Zhaotian

About the village

Zhaotian (招田村) is a Hakka village in the south of Meilin town, Wuhua County, part of Meizhou in north-east Guangdong. It covers about six square kilometres, with some 370 households and 1,950 people in fifteen village groups. Rice is the main crop, on about 1,170 mu of cultivated land, in a subtropical monsoon climate with roughly 1,500 mm of rain a year. In 2019 the village was named on Guangdong's model village list for democracy and the rule of law. Wuhua is the largest county in Meizhou by both area and population, and one of its wholly Hakka counties, where the local Hakka speech is universal. Its old name was Changle County (长乐县), set up under the Song in 1071 and renamed Wuhua in 1914 after Wuhua mountain. The county seat has been at Shuizhai town since 1954. The county is known abroad for stone, football and emigration. Tens of thousands of its men worked as stonemasons, blacksmiths and carpenters, and Wuhua stonework is found across China and South-East Asia. Wuhua was the home of Li Huitang, the King of Asian Football, and was named a football county in 1979. It is also an old revolutionary base: Gu Dacun, commander of the Red Army's Eleventh Corps, was born in 1897 at Youhe village in Meilin, which borders Zhaotian, and his former house stands about 1.3 km from the town centre. Emigration has shaped the county for generations. The 1943 famine in Guangdong, which killed about three million people across the province, followed failed harvests in Wuhua in 1942 and 1943 and took more than 8,000 people from the county. Hakkas from Meizhou went overseas in numbers, many by way of Mauritius, Reunion and Madagascar, and South Africa is one of their destinations: around 30,000 Hakkas live there today, most in Johannesburg, where a Meixian association and a Hakka association still meet.