Oct 20, 2013 - Part 8
Part 8
On the History of Hakka Migrations and Demography
by Oliver Lee, Oct. 20, 2013
While Carolyn passed out this information sheet to people at the meeting, I said: We’re running a little late, so I’ll keep it short. Luther will put this information on our website, so people can study it at their leisure. I’ll comment briefly about this data, and then Luther will project my short slideshow dealing with Hakka migrations. It has seven slides.
Luo Xianglin (罗香林) in his 1973 book 客家原流考 (A Study of the Origins of Hakkas) identified five major waves of Hakka migration, this first one being at the end of the Jin (晋) Dynasty about 600 A.D., the others being at the end of the Tang, Yuan, Ming Dynasties, and in the mid-19th century in the waning decades of the Manchu Dynasty.
Feng Xiuzhen (冯秀珍) in her article in 2012, 客家名片(Introduction to the Hakkas) agrees with Luo Xianglin, except that she identifies yet an earlier wave, namely during the Qin and early Han Dynasties, whose emperors had sent many thousands of troops and civilians to the northern part of Guangdong Province and other southern Provinces to settle in sparsely populated and mountainous areas.
The latter scholar, Feng Xiuzhen, is a Hakka from 丰顺 County in the Meizhou Prefecture （梅州地区).
She is a professor in the Beijing Institute of Science and Technology. In her article she provides very useful up-to-date figures on the size of Hakka populations in various geographic units, as follows:
Worldwide: 120 million
China: 62 million
Outside China: 58 million
Guangdong Province 31 million (of whom 4.7 million are in Meizhou Prefecture)
Jiangxi Province 8.3 million
Guangxi Province 7.0 million
Taiwan 6.0 million
Fujian Province 4.8 million
Sichuan Province 4.6 million
These figures show that worldwide there are 120 million Hakkas, 62 million inside China, and 58 million in the rest of the world. Of course, those outside China, mostly being third or fourth generation immigrants there, mostly don’t speak Hakka, but they consider themselves Hakka and their ancestral roots are Hakka.
Map from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The first slide shows in black outline the location of Henan Province （河南）as being in Central China.
It is where most of the Hakka people came from in the past 1400 years.
The second slide shows the same Province close up, And it has seven shaded areas, which is where the ancestors of the Char, Chen, Chung, Liu, Deng, Wong (黄), and Yap clans came from. This list is slightly different from what was shown in the slide; it includes the Chars but excludes the Pangs. The Pangs came not from Henan but from the shaded area just east of Henan.
The third slide shows the distribution of Hakkas in South China. Those counties with purely Hakka populations are shown in black dots or circles (mainly in northeastern Guangdong 广东, southern Jiangxi 江西, and southwestern Fujian 福建. Those counties where Hakkas have intermingled with Punti people are shown in tiny white circles.
About the Yellow River, I cited Han Suyin, a “hapa Hakka”, saying that in the past 2000 years, this river
has breached its banks in major ways nine times and had major changes in its course when the river
flowed where it decided to flow.
Unique Hakka Round Houses in the southwest part of 福建 (Fujian/Fukkian) Province
Amazing terraced rice fields in Guangxi Province
In my next lecture, probably after New Year, I will give you some interesting information about the Chinese who came to America in the 19th century and early 20th century from Taishan County (台山），being most of the Chinese immigrants in America then. And I’ll talk about Zhong Shan County（中山）, where many of the Chinese immigrants to Hawaii came from.
Thank you,