Hakka History -- Part 10

Part 10

Dr. Oliver Lee’s Presentation - Tsung Tsin Meeting of 2/9/2014

Today I’m going to focus on  China’s Taishan County （臺山  or 台山)，because it is the County which most of the Chinese immigrants to America in the 19th century and early 20th century had come from. So it is important in the history of the Chinese in America.

My wife’s parents came from Taishan (Toi San) in 1919 as a young couple. They lived in San Francisco and Cleveland, and settled in Boston. When I was dating my wife in the late 1940s, I learned the Toi San dialect from her and her mother. The mother had raised eight children, so was busy at home, had friends in Chinatown, but had little contact with English-speaking people outside, and never learned to speak English.

In speaking with the mother, I found some similarity between the Toi San dialect and the standard Hakka dialect spoken in the core region of the Hakkas. (Luther soon displayed one of my earlier maps on our website, showing the core region and also Toi San and other counties in the Pearl River Delta near Canton).

As an example of the similarity, the Toi San pronunciation for 7. 8. 9.  10 is “tit, bat, giu, sip”. This is almost identical with standard Hakka: “tsit, bat, giu, sip”. The relationship isn’t always this close, but this example is amazing. In contrast, in Cantonese the numbers are pronounced: “tsat, bat, gao, sap”.

Now I’ll talk about the history of the migration of Hakka people from the core region to Toi San more than 300 years ago.

The Qing Dynasty  （清朝） was established in 1644 by Manchu conquerors, replacing the Ming Dynasty. The Manchus were from Manchuria, northeast of Beijing. They were culturally and racially different from the Han people. Over the generations they had often raided Beijing, seizing grain and tea and other good things to take back to Manchuria. But by 1644 they captured Beijing and stayed and established the new Dynasty.

But they faced opposition from anti-Manchu fighters in South China, including a man named Koxinga (鄭成功), whom you may have heard of. He was a pirate, half Chinese, half Japanese, who had hundreds of pirate ships and used them to attack China’s coastal provinces, looting grain and livestock to take to the island of Taiwan, where Koxinga had expelled the Dutch colony and taken control. He had hassled the Ming Dynasty, and now in the 1650s and 60s and 70s he hassled the Manchus.

As a countermeasure, the Qing Emperor in 1661 ordered the evacuation of a wide strip of coastal land, from Fukkian Province  （福建）all the way up to Shandong （山东).  The strip was 20 miles wide, from the coast to inland. All the farmers and fishermen were forced to migrate inland, all the farms and boats were destroyed, creating a wasteland, for the purpose of depriving Koxinga of useful targets for his raids.

But when Koxinga died in 1684, the Qing Emperor tried to have famers and fishermen resettle the wasteland, but it was truly wasted, so the Emperor encouraged the migration of peasants from the inland areas, which had been overcrowded because of the earlier evacuation from the seacoast. Especially crowded was the core region of the Hakkas, near the Fukkian border.

So that’s when many Hakka people moved further south, to less crowded Counties which are now Taishan, Zhongshan, Bao An, Huiyuang, Dongguan, and others.

All these Counties have different geographic relationship with the Provincial capital, Canton （广州), and therefore are influenced by the Cantonese dialect to different degrees, thus “corrupting” their Hakka dialect to different extents. Sun Yat-sen’s County, Zhongshan （中山)，for example, is located closer to Canton than is Taishan, and therefore the Zhongshan dialect (and population) is closer to Cantonese or “punti” （本地）。

While mentioning Zhongshan County, where the ancestors of many of our Tsung Tsin members came from, I repeated some information from previous lectures, including the anti-Manchu resistance in Purple Gold County (紫金) near the core region of the Hakkas, and the subsequent move by a Hakka man, Sun Lianchang (孫連昌), from Purple Gold County to Zhongshan County, where eight generations later his descendant Sun Yat-sen was born.

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