Xingning

About the village

Xingning is a county-level city in the north-east of Guangdong, administered by Meizhou prefecture, and one of the most thoroughly Hakka places in China. More than 99 per cent of residents are Hakka and everyday speech is Xingning Hakka, a dialect with its own sound system that neighbouring counties can still follow. The county was first created in 331, the sixth year of the Xianhe era of the Eastern Jin dynasty, and became a city in 1994. It covers about 2,075 square kilometres of hill country around the Ning river basin, one of the ten largest basins in Guangdong, and its registered population was about 1.16 million in 2021, with roughly 780,000 people living in the city. Local usage gives it three titles: home of overseas Chinese, home of culture and home of football.