Xuwen County, 徐闻县, is the southernmost county of Guangdong province, at the very end of the Leizhou Peninsula. The city of Zhanjiang governs it. To the south, across the Qiongzhou Strait, 琼州海峡, the narrow sea between the mainland and the island, lies Hainan. The county calls itself the southern end of mainland China. It has about 1,988 square kilometres of land, and about 646,000 people lived there at the end of 2024. If your family’s stone or papers say Xuwen (徐闻), this is the ground they name.
Maybe the two characters were all you had: a county name on a grandparent’s stone, and a map that runs out at the sea. Two big stories come with the name. One says ships sailed from here on the Maritime Silk Road, the old sea trade routes out of China, in the time of the Han dynasty. A dynasty is one family line of emperors. The Han ruled when Xuwen County was first set up, in 111 BCE. BCE means “before the Common Era”, the same years as BC. The other story says Tang Xianzu, 汤显祖, a playwright of the later Ming dynasty, was sent here in disgrace and built a school. Both stories are worth telling. Both also need sorting into three piles: what the record shows, what tradition adds, and what we do not know yet. Let us walk south and sort them.
Where is Xuwen County, and is it the tip of mainland China?
Picture the Leizhou Peninsula as a long tongue of land hanging down from the rest of Guangdong. Xuwen is its tip. Its borders are simple: the South China Sea to the east, the Beibu Gulf to the west, the Qiongzhou Strait to the south, and Leizhou City to the north. Leizhou City is old Haikang county, and Xuwen’s only land neighbour. Haikang, Suixi and Xuwen are the three old counties that still frame the homeland, and The Homeland: the Leizhou Peninsula puts Xuwen where this walk ends, at the very tip.
So is this the tip of mainland China? Yes. The exact spot has a name: Denglou Cape, 灯楼角, in Jiaowei township, 角尾乡. A township is a country district, the rural partner of a town. A spit of sand, a long thin finger of beach, runs out into the sea at the cape. It marks the line where the South China Sea and the Beibu Gulf part.
The cape has had a light for a long time, three in all. In 1890 the court of the Qing dynasty built a navigation light there. In 1894 the French built a steel lighthouse. In 1994 the Guangdong maritime office built a modern one, and today it marks mainland China’s southernmost point. Across the water, Lingao Cape on Hainan is 12 nautical miles away. A nautical mile is the sailor’s mile, about 1.85 kilometres, so that is about 22 kilometres of sea.
A place at the end of the land is also a place on the way to somewhere. The county credits the Song dynasty poet Su Dongpo, 苏东坡, with a line on exactly that: “the people of four prefectures take Xuwen as their throat”. A prefecture was a large district of old China, bigger than a county. The throat is the narrow way everything passes through.
What is Xuwen like today?
Low, red and warm, with the sea on three sides.
The land. Xuwen is a low tableland made by old volcanoes. A tableland is wide, fairly flat ground that sits a little above the land and sea around it. Lava rock, called basalt, covers almost the whole county. The ground is highest in the north and slopes down to the sea on the east, west and south. Its top is Shibanling, 石板岭, at only 245.4 metres. The soil is mostly brick-red laterite, a soil that is red because the iron in it has rusted. It is the same red earth that colours the whole peninsula, and The Leizhou Peninsula: red soil, old volcanoes and the strait tells how the land got that way.
The weather. The climate is tropical monsoon. In plain words: green all year, an average of 24.1°C, dry in winter and spring, hot and wet in summer and autumn. A typhoon is a big storm that comes in off the sea, and Xuwen gets about 3.5 of them in an average year, mostly from July to October. So if you are checking the weather before a visit, look twice at those months.
The pineapples. In Qujie town, 曲界镇, the fields roll over the tableland as far as you can see. The place is called the Sea of Pineapples, 菠萝的海, because it looks like an ocean of them. People run through it now too. On 17 January 2026, 3,000 runners from China and abroad, Russia, Pakistan and Spain among them, ran the Xuwen Pineapples Sea Fun Run along its country roads.
