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.