God's Chinese Son by Jonathan Spence

separate counties. This made it a natural base for bandits and marauding gangs, for by moving only a few miles they could slip easily from jurisdic­tion to jurisdiction without ever leaving their mountain fastness, and the chances of five separate county magistrates coordinating an attack on ban­dits all at once were slim indeed.
    The chaos of the period from the collapse of the Ming dynasty in the 1630s through the civil wars that marked the Manchu conquest of the south from 1645 to 1680 made this situation bleaker than ever, and the area became a no-man's land. Representatives of local scholarly families petitioned the government for redress and, after being once rebuffed, were finally rewarded by the creation of a newly named Hua county, a block of land about forty miles by thirty, carved out of the northern sections of the two large and populous counties between which Canton was subdi­vided. Hua received its own magistrate and staff, its county school, its clerks and tax inspectors, its grain storehouse and orphanage, a wall with four gates, and a force of four hundred men, half of them to guard the county seat and half scattered in garrisons among the surrounding villages. Thus reassigned were a total of 5,223 households, comprising 7,743 men and 6,775 women, working between them taxable farmland of around forty thousand acres. 4
    Hong's ancestors migrated here from the northeastern part of Guang­dong province in the 1680s, just as the new county was being formed. They settled and farmed in Guanlubu, to the west of the county town, on a stretch of well-watered level land, with mountains rising at their backs as they faced the sun. Guanlubu had been nothing but a couple of shops on the road when they first arrived, but by the time Hong Huoxiu was preparing for the exams a century and a half later, it was a good-sized village, dominated by people of the Hong lineage, with at least three streets of homes and a large pond in the front. 5
    The Hongs are Hakkas—"guest people"—as they are called in the local dialect of Canton, or "Nyin-hak," as they call themselves in their own dialect. To be a Hakka is to be not quite a local, and Hakka are granted two special slots in the local examinations, to help in their assimilation. The Cantonese whose ancestors settled in the area earlier emphasize their own priority by calling themselves the "original inhabitants." 6 But to be a Hakka is not to be purely an outsider. It is not to be like the Miao tribes­men from Guangxi province to the west, who sometimes travel in their boats down the West River to Canton, to sell their oils and trade for city goods. These are truly strange-looking men, their religions all their own, their language unintelligible to Hakka and Cantonese alike, their hair not neatly shaved in front and braided at the back, in obedience to the style imposed on all Chinese by their Manchu conquerors in 1645, but piled in wild profusion upon their heads. 7 Nor is it to be socially inferior, forbid­den to take the examinations and kept out of prosperous marriage ties. Such stigmas are reserved for the actors, or barbers, or the restless Tanka boat people, so named from the rounded twelve-foot boats like severed eggs in which they live, who pass their whole lives on the water and are forbidden—even if they had the means—to buy land and build a home on shore, or marry there. The greatest difference between Hakkas and other Chinese families in the region is that by Hakka custom their women do not bind their feet to make them small. Thus Hakka women can walk freely, and work in the fields with their men; they will also always marry Hakka men, since the other Chinese will find them unattractive. 8
    The Hakkas as a people place their origins in the central China plains to the south of the Yellow River, below the former capital of Kaifeng, and through their oral histories and their written genealogies trace their successive movements south across the centuries, in