Wúchuān

The Wúchuān are the Yue people of the lower Jian River, where it enters the South China Sea on the eastern flank of the Leizhou Peninsula in south-western Guangdong. Their dialect, nicknamed Wuchuan bone, forms with Huazhou speech the Wu-Hua branch of Yue, the product of the long Hanization of local Baiyue peoples under the Gaozhou and Luozhou administrations from the Northern and Southern dynasties onward.

The Sui created the county in 598 in place of Pingding, naming it after the Wuchuan river, later called the Jian. The Ming placed it under Gaozhou prefecture in 1377, an arrangement the Qing retained.

Wuchuan kept piaose tableaux, clay sculpture and deity-centred nianli festivals; Lin Zhaotang, born in 1786, became one of the few Guangdong scholars to take the zhuangyuan, the top rank in the imperial examination.