Léizhōu

The Leizhou are the Min-speaking Han Chinese of the Leizhou peninsula that reaches towards Hainan, calling their speech Leizhou Min, or Li speech. Before the Han the peninsula was Luoyue country; in 111 BC, after the conquest of Nanyue, the Han set up Xuwen county, whose harbour became a departure port of the maritime silk route.

In 634 the Tang renamed the prefecture Leizhou. The Leizhou descend mainly from Min migrants from Zhangzhou and Putian who began arriving under the Tang; a great wave came at the fall of the Southern Song, when Putian militiamen fled the Mongol advance and settled the peninsula after 1279.

Their dialect, grouped with Hainanese in the Qiong-Lei branch, took in local Yue and Li substrata. The 1687 Haikang annals described this eastern speech as much like the language of Zhangzhou and Chaozhou.