Posted on Saturday 14 October 2006

As my wife says never mess with the Hakka and she should know what she's talking about. Notable Hakkas include Lee Kuan Yew, Deng Xiaoping and, er, Naomi Campbell. 'Nuff said...

Contributing yet another strand to the patchwork of overseas Chinese speech and customs were the Hakkas, latecomers to the southernmost provinces, moving into Fukien and Kwngtung in two separate migrations: during the tenth century and the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Hakkas whose name means `guest families' have been described as the gypsies of China, people who live side by side with speakers of different dialects in enclaves scattered across six southern provinces, without a homeland of their own. They were a rugged lot, and even their women had to be hardy. Little wonder that the Hakkas were the only Chinese to refrain altogether from binding their daughters' feet into the `golden lilies' that were de rigueur everywhere else. One thing Hakka women were not was dainty.

Men moving across great distances into an unknown landscape, assailed by the hostility of settlers who have preceded them, band together; and if Hakkas were (and still are) thought a very clannish people, they had good reasons to be. The banding-together took a palpably defensive form, in communal living and communal housing Their dwellings, still to be seen today in a border area in Fukien province, are extraordinary constructions, rising out of the countryside like veritable fortresses, gigantic, multi-storied, round. They are built to a circular plan, with a thick outer wall of tamped earth pierced by tiny squint-holes, presenting a resolutely sealed and embattled look to the world. In the walled complex, an entire community, numbering six to seven hundred inhabitants, could be concentrated.

It was no easy matter to live among the Cantonese, to contend for land and water. Feuds were easily ignited in such an atmosphere, and there evolved a tradition of armed fighting between the migrant and the settler. We read of a period of prolonged fighting between the two in the years 1855-67, a war in which about half a million people are said to have lost their lives. It is not hard to see why the Hakkas emigrated to Nanyang [South-East Asia]. In China they were pushed on to marginal land, hilly country rejected by those who had got there first.

— from Sons of the Yellow Emperor : The Story of the Overseas Chinese by Lynn Pan, Mandarin Paperbacks 1991, page 16

And here area a few examples of these remarkable communal round houses cum fortresses.

This type of building is round in shape and divided into three classes, small, medium and big. The small ones are usually 2 to 3 stories tall with a single ring. The medium dwelling is usually 3 to 4 stories tall with a large inner open space (single ring) or double rings. The large round building is usually 4 to 5 stories tall consisting of as many as three rings. The very small round building has about 12 to 18 rooms, the small ones have 21 to 28 rooms, the medium ones have about 30 to 40 rooms, the large ones have about 42 to 58 rooms, and the super large round buildings have about 60 to 72 rooms.

Two-third of the round building are 3 stories high and hold roughly 20 families or 100 people. The round earth building is a "group-oriented" residence, usually with one main entrance. Its wall is usually around 1 meter thick. The main entrance door is padded with iron sheet and is locked by 2 horizontal wood bars. The wooden bars retract into the walls in order to open the door. In the event the wood bars are sawed through, the locking mechanism is still intact.

Inside the entrance is a huge central courtyard where all the doors of the rooms and inner windows are open to. At the ground level except the hall and the staircases, the rooms are used as kitchens and dining rooms. The rooms on the second floor are used for storage. The rooms on the 3rd level are used as bedrooms. The rooms in each level are identical. In front of each room, there is an open round hallway and usually there are 4 staircases to move from one level to another. Thus each family occupies one vertical units with lower level as kitchen, 2nd level for storage and miscellaneous use and 3rd level and above used as bedroom. Sometime there is no open round hallway. Instead, every family has its own private staircase. A typical room is about 10-13 square meter in size.

The larger round earth building has room around 15 square meters. The windows facing outside tends to be small, with the window size at the outer wall smaller and the window size at the inner wall larger enabling wider surveillance from the inside. It is extremely hard for outsiders to come in through the windows. There is usually no window at the ground level. While the round building is fairly large, it has an inner ring, which is like a round building within a round building. For round building that built earlier than 15th century, they have other defensive features that would counter siege. It is said that during Ming dynasty as Japanese pirates intruded the coastal areas, they always leave the Hakka's Earth Buildings area alone.

Hakka - An Important Element of Chinese Culture

See also
Wikipedia: Hakka architecture