Hi All!
I've just discovered a _wonderful_ book which I would like to tell other Forum readers about. It's called "The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas". I'll write more details about it in a separate, new topic.
Here I wanted just to post some extracts from the book, relevant to the subject of "statistics of Hokkiens and other dialect groups overseas" (which is one of the topics covered in this thread).
<Quotes>
p31 [About Fujian in general]: ... As an emigrant source, Fujian is second to Guangdong, its natives estimated in 1955 to constitute a little over 30 per cent of all overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia (3.7 million out of 12 million). The distribution of the Fujianese diaspora further distinguishes it from Guangdong: whereas the vast majority of Chinese in America came from Guangdong, Fujian sent most of its sons to Southeast Asia. In 1955, for example, Fujianese in Indonesia and Malaya were 50 and 40 per cent respectively of the Chinese populations of those countries, while in the Philippines their proportion was as much as 82 per cent. In 1986-90 they were said to be 55 per cent of all Chinese in Indonesia, 37 per cent of all Chinese in Malaysia, 42 per cent of all Chinese in Singapore, and no less than 90 percent of all Chinese in the Philippines. ...
p33 [About Fuzhou specifically]: In their book on the Fujianese diaspora, Yang Li and Ye Xiaodun estimate that about 78 per cent of overseas Fujianese in the world in 1990 traced their origins to southern Fujian (Xiamen, Zhangzhou, Quanzhou and their environs). Fuzhou and its surrounding counties were a much smaller fount of emigration, accounting for just under 10 per cent. ...
p36 [About Guangdong in general]: ... Guangdong has supplied the world's largest number of overseas Chinese, estimated at 8.2 million in 1957, 68 per cent of the total. In terms of distribution, figures compiled by researchers in China for that year show that some 7.9 million people of Guangdong origin, or just over 68 per cent of all overseas Chinese, were settled in East and Southeast Asia. There they rubbed shoulders with many Fujianese, but they accounted for 99 per cent of Chinese settled in the Americas in the year in question.
<End-of-Quotes>
There are *many* more very interesting immigration statistics: for Chaozhou-Shantou (Teochiu-Swatow), for Hakkas, for people from Zhejiang (Chekiang), and for Hainan, etc.
The whole chapter that the 3 extracts above are taken from does in fact support my theory that the reason so many overseas Chinese come from Fujian and Guangdong is because these two provinces had major ports. However, there are very few references to Shanghai and/or Shanghainese in the book, and no explanation as to why we don't see more Shanghainese among the overseas Chinese, so that mystery still remains. (It does mention that Shanghai was a very properous city at the time, so that might be a partial explanation: more prosperity => less incentive to emigrate.)