Hainan Island, across the Qiongzhou Strait and the mainland of the motherland, covers an area of about 34,000 square kilometers, making it the second largest island in the motherland after Taiwan. One of the most widely spoken Chinese dialects on Hainan Island is called "Qiongwen dialect", also known as "Hainan dialect". Linguistically, Hainan dialect belongs to the "Min dialect", behind this fact, what is the unknown history?
The origin of the Hainan people
The "Hainan dialect" located at the end of the world is too difficult for most Chinese people to live up to its name. How difficult is it, you can listen to the song "Pomegranate Garden", which is relatively well-known in recent years.
Obviously, even with the lyrics, it's still not easy for many people to put them in their seats. Who would have thought that "heartache" in Hainan dialect would actually read "Ding to Right"? Interestingly, Hainan Island is only separated from Guangdong Province by a Qiongzhou Strait, but Hainanese is not at all like "Cantonese (Cantonese)". In the Republic of China's "Chronicle of Hainan Island", it is said, "The languages of Qiongshan, Wenchang, Anding, Qiongdong, Lingshui, Wanning, and Thanksgiving are called 'Qiongzhou language', which is slightly similar to the pronunciation of Minzhizhang and Quanyin." The "Min Zhi Zhang, Quan Yin" mentioned here is also "Min Nan dialect". Therefore, such a "southern" "Hainan dialect" is academically called "Hainan Min dialect", and it is most closely related to The Minnan dialect. However, compared with the Fujian dialect, some phonetic phenomena in Hainan dialect have undergone regular changes. For example, the word "worm" is already very unusual to pronounce "tang" in Minnan dialect - retaining the middle-ancient phonetic characteristics of "ancient tongueless pronunciation (such as "Cheng" pronounced as "deng" next to the sound)", and the Hainan dialect (Haikou, Wenchang) simply becomes "hang", which is even more unrecognizable to outsiders.
Distribution of The HainanEse language
Why does Hainan dialect belong to the "Min dialect"? This is actually related to the origin of Hainan people. Of course, the "Hainanese" mentioned here refers only to the Han Chinese. There is no doubt that Hainan Island is also home to many fraternal peoples. In terms of numbers, the main ethnic minority is the Li ethnic group. The Li call "field" "three". Today's tourist resort "Sanya", in the Li language, the original meaning is "crow field" or "heron field". Interestingly, although there are very few Zhuang people on Hainan Island today, the Guangdong Xinyu of the early Qing Dynasty records that there is a strange four-character place name in the Li area of Hainan, such as Cao Nu "Na Niu", Cao Nu "Na Persuasion", and Cao Nu "Na Tired". "That" means "paddy field" in the ZhuangDong national language. Because the Zhuang Dong language group places adjectives after nouns, in Guangxi and Yunnan, where the Zhuang, Dai, and Buyi ethnic groups live, there are many place names that begin with the word "na": "Nabo" means "field with springs"; "Nalong" means "large field"... If the "that character" place names in the "four-character place names" of Hainan Island are regarded as typical Zhuang place names, there will be such a view: originally these places on Hainan Island were inhabited by the Zhuang people first, so the Zhuang place names were used first, and then the Zhuang people withdrew, and the Li people moved in, that is, the Li language component was added to the old place names, so that there were these overlapping place names, and the overlap of the levels of place names reflected the first-come, first-served arrival of the residents. However, by the latest in the first year of the Yuan Dynasty (110 BC), when Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty set up Zhuya and Dan'er Counties on Hainan Island, the Li people should have become the main inhabitants of the island.
Hainan Li people's residence
Emperor Wu made Hainan a Hanjia County, marking that the Han people had since entered the historical stage of Hainan Island. However, due to the harsh environment in which miasma prevailed and the situation of "repeated rebellions of the native people", a few decades later, in the third year of the first century (46 BC), the two counties of Zhuya and Dan'er were abolished. It was not until the Sui Dynasty that Zhuya County was restored that Hainan Island was re-incorporated into the direct jurisdiction of the Central Plains Dynasty. After such twists and turns, until the Tang Dynasty, the total population of Han Chinese in the counties and counties on Hainan Island was still less than 20,000 households. Decisive changes appeared in the Song Dynasty.
