Dōngjiāng

The Dongjiang Hakka occupy the upper valley of the Dong River in north-eastern Guangdong, the counties of Longchuan and Boluo around Heyuan, whose name means source of the river.

This was among the first Lingnan lands brought under Chinese administration: after the Qin conquest of the Hundred Yue in 214 BC the Nanhai commandery was divided into counties, and its Longchuan magistrate Zhao Tuo founded the kingdom of Nanyue in 204 BC.

The hills long kept it a borderland of Yue, She and Yao peoples, and the Hakka descend mainly from migrants who came south through Jiangxi in the late Yuan and early Ming and again after the Qing coastal evacuation of the 1660s. Their speech belongs to the central Guangdong group of Hakka, while a river-bank local speech is classed by some with Hakka and by others with Yue.