Districts We Belonged To

The club has changed district four times without moving an inch. Each change is a line on the graph of how fast Toastmasters grew in China.

Toastmasters organises clubs into districts, and districts get split when they grow too large to run. A club that never moves can still change district several times, simply by being in a part of the world where the number of clubs keeps going up.

That is what happened here. Shenzhen Toastmasters has met in Futian since 2003 and has been reassigned four times. Read downwards, the list is not really about this club at all. It is a record of Toastmasters arriving in China, becoming large enough to need its own district, then large enough to need three.

What we can prove, and what we are guessing

The two later rows are certain. The club’s own weekly emails from 2013 to 2015 sign off with District 89, Division I, Area I4, and the Toastmasters directory lists the club today under District 118, Area H03.

The two earlier rows are worked out rather than found. We know when District 85 and District 89 were created, and we know Shenzhen is in the south. So the dates below are the district’s dates, and the assumption is that this club moved with the rest of southern China. Nothing in the surviving material contradicts it, but nothing in the surviving material confirms it either. It is marked as inferred for that reason.

Four districts, one room
September 2003
→ June 2007
District 75 inferred
A single district covering much of the Asia-Pacific: Japan, Korea, South East Asia and China together.

When the club was chartered there was no China district. Everything east of India reported into one enormous unit.

July 2007
→ June 2012
District 85 inferred
Mainland China, on its own for the first time.

China had grown enough to be its own district. Shenzhen had been meeting for four years by then and was one of the older clubs in it.

July 2012
→ June 2019
District 89 confirmed
South China, Hong Kong, Macau, Fujian and Hainan.

The mainland district split, and the south went its own way. This is the one period we can confirm from the club's own records: the weekly meeting notices sent between 2013 and 2015 give the full address as District 89, Division I, Area I4.

July 2019
→ now
District 118 confirmed
Western and south-western China, with part of Guangdong.

District 89 split again. Shenzhen is now in Area H03, which sits inside Division H.