Many of the genealogies of the Han people in Hainan who have survived to this day trace the origin of their families back to the Song Dynasty. For example, the following one: "The ancestor of the Chen clan Qianqiong, a native of Putian County, Minzhi, raised the first Zhaozong Dynasty to know Jianzhou, and the Yuanshang Shu Zhang Chun denounced YuanYou's old subjects as traitors during the Fu Dynasty (Northern Song Dynasty 1098-1101), and the ancestors took refuge in Qiongguan and ruled in the place of Cangmu." According to Mr. Wang Yuchun's statistical analysis and comparison of the ancestral residences and places of migration of the ancestors of each surname (a total of 176 people) in the past, the following conclusions can be drawn: "In addition to the 12 people whose ancestral origins are unknown, there are 97 people of Fujian origin who have moved to Qiongqiong, accounting for 59% of the total; while 72 people moved in during the Two Song Dynasties, except for 5 people whose ancestral origins are unknown, there are 50 people of Fujian nationality, accounting for about 75%. The conclusion suddenly became clear: "Hainanese" is like Fujianese because many hainanese ancestors came from Fujian in the Song Dynasty.
A choice made a thousand years ago
In the last years of the Han Dynasty, Xu Jing, a university scholar who arrived by sea from present-day Zhejiang to present-day North Vietnam, once lamented that Fujian and other places along the way "did not see Han China" as he passed. After hundreds of years of development, Fujian in the Song Dynasty is no longer the barbaric land of the past. "The dangerous and remote land of the former Europe and Guangdong is now the prosperous state of the southeast!" This sentence of Zhang Quanzhen, a Song dynasty, expressed the shock of the people at that time at that time about the rapid change in Fujian in the Song Dynasty. Su Rui even said in "Lin Ji Zhi Fuzhou", "Changle Da Fan, the crown of the Seven Fujians, the crown of clothing, the A in the southeast." The mercy of industry and commerce is the benefit of the mountains and seas."
In agricultural societies, economic development is often reflected in the size of the population. There were only more than 12,400 households in Fujian in the Sui Dynasty, with an average of only one household per square kilometer. The population is so sparse that there is no economic development at all. At the time of the Fifth Tang Dynasty, the northern population immigrated to Fujian in large numbers, and until the Song Dynasty unified China, there were about 460,000 households in Fujian. Subsequently, the population of Fujian increased significantly, and in the last years of the Northern Song Dynasty, there were more than 1 million households. By the middle of the Southern Song Dynasty, the population of Fujian had reached 1.6 million households. As the seat of governance of Fujian Road, Fuzhou is "full of teeth". Another big city, Quanzhou, is also "eighty painting workshops in the city, half a million without worrying about teeth". Even Tingzhou, which is located in the southwest of Fujian and is closed to traffic, is a very sparsely populated mountainous area, and by the First Year of The Qing Dynasty (1195-1200), there was a situation of "narrow land and dense population".
The growth of the population of Fujian during the Song Dynasty
In this way, the phenomenon of overpopulation in Fujian in the Song Dynasty became very prominent. Although on the surface, the population density of Fujian at that time was less than half that of the neighboring Liangzhe Road (present-day Zhejiang, Southern Jiangsu, and Shanghai). But for agriculture needed to feed the population, the mere amount of land does not really make sense, what is important is the plains that can be reclaimed into arable land.
Topographic map of Fujian
In this regard, Fujian has suffered extremely badly. There is a saying called "eight mountains, one water and one field", which is used to describe the terrain of Fujian. Since the whole territory is mainly hilly and mountainous, the average household arable land in Fujian in the Song Dynasty is only a little more than half of the most densely populated two Zhejiang roads.
