About Myshantou.net

A city should have its place on the web to share its stories. Well, this one is for Shantou - an southern city with rich culture and history, delicious local cuisine and interesting people.

The story of Project MyShantou

In the summer of 2005, I went back to Shantou for my school holiday. After spending a few years in the UK, I started to wonder how my hometown was perceived outside China. After a few search, let’s say the results from google were disappointed. Other than a few official sites from the local governments and a couple of posts from the tourists, useful information was limited.

“We can do better than this?”, I thought. The next thing I did was to get the domain myShantou.net and a couple of tech setup, a blog was up running.

I teamed up with with my friend Maggie who was teaching English in a local school at the time. She was from the UK and was kind enough to document parts of her daily life here.

From zero to one was easy. As search engines clawed more information, we started to receive emails from visitors who were planning to visit the city. More interestingly, we heard from second or third generation Teochew who were making root-seeking tours to find their ancestors’ memories.

As the community grew, it was encouraging to see our work was meaningful. The local news station even featured a piece on the us.

Later when Maggie left the city, I was introduced to John Noonan – a professor at Cheung Kong School of Journalism and Communication, Shantou University. Again, he was kind enough to continue Maggie’s work and write about what’s happening in the city. He and his students have done some remarkable work. Most of the contents post 2007 were written by John and his students. There was even one piece that was contracted and featured in the printed magazine of Singapore’s JetStar airline!

Project MyShantou (as I like to call it) is maintained purely by volunteers like John and me. You may see an inconsistency of posting timeline. This is normal and expected. With the limited effort we can put in, we would like interesting stories to be told, and meaningful developments to be documented about the city.

We do welcome contributors and supports if you have any ideas to make this work better, or even just to share your story in Shantou. Click here to contact me.

Richard Hong December 2019

John H. Noonan served as lecturer and then Associate Professor and Director of the Global Media Honors Program at Shantou University’s Cheung Kong School of Journalism and Communication from 2003-2009 and 2012-2021. During that time and especially during the second stint, he and his journalism students contributed heavily to the MyShantou local news reporting project, utilizing the site as a platform to write and produce breaking news, news translations, feature stories, and photo essays about Shantou and the wider Chaoshan region. Over a period of nearly 15 years, Noonan guided, shaped, edited, and co-wrote news and features with his students – and wrote his own personal narrative pieces on culture, events, and development and transformation of the city.