These were not written for a website. They went out on the club’s WeChat account, mostly by whoever held the education or membership job that half-year, usually because somebody had just asked the question.
That makes them more useful than a page like this one could be. They are the club explaining itself to itself.
One warning. These are documents, kept as published. Meeting times, fees and room addresses have all moved since. Where one disagrees with the visit page, the visit page is right.
Start here: what this is
The club’s second post ever. Toastmasters founded in 1924, the growth of District 89 across southern China, and this club as the first in the city.
The communication track and the leadership track, and what a Tuesday evening actually consists of. Written when the meeting ran to 21:30.
Learning by doing, in a room that is on your side.
Bilingual. Eva Lee founded the club in 2003 after meeting Toastmasters through friends in Hong Kong, when there were too few members to hold a meeting at all.
For the same thing written now, with the numbers checked, see about the club and the pages under it.
The jobs in the room
Every meeting is staffed by its own members. Nobody is a permanent host. If you join, you will be doing one of these within a few weeks, and the club will expect you to be bad at it first.
The one to read first. Starts with the roles a new member can take on their second visit (Sergeant at Arms, Timer, Ah-counter), works up through Grammarian and Toastmaster of the Evening, and ends with the evaluator roles. Includes the club’s timing rules in full.
Simon Zhao on three levels of doing the same job, from holding up the cards to reading the ratio between a speech’s opening, body and close.
One prepared speech per member per month, booked online, and the form fills in minutes. The title translates roughly as set an alarm, grab one, go.
Why a new member gets paired with an experienced one, and the seven members who were doing it in 2023.
Not written here, but the club chose to pass it on. A TEDx organiser on how speakers get picked, and how a TED talk differs from a Toastmasters speech.
Whether to join
I already present for a living. I am not a public speaker. I am not clever enough. I am a student. I do not like being criticised. All ten, taken seriously. This is also the only post that states the entry bar outright: you have to be eighteen.
The same guide went out nine times in three years. The fee and the three steps are word for word identical in every version; only the photographs changed.
The joining guide, all eight surviving versions
Between March 2020 and February 2022 the club posted the same guide again and again. Nothing in the fee or the steps ever moved. What changed was the photographs, which is to say the answer to what would I be joining.
The rest of the archive
Fifty-seven more pieces survive in full: essays about particular evenings, four newsletters, and the notices.
Things the club wrote →All seventy-four, by kind, 2014 to 2025.