The sea. The coast is long, 371.87 kilometres, with 23 main islands. Off the southwest shore lies a national nature reserve for coral. By the county’s account it holds the largest, most complete and best-kept stretch of coral reef along China’s mainland coast. The west coast makes salt too: Xuwen calls itself a “hometown of sea salt”, and its salt works is one of Guangdong’s four big ones.
The people and places. About 646,000 people lived in Xuwen at the end of 2024, and about 41 percent of them in towns. The county seat, the town where the county government sits, is Xucheng, 徐城. Around it lie 12 towns and 2 townships. Under those, the county counted 1,199 natural villages in 2024. A natural village is a village as people know it on the ground, not an office’s unit. Keep that number in mind. We will come back to it.
How do you cross from Xuwen to Hainan?
By ferry, as people have done for a very long time.
How long? The Book of Han, 汉书, the official history of the Han dynasty, has a line on it. In plain English: from Xuwen in Hepu, go south into the sea and you reach a great island. Hepu was a commandery, the big unit of government in Han times, and Xuwen was one of its counties. The same passage says Emperor Wu took that island in the first year of his Yuanfeng reign, 110 BCE, and made it two commanderies, Dan’er and Zhuya. Yuanfeng is the name Emperor Wu gave to that stretch of his rule, and years were counted from it. So the crossing from Xuwen to Hainan is as old as the written record of the place. That part is documented.
Today Xuwen has four ports of its own on the strait: Xuwen Port, 徐闻港; Hai’an Port, 海安港; Hai’an New Port, 海安新港; and the north port of the Guangdong to Hainan railway ferry. The ferries carry road vehicles and railway carriages. A railway from Zhanjiang down to Hai’an was finished in 2000, and its carriages cross to Hainan on the ferry. Hai’an town, 海安镇, has been here a long time as well. In 1462 the county seat itself moved into the walled garrison town at Hai’an, a town built to hold soldiers, and in 1501 it moved back inland.
Which boat leaves from which port, when, and for how much, can change, so check the times and fares close to your trip. From Malaysia there is a back door, too: fly to Haikou in Hainan, then take the ferry north to Xuwen’s port. Visiting Leizhou from Malaysia calls that the most direct way to reach Xuwen, and walks through the rest of the trip.
Was Xuwen a starting port of the Maritime Silk Road?
Here is the first big story. The Maritime Silk Road, 海上丝绸之路, is a modern name for those old sea routes, the ones that carried trade out of China to the south and west. Xuwen’s county government calls Xuwen “the starting port of the Han dynasty Maritime Silk Road”. A 2015 China Daily feature put it in its headline as “the ancient departure port”, as if Xuwen stood alone. So what does the record actually say?
What the record shows. The evidence is one passage in the Book of Han’s treatise on geography, the chapter that describes the empire’s lands. It lists the sea route south in stages. Its first stage, in plain English: from the frontier forts of Rinan, from Xuwen and from Hepu, sail about five months and you reach the state of Duyuan. The passage goes on from there, state by state, to a far country called Huangzhi. It says interpreters in the emperor’s service went out with hired men, carrying gold and silk. They came back with bright pearls, glass and rare stones. Foreign merchant ships passed them along. Some drowned in storms. The rest came home after several years.
So Xuwen is named, in the Han dynasty’s own history, as a place ships set out from. That is documented. But look at the words again: it is named with two others, Rinan and Hepu, not alone. The same book’s list of counties also shows that Xuwen was then a county inside Hepu Commandery, not a commandery of its own. “One of three named starting points” is what the record supports. “The” starting port, or “the first”, is more than it says. Even the China Daily feature, below its headline, says the careful thing: Xuwen “is one of the ports of origin in the Han Dynasty”.
What the ground shows. The book is not the only evidence. Near the strait, at Erqiao village, 二桥村, in Nanshan town, lies a site the county also calls the site of the Han Xuwen county seat. A national survey of historic sites found it in 1983. In May 1990 archaeologists from Guangdong found many Han building pieces there: roof tiles, pottery, and a round tile end stamped 万岁, “ten thousand years”. A tile end is the round cap on the last tile of a roof row. In 1993 they dug again and found more Han objects. The province now protects it as a historic site. So Han-era Xuwen is on the ground at the tip of the peninsula, not only in a book. That is documented too, in the county’s own history.
