Samsui woman

English

Etymology

From Cantonese 三水 (saam¹ seoi²).

Noun

Samsui woman (plural Samsui women)

1. (historical) A Chinese female immigrant who came to Malaya or Singapore between the 1920s and 1940s in search of construction or industrial work, mostly from the Sanshui district of modern-day Guangdong in China.
   • 2009, Mark R. Frost, Yu-Mei Balasingamchow, “A Woman's World”, in Ibrahim Tahir, editor, Singapore: A Biography‎^[1], Singapore: Editions Didier Millet Pte Ltd; National Museum of Singapore, →ISBN, →OCLC, pages 204–205:

     It’s believed that between 1934 and 1938 close to 200,000 of these women arrived in Singapore and Malaya. One group that stood out from the throng were those women who hailed from Guangdong’s Samsui county (in Mandarin Sanshui, literally ‘three rivers’). The image that Samsui women presented, with their starched navy-blue samfoo, home-made rubber sandals and unmistakable red headdress (folded into a rectangle into which they tucked their plaited hair), has become a nationalist archetype of pioneering Singapore womanhood.