The history of Guangdong Province's maritime Chaozhou region is probably one of the most underexplored areas in modern China. As the ancestral homelands of tens of millions of overseas Chinese in Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, Europe and north America, the long history of global migrations from Chaozhou challenges our widespread misperceptions of China as an isolated, agrarian society and a state-centric polity. Since the 16th century, Chaozhou was deeply integrated into the ever-growing maritime economy of the South China Sea, and these migratory networks even remained outside the control of any regimes, including the Maoist state. Consequently, such networks created an invisible maritime highway that not only transcended the boundaries of traditional empires and modern nation-states, but also channelled resources into this remote corner of South China in times of wars and revolutions. The topics to be addressed include the development of Chaozhou-Chinese emigrations, the history of emigrants' remittances, the visual representations of Chaozhou and Shantou in historical photographs, and the formation of Chaozhou merchants’ networks across the South China Sea.