A world of their own

If Hakka are permanent guests from North China, Meizhou in eastern Guangdong province is the perfect locale to showcase their hospitality, writes Raymond Zhou.

The Hakka people are so intensely proud of their heritage that you'd be forgiven if you mistook them for a separate ethnicity. But they are just as Han as anyone else of the majority race in China, perhaps more so than people who live in northern China, where the ethnicity hailed from. Customs and speech patterns evolved separately from the mainstream, and these inhabitants of southern China have stubbornly maintained them as a lifestyle and as an identity.

Currently 70 million strong in number, the Hakka first relocated to the south more than 2,000 years ago as part of Emperor Qin's 1 million-plus troops. Wars and social disturbances in later years sent more migrants down south into the mountainous provinces of what are now Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi and Guangxi.