What the county adds. The county goes further. It says that in 2001 senior provincial archaeologists confirmed Erqiao as the site of the Han starting port of the Maritime Silk Road. It places the old harbour itself mainly at Sandun harbour, 三墩港, in the same town, and has built a tourist area, Dahan Sandun, 大汉三墩, on the strait around it. It calls Xuwen the world’s first starting port of the Silk Road named in an official history. And in its account of the Han years it quotes an old saying: to shake off poverty, go to Xuwen. The saying is a lovely piece of the county’s memory. But a saying is not a Han record, and “the first” is more than the Book of Han says, as we saw.
What we do not know yet. The county names no experts for 2001, and points to no published report that shows the harbour itself, such as the places where boats landed. No Xuwen site is on China’s national list of major protected historic sites for Guangdong; Erqiao is protected by the province, one level down. So we can say with confidence that the Han had a county here and named it as a place ships sailed from. What the harbour looked like, and exactly where its ships tied up, we do not know yet.
Why was Tang Xianzu sent to Xuwen?
Now the second story, and this one has more paper behind it.
Tang Xianzu (1550 to 1616) was a playwright of the Ming dynasty. His best-known play is The Peony Pavilion, 牡丹亭, still performed and translated into English several times. He was also a government official, and that is how he came to Xuwen.
What the record shows. Tang wrote a memorial, a formal letter to the throne, criticising how the court had been run under two of the emperor’s chief ministers, Zhang Juzheng and Shen Shixing. As punishment he was sent down to Xuwen. That was in 1591, and Xuwen’s county history names his post: tianzhu dianshi (添注典史). A dianshi was a junior clerk of the county, the one in charge of its prisoners and jail. Tianzhu means the post was an extra one, added on top of the usual staff. It did not last. By 1593 he had been promoted to run Suichang county, in Zhejiang.
The county’s history also records what he did while he was there. Tang and Xiong Min, 熊敏, the magistrate who ran the county, gave their own money to found a school, the Guisheng Academy, 贵生书院. Guisheng means “value life”. The county says the name carries his teaching that every life under heaven should be valued. Zhanjiang’s city government tells the same story, and quotes an older account in classical Chinese, the written language of old books. It says Tang, under his courtesy name Yireng, 义仍, chose a bright, open site with the magistrate, wrote the name Guisheng Academy on its board, and wrote a short piece himself to teach his students. A courtesy name is the second name an educated man went by among his peers.
So the founding is not only a story passed down by word of mouth. It is written down, in the county’s history and in the older account. That makes it documented, not just tradition.
The academy still stands, on Guisheng Road in the county seat, and the province protects it as a historic site. It was restored in 1821, and rebuilt again in the 1980s, with a seated statue of Tang in the back hall. On the wall behind him is a line credited to him: 天地孰为贵，乾坤只此生. In plain English: in all the world, what is most precious? Only this life. And he is not only history in Xuwen. In 2016 the county’s Leizhou opera troupe, its company of players in the local opera, made two new plays in his memory, one of them his own Peony Pavilion.
What tradition adds. The why. The county says Tang founded the school because he saw that local people held life too cheaply and did not know the rites, the proper forms of respect and ceremony. That is the county’s telling of his motive. The older account says he wrote his own piece for the academy, and that piece would give his reasons in his own words. Neither telling quotes it.
What we do not know yet. Who wrote the older account, and when. And how many months Tang actually spent in Xuwen between 1591 and his move to Suichang.
Is Xuwen part of the Lui Chew homeland?
Yes. Lui Chew is the older Malayan and Singaporean spelling of Leizhou, 雷州, and Xuwen is one of the three old counties that name grew from.
