Diaspora tourism and homeland travel

In this chapter, we turn our focus to how descendants of Australian Chinese migrants maintain transnational connections with their ancestral villages in Zhongshan through diaspora tourism. It is hard to define what constitutes ‘diaspora tourism’, as it goes by many names, including heritage tourism, legacy tourism, ancestry tourism, genealogy tourism, roots tourism, and visiting friends and relatives tourism, to name a few.1 Diaspora tourism also occurs on different scales and levels of formality, ranging from grassroots initiatives such as trips taken by individuals, families, or small historical groups,2 to nationally organised events such as Homecoming Scotland3 and Homecoming Ireland,4 which feature large-scale, year-long festivals, usually organised by national tourist agencies to attract diasporas worldwide to visit their ‘home’ countries. Regardless of its scale, diaspora tourism can be broadly defined as ‘the travel of people in diaspora to their ancestral homelands in search of their roots or to feel connected to their personal heritage.