This made Fujian in the Song Dynasty feel a strong demographic pressure: "The land is narrow and the birth is prosperous; although it is a solid land, the cultivation is exhausted." In the 28th year of Shaoxing (1158), the discounted nano price in Fujian was "eight hundred odd per bucket", while the neighboring Rao Prefecture (now part of Jiangxi) was only "four hundred and fifty per bucket", only slightly more than half of Fujian. This is only the case in ordinary years, and the "Chronicle of the Three Mountains" says that Fuzhou is "a little thrifty, and the price of the valley is gushing". In other words, in the event of a poor harvest, grain prices are bound to soar. It is no wonder that when people lament that "their nourishment is insufficient".
Population and arable land in Fujian during the Song Dynasty
In order to maintain the existing standard of living, the people of Fujian have to control the size of the family population by means of infanticide and drowning. "In the eight states of Fujian, only the people of Jian, Jian, Ting, and Shao Wu have many children, and they have become the trend of habit, although the people of the world are also for it, and they do not know how strange it is." In ordinary years, a family of five can barely make ends meet by relying on the ground and grass-roots wild vegetables, and if there is more than one bite, the balance on this critical line will be destroyed. Therefore, to limit fertility, more men kill their males, and more women kill their females. As the saying goes, "Tiger poison does not eat children", let alone the Fujian people who flourished in education at that time (one-fifth of the Song Dynasty was from Fujian)? It is also enough to imagine that the contradictions between fujian people and the land are extremely sharp.
The so-called "Fujian land is not enough to eat and clothe, so it is scattered in all directions." In order to survive, the people of Fujian spontaneously emigrated outward. The Fujian natives of Fujian, the Minyue people, are said to have learned to be good at boating, and the Hanshu Yan Shu Biography says that they were "accustomed to water fighting, which is convenient for using boats." It seems that the later Generations of Min people learned this hand very successfully, and the sea ship they made at that time was the best in the country. Ouyang Xiu said in the "Memoirs of Youmeitang", "Fujian merchants and seas, sails and waves." They set up wooden boats and traveled south, choosing a place to live along the coast of today's Guangdong. Zhao Rushi has such a record in the "Zhufan Zhi", "The value of Fujian merchants is fluctuating, the goods are trapped, and more people have entered the Land of Li", indicating that the Min people have settled on Hainan Island, where the Li people are concentrated. Judging from the historical records, there were only more than 8,000 households in the eastern and western ends of Guangdong and the early Tang Dynasty in Lei Erzhou, which was a barbaric wilderness. Even counting Hainan Island, there were only 100,000 households (including many ethnic minorities) in the early Song Dynasty. However, in the Yuan Dynasty, it increased to 730,000 households, an increase of more than 7 times (and only more than doubled in the same period in southern Fujian).
See who runs fast
Of course, some people have to ask, Fujian is far away from Hainan Island after all, why is it not the Guangdong people who get the moon first near the water tower and get on it first?
This brings us to the scene of the "Pearl River Delta" of the Song Dynasty. It is true that since the Han Dynasty, Guangzhou has been the center of China's maritime trade. During the Tang Dynasty, it was also famous for the world's eastern port. However, guangzhou trading houses luxury goods that are consumed by wealthy groups, which can only be connected to the metropolises of Kyoto and Lingbei, but are like "isolated islands" in Lingnan. Guangzhou's bustling maritime trade is almost isolated from the undeveloped surrounding countryside. The slang people who lived in Slovakia "had a half-hearted rate and no teeth." Extensive agriculture and natural aquatic products are sufficient to meet the needs of "rice soup fish". Some people have searched for Tang Dynasty poems to outline the distribution of rice contiguous patches throughout the Tang Dynasty, but there was no Lingnan. This also shows from another aspect that stable large agricultural settlements engaged in rice cultivation have not yet appeared in Lingnan. What's more, until the Tang Dynasty, Guangzhou was a "shengkou" market that also engaged in slave trade.
Maritime trade in Guangzhou during the Tang Dynasty
By the early Song Dynasty, the phenomenon of sparse population in Guangdong was still very prominent. The population of the Pearl River Basin accounts for only 4.8% of the total population of the country, and the reclaimed land accounts for 0.68% of the country, which is really pitiful compared with the Yellow River and Yangtze River basins.
