There are over 30 million people of Chinese ancestry living outside mainland China and Taiwan in the twenty-first century. They comprise one of most remarkable human diasporas that helped shape the modern world. From being a trading minority of the old, through the rise of European empires in the early modern, to the age of the great migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and now the contemporary era of intensified mobility and increasingly porous borders, the Chinese were and still are on the move. This course on the Chinese diaspora is a study of human mobility, of travels near and far, of personal dreams and family aspirations, of encounters between different societies and cultures, and of adaptation and accommodation in a wide variety of human activities and social behaviours.