"Hakka Town" appears surprisingly in Chongqing,

in which everyone speaks Hakka dialect!

It has a history of more than 300 years......

Do you know there is a "Hakka town" in Chongqing in the west? Men, women and children here can speak "Hakka Dialect" which comes from thousands of miles away. This unique "language island" is located in Pan Long Town, Rong Chang District, Chongqing Municipality. Most people in the town only speak Hakka dialect at home, commonly known as "Cantonese dialect", which is almost impossible for outsiders to understand.

Chongqing Hakka ancestors, generally from Guangdong Mei County. At the end of Ming dynasty and the beginning of Qing Dynasty, they settled in Chongqing in the emigration tide of "Hu Guang filling Sichuan", which has a history of more than 300 years. At present, there are about 100,000 Hakka people in Chongqing, mainly distributed in Pan Long, Rong Long, Long Ji, Ren Yi, An Fu and Ren Tuo in Jiang Jin , Zhongshan and other places, generally living together.

In the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, the population of the Hakka Base Camp was reproducing rapidly , the arable land was seriously insufficient, or the flood and drought disaster occurred, or the "war happened between the host and the guest"  plus many other reasons, so that many Hakka people continued to migrate to other areas or even overseas to seek survival and development.

Under this background, in the Kangxi and Qianlong periods of the early Qing Dynasty, the Hakka people in Chongqing moved out from the Hakka Base Camp Area , they distributed in Pan Long Town, forming a Han ethnic group that still retains its own dialect and culture and has a strong Hakka identity.

Experts believe that Pan Long town of these Guangdong immigrants, after more than 300 years, in the ocean of Sichuan dialect, still live in the language of their ancestors, the reason is related to ancestral teaching. According to the survey, the ancestors of these Hakka people once set a rule for their descendants: it is better to sell the land of ancestors than forget their teachings. These Hakka people have taken to heart the lessons of their ancestors. Speaking Hakka at home, speaking Chongqing dialect outside, has become Hakka custom rules in Pan Long town. As soon as the child is born, he receives the education in Hakka language.

And, according to Mr. Yan Kun Ji, age of 74, both he and his wife are from the Hakka ethnic group, which used to marry only speakers of Hakka, a language that still lives in the family, though the rule has since faded.

Another reason was that the ancestors of Guangdong emigrated from their native land to Sichuan and lived in other places, so they had the necessity to stick together and help each other. Therefore, speaking Sichuan dialect to the outsider and Hakka dialect to the insider may be a kind of self-protection, round outside and square inside it is a way of life.

The number of Hakka families migrating to Rong Chang county from Guangdong was only about 100 families, but it increased to 3,670 families and 15,800 people during the reign of Emperor Qian Long of the Qing Dynasty. To the peak of the Qing Dynasty Jia Qing period , it increased to 33,381 households, 93,598 people.

With the social development and cultural integration, young and middle-aged people go out to work or even settle down there , the Hakka dialect in Pan Long and even the whole Rong Chang district is decreasing, many Hakka children can not understand their elders speaking Hakka.