Huìzhōu

The Huizhou Hakka are Hakka-speaking Han Chinese settled around Guishan on the Dong River in east-central Guangdong. The name Hakka means guest families: their forebears were Central Plains migrants entering Guangdong by way of Jiangxi and taking up hilly land earlier Han settlers had passed over.

Under the Song, Huizhou was a prefectural seat and cultural centre; in the 1090s the poet Su Shi was exiled there and renamed its Feng Lake the West Lake. County annals record the late fourteenth-century prefecture holding barely forty-five thousand people; most present-day local families descend from late Yuan, early Ming and Qing-era migrants.

The coastal evacuation edicts of 1661 and 1664 emptied the coast; as the order was lifted from 1669, Hakka farmers were encouraged to resettle the cleared districts. They lived in walled villages and spoke the Huiyang variety of Hakka, alongside a local Huizhou speech of disputed classification.