Pearl River Delta | 珠江三角洲
Pearl River Delta | 珠江三角洲
Pearl River Delta is a region in Guangdong, China, and the place of my ancestry. I have heard the term hundreds of times, and there are all sorts of products and places in NYC Chinatown that refer to this location in its namesake. I realized, though, that I didn’t have a clear understanding of a river delta after someone asked me about its significance to the region.
Before I left for the trip, I researched river deltas and found this resource which provided some insights:
A delta is an area of low, flat lands shaped like a triangle, where a river splits and spreads out into several branches before entering a larger body of water, and are formed by the accumulation of sediments.
One of the main features of river deltas is the fertile surrounding lands; deltas are one of the most biodiverse and ecologically productive environments on the planet, as the soil tends to be organically rich. When I traveled throughout the Pearl River Delta, I saw first hand how fertile the land was, especially near my ancestral villages, which were both still very agrarian.
To give you a sense of the size of the Pearl River Delta region, according to Him Mark Lai in Becoming Chinese American:
The delta is a complex geographical feature in the present Guangdong Province formed by the flows from the Pearl, West, North, East, and associated rivers. It is approximately the size of the greater San Francisco Bay Area from Sonoma County in the north to Santa Clara County in the south, and from San Francisco County to Contra Costa County in the east—west direction.
You can see how the Pearl River Delta has changed over time during periods of rapid development in the following satellite images from the US Geological Survey from 1973 to 2019.
It just so happened that our group was near Jiangmen when the most recent image was taken on November 14, 2019. We became part of the documented landscape. ■