In the last years of the Northern Song Dynasty, the Pearl River Delta finally ushered in opportunities. In the first year of Jing Kang (1126), Jin soldiers invaded the south, the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty fell, and Emperor Gaozong of Song fled south. A large number of Central Plains soldiers who migrated south crossed the Dayuling Mountains, first living in the area of Zhujie Lane in Nanxiong, and then entering the area around Guangzhou. At the end of the Southern Song Dynasty, the imperial court issued an edict to relocate the residents of Nanxiong (in fact, the southern Central Plains shimin who temporarily lived here) to enrich the Pearl River Delta. In the second year of Deyou (1276), when the Yuan army captured Nanxiong and Shaozhou, the northern shimins who originally lived in the Nanxiong area continued to move south.
The legend of the "Zhujie Lane Immigrants", which is well known among cantonese-speaking Cantonese-speaking people in the Pearl River Delta, is an oral monument to the historical merits of this immigration group. Living in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, Qu Dajun, who was known as "Guangdong Xuxiake", wrote in the "Guangdong New Language", "The Wang clan of my former family in Guangdong province first came from Nanxiong Zhuji Lane." According to Huang Cibo's "Records of the Southward Migration of the Zhujie Lane Nationalities" and the "Genealogy and Anthology of the Southern Migration of the Zhujie Lane Clans of Nanxiong", 191 of the 211 clans distributed in the Guangfu people in the present-day Pearl River Delta moved in from Nanxiong, and 187 of them moved from Nanxiong to the Pearl River Delta in the Song Dynasty, accounting for 98% of the total. Due to the concentrated arrival of many southward migrants, there were only 1.2 households per square kilometer in the Pearl River Delta during the Tang Dynasty. By the end of the Song Dynasty, there were 4.8 households. Guangzhou had only 40,000 households during the first year of the Tang Dynasty, and by the late Southern Song Dynasty, it had risen to nearly 200,000 households.
Jewel Lane
This wave of immigration has greatly changed the original appearance of the Pearl River Delta. During the Northern Song Dynasty, the Xinhui by the Southern Song Dynasty was already "the sea has anointed fields and fertile soil, and the cangxiao boats are more to give". Dongguan County's Tea Mountain "surrounded by shallow... Since the Song Dynasty, the surnames have lived here since then", and later gradually became a "giant town" where agricultural merchants flourished. Even the southern part of the Pearl River Delta, which originally belonged to the four counties of Nanhai, Panyu, Xinhui and Dongguan, was also established in the 22nd year of Shaoxing in the Southern Song Dynasty (1152), which was the predecessor of Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Macao and other places in the later years.
Map of the situation of Xiangshan Mountain in the Southern Song Dynasty
However, while the Cantonese, as a branch of the Han nationality, concentrated on developing the Pearl River Delta and had no time to take care of it, the Fujian people of the Song Dynasty were forced to migrate to Hainan Island under population pressure. Even in the development of the core area of the Pearl River Delta, there are Also Min people from the Song Dynasty who come to share a piece of the pie - in the south of Guangzhou, "there are many seas on the coast of the river, and the Min people are as good as the houses". To this day, there is still a Hokkien dialect "dialect island" in Zhongshan City. According to the Records of Xiangshan County, this is precisely because during the Song and Yuan Dynasties, immigrants from the coastal areas of Fujian came to settle here.
As a result, by the time the Pearl River Delta was developed and declared a great success in the Ming and Qing dynasties, looking around, Hainan Island and Leizhou and Chaozhou along the coast of Guangdong had become the world of "Fujian dialect".
bibliography:
Wang Lige: "Research on the Relationship between People and Land in the Song Dynasty", Doctoral Dissertation of Hebei University, 2014
Ye Xian'en, "The Development of the Alluvial Plains of the Pearl River Delta from the Song Dynasty", Pearl River Economy, June 2007
Zhan Changzhi, "Population Migration Path and Regional Development in Ancient China," Journal of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, February 2007