On the map of old Leizhou. In 634, when the Tang dynasty renamed the area Leizhou, Xuwen came under it. That Tang is a dynasty, no relation to Tang Xianzu. In the Ming and Qing dynasties Xuwen belonged to Leizhou Prefecture, 雷州府, one step above a county. Its two partner counties were Haikang and Suixi. Zhanjiang and the old Leizhou homeland shows how all three now sit inside one city.
In the mouth. Xuwen speaks Leizhou. Xuwen speech, often just called Leizhou speech, 雷州话, is the county’s everyday language, and more than nine in ten people speak it. Leizhou Min, the language the Lui Chew carry, is the page on that speech and the families who took it overseas. A few Xuwen villages speak Cantonese or Hakka instead, mostly families who moved in from other parts of Guangdong and Guangxi. Two more details are worth knowing. Xuwen speech sits close to Hainan speech, because Hainan is so near. And it does not sound quite like the speech of Leizhou City to the north: by the county’s own ear, Leizhou City’s tone is softer, and the county seat’s higher and sharper.
Some of those speakers’ families came from far away. Many people from Putian county in Fujian settled in Xuwen at the end of the Yuan dynasty and the start of the Ming, and more came again at the end of the Qing.
In the leaving. This is the part of Xuwen’s history that reaches furthest towards Malaysia. From 1916 to 1933, the county’s history records, bandits, tigers and disease tore through Xuwen. More than 190,000 people were killed by bandits or died of hunger and sickness. The population fell to a little over 50,000. And more than 40,000 people moved away, “mainly to Hainan Island or the countries of the Nanyang”. Nanyang, 南洋, the southern seas, is the old Chinese name for Southeast Asia, Malaya included. That is documented. Whether any of those 40,000 reached Malaya and joined a Lui Chew clan house, we do not know yet. Why the Lui Chew left Leizhou follows the wider push behind the leaving.
On the family stone. If your family’s stone or papers say Xuwen (徐闻), read it as a county. The jiguan line, 籍贯, is the line on a stone that names a family’s ancestral home. Reading the jiguan line on a Chinese gravestone gives Xuwen the same weight as Haikang: county level, and Leizhou-speaking. It does not prove every Xuwen family is Lui Chew, because a few Xuwen villages speak something else. But it puts your family on the right ground.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 111 BCE | The Han set up Xuwen County. Documented in the county's own history |
| 634 | The area is renamed Leizhou, and Xuwen comes under it. Documented |
| 1591 | Tang Xianzu is sent down to Xuwen as a junior jail clerk. Documented |
| 1916 to 1933 | Over 40,000 leave for Hainan and the Nanyang. Documented |
| 1983 | Xuwen comes under the city of Zhanjiang. Documented |
| 1990 | Archaeologists find Han building pieces at Erqiao village. Documented |
What we do not know yet
Five questions stay open.
What the Han harbour looked like. The Book of Han names Xuwen as a place ships set out from, and digs at Erqiao found Han buildings near the strait. The county says experts placed the port there in 2001, but it names no report that shows the harbour itself. We do not know yet.
What the name Xuwen (徐闻) means. The county’s history lists the names Xuwen has carried, among them Lekang, Qikang, Suikang and, for two years from 1958, Leinan. It does not say why the Han chose Xuwen (徐闻) in the first place. We do not know yet, and we would rather leave the gap than fill it with a story.
Tang Xianzu’s own words. Who wrote the older account of the academy, and what his own piece for it says. We do not know yet.
Where the 40,000 went. Xuwen’s history counts more than 40,000 people who left between 1916 and 1933 for Hainan and the Nanyang. How many reached Malaya, and whether they joined the Lui Chew clan houses there, we do not know yet.
Your village. The county counted 1,199 natural villages in 2024. A stone that says Xuwen (徐闻) narrows your family to one county at the tip of the land. Which of those villages is yours is a question your family’s own papers and memories may answer.
Xuwen is where the land ends and the sea road begins, so the next chapter is the leaving itself. Read The Crossing next: why the Lui Chew left this coast, and how they reached Malaya. And if your family’s stone or papers say Xuwen (徐闻), we would love to know the village name, or to take a correction to anything on this page.