Kèjiā

The Hakka, whose name means guest families, are latecomers among the Han of south China, farming the marginal hill country where Guangdong, Fujian and Jiangxi meet, around Chengxiang in Meizhou, the Tingzhou basin and Ganzhou's Longnan and Xingguo.

Their forebears were Central Plains refugees who began moving south with the collapse of the Western Jin in the early fourth century and entered the south through Jiangxi; Ganzhou served as their staging ground before they pushed on into western Fujian and eastern Guangdong, mixing with She and Yao peoples. Their speech keeps archaic final consonants lost in Mandarin and is closest to Gan, the two perhaps sharing a Song-era ancestor.

In the hills they built the fortified communal tulou, and under the Kangxi emperor between 1662 and 1722 the court resettled Hakka farmers in war-ruined Sichuan, offering silver grants to migrants after 1671.