity even as the migrants became many distinct communities rather than a single people. A thin merchant traffic in earlier centuries swelled into a mass migration of millions in the 1800s and early 1900s, which slowly turned sojourners into settlers and, in time, into citizens of new Southeast Asian nations.
Most who made the crossing meant to come home. A young man from a crowded village in Fujian or Guangdong would sail south to the tin fields and trading towns of the Nanyang, work until he had saved a little money, and carry it back to the family he had left behind. Millions did exactly that. But millions more never went back. They married local women, raised children who spoke a language that was neither Chinese nor Malay, and built a commercial world that came to handle much of the region's trade. That very success made them, over and over, an easy target for blame — and, in the worst years, for killing — whenever Southeast Asia convulsed. They had crossed the sea to get rich and go home; instead they stayed, and became not one people but many — Peranakan and newcomer, Hokkien and Teochew and Hakka, sojourner and settler. Prosperous and exposed, they would spend the next century turning, unevenly and often against fierce resistance, into citizens of the new nations of Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand — the very places they had once meant only to pass through.