The club has had three homes on the internet. This was the first.
It ran on classic Google Sites, and the officers of 2008 and 2009 kept it themselves: Sun Zhang and Emily Yang wrote most of the meeting write-ups, Robert Luo maintained the pages, Cissy Yang added the convention notices. Google closed classic Sites in 2021 and the site went with it. The Internet Archive had crawled it once, on 22 October 2020, about a year before the shutdown. That single crawl is now the earliest surviving record of Shenzhen Toastmasters, and everything on this page came out of it.
What it settles
The club had been running for five years by the time this site started, and almost nothing from those five years is written down anywhere. This site answers a few of the questions.
Who started it. The welcome page names him: “We are the first Shenzhen Toastmaster Club established by our club father, veteran Toastmaster Mark Pixley in 2003.” The members page names the first elected president, Eva Li, who also went on to sponsor Shenzhen Mandarin and SHIP. That matches what a long-standing member said in the club group thirteen years later, from memory, which is the first time those two sources have agreed on anything.
Where it met. 4th floor, Star Training Center, Guangshen Building, 2021 Shennan East Road, in Luohu. The club was founded on the other side of the city from where it meets now.
How often. Twice a month at first. A notice from 2008 announces the change: “we decide to increase our meeting from two times a month to three times a month.” Which is why the club had held only 123 meetings after five years, and why the number climbs so much faster afterwards.
How the officers were elected. For a full Toastmasters year, July to June, not the six months the club uses now. Jane Lee handed over to Emily Yang on 20 May 2008; Emily Yang handed over to James Li on 2 June 2009. Both announcements survive with the whole roster attached, which is how two of the club’s fifteen complete officer teams come from a decade nobody thought was documented.
How big it was. The welcome letter, written for 2009: “In the past six years, we have successfully held more than 170 meetings and up to 1,500 people from different countries, different cultures, and different industries visited our club.”
What it sounds like
The writing is the part that does not survive in any other archive. Meeting minutes in 2008 were not minutes. They were letters, written the next morning by whoever had volunteered, in unedited English, about people the writer clearly liked.
Judy told us the changes in her life after she focus on what she had, maybe the shortage in the mind of yourself was the different scene in others' eyes. The short body could be cute, the irregular teeth would be your feature. With the changes our Mini Judy become a confident lovely girl.
There's a most experienced toastmaster I've ever seen, with huge power and personal attractive, as a member of toastmaster for 25 years, came from Taiwan, being the general evaluator last night — Thomas Chen! He showed us what's the soul of the toastmaster!
Nobody was writing for posterity. That is why it is worth keeping.
Also in the capture
A report on the 2009 autumn club contest, where Emily Yang won all three events and the club thanked eleven facilitators and six judges from sister clubs by name. A notice for the Toastmasters national convention held in Shenzhen from 27 to 29 November 2009, with Lance Miller, the 2005 world champion, flying in to speak. Minutes of a small meeting held on 20 January 2009, right before Spring Festival, when half the club had already gone home: “we managed to hold a meeting with less members but still full of fun.” An invitation to Sunday lunch at CITIC Plaza to argue about the membership fee.
The full capture, including the pages not used here, is kept alongside the club’s other recovered archives. Personal contact details were stripped out of everything before any of it was read: the officer pages of 2008 list mobile numbers and email addresses for seven people, and none of that is on this site.
The table topic was <em>Home</em>, and the minutes are mostly about the price of housing in Shenzhen. “So pity that we work many years just for a house, but there're still so many people join in the line, just because everyone wants to have a home.” The role sheet for this meeting also survives, which makes it the earliest evening the club can name from beginning to end.
The only timed programme from this era: 7:30 president's opening, 7:33 general introduction, 7:37 everyone introduces themselves in fifteen seconds each, 7:41 the timer explains what a timer does. Two minutes, three minutes, two minutes.
Members had said for months that the Guangshen was too hard to reach. The president made it a table topic instead of a decision: change the room, meet more often, and accept the higher fee that both would cost, or not. Some wanted to stay. The room was, someone said, not just the root of the club but full of memories.
Robert Luo, a game designer, maintained the site you are reading the remains of. He gave a speech asking the club how to improve it, and the meeting turned into a workshop: upload more photos, add member's own stories, appoint an IT officer. The VPE then wrote up his own two mistakes of the evening and apologised for both. “But Toastmasters is the right place to make mistakes.”
Nine months after the vote, the invitation still gives the same Luohu address. The move to Futian happened after this, and nobody wrote down when.